Zoom Out Episode One: Who is standing between YOU and your maker?

The hosts of the Zoomed Out Podcast discuss their personal experience with God and organized religion. They share how leaving the church has actually strengthened their relationship with God. They talk about their childhood experiences with church and how it didn't feel authentic or fulfilling. They also emphasize the importance of understanding the Old Testament and its role in building a relationship with God. They believe that all religions should come together and focus on the common goal of rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. They mention their journey starting in the book of Ezekiel and how it has been enlightening. Welcome to the Zoomed Out Podcast with your hosts, Rob and Max, where we take you on a couple's journey to finding God in just the right place. So sit back and enjoy the ride. Welcome to the premier episode of Zoomed Out, where we discuss today who is standing between you and your maker. How are you doing today? Good, good. How are you doing? I'm doing wonderful. So I think what we wanted to get into today that's sort of been top of mind, and I know you and I talk about this constantly because it's been sort of remarkable. And that is how our relationship with God and living life as a partner with God has been so prosperous since you and I made the decision to leave the church and leave organized religion, which is contrary to what most people would think would happen in a situation like that. But that has been our situation. So I think we should discuss our situation personally. There might be a little bit of hate coming from this, especially from people who don't know our situation perfectly. But for us, that has been absolutely what our situation has been. We are living more of a partnership with God than we ever have. And coming out of the church, we certainly felt the freedom to do that. So this is just going to be a conversation discussing our personal experience with this. And maybe some people can relate. And maybe if you're not feeling quite right in whatever kind of organization you're a part of, and it's just not doing it for you, and you feel like you're actually getting further away from knowing who your creator is, or what your purpose is, then you might find a little bit of insight in this. Right, exactly. And I know for me, growing up as a kid, around six years old, my parents would take me to this country church. And it would absolutely seem so out of place for me, because it was a very old school church. And they would sing the Gospels, and they would sing the hymns, and everybody would have to stand up and pick up a hymn book and sing everything. And I always felt like I didn't need to do that. And when it came time, all of the adults, especially the pastor, would say, okay, all of the kids, let's head downstairs. And let's go to Sunday school, right? And I felt like that was the dumbed down version of what the Bible represented, that was being taught to us. Yeah. And so question then, when you did that, when your family went to church, and people who you know who went to church, did you feel like when that service was over, that you really had the essence of God, that you were really building a relationship with God? Or did you feel like this was just a ritualistic thing? I felt like it was ritualistic, for sure. Yeah, because I had a very similar experience, where my family started going to church, maybe I was around 10 years old or so. And I think my parents had bought me like a kid's Bible. And like, okay, you're going to go to Sunday school with these kids. And I was kind of a shy kid. So there was a lot of anxiety, like being separated from my parents and being told you're going to go with these these random kids, they're your age. So it's okay to get along with them, because you're your age, right. But you know, that's not always how it works. So I was sent down there. And I had so much anxiety, and my heart was pounding. And they wanted me to like, read Bible verses out loud, like basically meet brand new people. Yeah. And so my idea of God, obviously, at that age, because you go to church to meet God, right, you go to church to build a relationship with God. So in my mind, it was sort of ingrained that knowing you're my creator, knowing God was synonymous with the church experience. So it was almost like it was a bit of a trauma experience that, you know, and it's and it's no fault of anyone's, because we all thought we were doing the right thing. My parents thought they were doing the right thing, by all of us going to church, and I was doing the right thing by going to Sunday school with these kids. But my heart would just race, and I had so much anxiety. And so for me, it was God represented anxiety, because God is the church, God is the people in the church, God is the pastor, God is, you know, those girls that are looking at me sideways, because maybe I don't fit in, like, that was God to me. So it's a very confusing thing for a child to, to not have, I guess, the foundation, yeah, the essence of their faith, it's sort of, you can't separate religion from the essence of your faith at that time. I guess that's what it is. You know, when you're a kid, and your brain's developing, it all becomes synonymous, you don't, you don't see a difference there. Exactly. And, you know, it's just like, you know, the bedtime stories that you used to have with your mom, you know, what a perfect opportunity to pull out the Bible and have a one on one conversation with your parent, who is supposed to be teaching you these things, which she did. And, you know, your mom knows the Bible better than any other person, because she has such a unique story. Yeah, right. Yeah. And even for me, when I was a kid, I was more focused on like the pictures, you know, seeing Jesus on the cross. You know, and, and all these pictures are cool color, and it's so cool. And not knowing what it meant. Right? Yeah, exactly. I had no idea. And that brings up a good point about about seeing images of Jesus is the modern Christian church is very Jesus focused. And, you know, even though you carry the whole Bible with you, when you go to church, it has the Old Testament and the New Testament. What I have noticed is that in a modern Western Christian church, it is very Jesus focused the life of Jesus. And let's get one thing straight, we have all accepted Jesus as our personal Savior, we understand that it is only through the Son that you can go to the Creator is only through the living sacrifice of Jesus, that you can be saved. Yes, that's part of it. That's a very important part of it. That's key. But there's so much that came before Jesus, there is an entire blueprint in the Old Testament, that as people of God, if we're going to subscribe to the model of calling ourselves Christians, if you want to do that, or let's just say having a faith with God, because I'm a little bit, it irks me a little bit to start subscribing to these models, these labels, because if you just I'm a Christian, I'm religious, these words start to become synonymous in the mainstream. But what we're really trying to get at here, before Jesus came and died on the cross, there is an entire blueprint that was created. And blueprint is a very good word to describe it. And that's the thing is, when you're young, especially, and even when you're not young, when you go to church, and you have this church experience, the pastor picks a verse or chapter that they want to focus on, usually long thing, usually in the New Testament, something around the life of Jesus. And you take that little blurb and you focus on it. And you got this charismatic guy up there who's saying all these wonderful things, and you get this boost, and you feel super motivated. And then you leave. And let's face it, most of us throw the Bible in the backseat of the car. And that's where it stays until next Sunday. You know, once once you come down, you get high in church, you get really high. And then by the time you leave the parking lot, you come down, you know, and maybe there's people doing Bible studies in the middle of the week or whatever. And that's great. But that's not what I'm talking about here. And so they get really stuck on the life of Jesus. But, you know, there's so much in the Old Testament. And I know, people like to, let's face it, Christians like to leave the Old Testament up to the Jewish people, right? Let's say the Jews get the Old Testament, they get the Torah, they get the first five books of the Bible, and the Christians will focus on the life of Jesus. And there's this, it becomes very disjointed, right? When in reality, we're all on the same train heading to the same place, the same mountain. So there's a bridge that needs to be built there, right? Because the place we're heading to is the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. We're all heading back there, we all need to be posturing ourselves towards the temple in Jerusalem, Jew or Gentile, that's where we're heading. So we must build a bridge there. That's like that discovery that you and I made in Zechariah, where it prophesied a Savior being stabbed and hung. And that's not in the Torah. That's right. Yeah, these things are, they're not in the Torah, because there's, there's always that separation in society between all these religions, like, let's just take these little parts and focus on each one, the Christians will, the Christians will go with Christ, that's going to be their thing, they're going to, they're going to do the Christ thing. And the Jews are going to do the Torah. And you know, the Jehovah's Witnesses are going to have their version, the Mormons are going to have this version, the Catholic is going to defer to the clergy. But the thing is, is that once you start to realize that you can have a very personal relationship with the Old Testament, specifically, and what God speaks of in the Old Testament, you no longer see it as a fairy tale, you no longer see it as this reductionist Sunday School version, but you start to see it as a blueprint. When I started digging into the Old Testament, when you and I started sitting there, and we started in the book of Ezekiel. And the reason we did that is because long story short, I had a bit of a spiritual awakening where I believe that I received a download from God that told me that I needed to start in the book of Ezekiel. And anyone who's gone into Ezekiel will know that it starts with Ezekiel's inaugural vision. And this vision is a chariot that Ezekiel sees coming down from the sky. And it's a beautiful place to start. If you're not sure where to start, you don't necessarily have to start at Genesis, you can certainly circle back to that. And that's what we're going to do. That's what we're doing. Right. But so we started with Ezekiel. And when we really dug into it, it no longer felt like a story. It didn't feel like a fairy tale, it started to feel like this was stuff that was happening today. Like this is our Creator speaking to us today. We have a purpose. We were created for Him. And then when you start to read all of that, and you start to see what was required of the Jewish people, what was required of people in Israel at that time, how hard it was to live up to your Creator's expectations with the sacrifices, the sacrifices that need to be made, the way in which you have to account for your sin. Like, let's face it, there's no one, there would be not a hope at all that any of us would get into heaven if that was required of us today. There would be no animals left. That's right. Yeah. So you start to see, when you really dig into it, just how grateful we ought to be. Because here's the thing, we accept Jesus as our Savior, and it sort of becomes, at least for me, this is my personal feeling, is that it tends to become a little bit more about, what can Jesus do for me? What can God do for me? I've accepted Jesus, so I'm going to ask Jesus for things, and Jesus is going to make everything all right in my life, and all the suffering is going to go away, and that's going to be fine. Just a quick side, but I don't mean to go off on a tangent, but I hear quite often from self-identified, agnostic, and atheist people, well, if there is a God, how can there be suffering in this world? Why would God let this happen? Well, we don't grow without suffering. We don't attain wisdom without suffering. There is no compassion without suffering. If you say you have faith, and you've never been put in a position to exercise your faith, then how do you know you have faith? Right? Because it's not about us at the end of the day. We are simply just characters in this story, and we don't know what's next. So what we do is people become very attached to their characters. They become very attached to the role. And let's face it, your gender, your race, the way you look, the job you go to every day, these are the least interesting things about you. Your friends, that's another good example. You're identifying so hard with the model. And of course, you have to be put into some sort of category, because the ego exists for a reason. We have to meet each other on some level. I have to look at you, and I know what you look like, and say, hey, Tanner's a pretty attractive guy. Maybe I want to go on a date with him. We meet each other on that level, but that's it. Right after that, it becomes so much more than that, and we realize that I can look at him, I can look at a friend, I can look at my parents, I can look at my sister, I can look at my nephew, and I can see myself in them as another soul who's inside of this body right now. And this is just a process that's unfolding, and we're not identifying with any of it. So, now that I've got that tangent out of the way, we can loop back around to the Old Testament here, and we can see that it was very, very difficult to meet our Creator's expectations during that time. We turned away from Him. We became so ridden with sin that we just got further and further away from Him, and by His love for us, His love for His people, He sent His Son to die for us. And if you really look into that, and you go all the way back to the beginning, you examine this blueprint, you hear God's harsh words. And maybe I'm one of these people who I actually enjoy listening to God's harsh words and saying the things He's going to do, the way in which the destruction He's going to cause, because you feel it. You really feel it. And then you just... It really sets you on the right path. You're left with nothing else except for gratefulness when you see just how disappointed our Father has become with how ridden with sin this world has become, and how self-absorbed, that we are at the point that instead of looking to God and saying, okay, God created me because He needs me to exist. I didn't ask to be born. I didn't ask to exist. I don't have any needs. God has a need. My Father has a need. That's why He created me. But we've reduced ourselves to the skin, the meat suit. We reduce ourselves to looking in the mirror and saying, well, I don't like this. Well, maybe I don't want to be this gender anymore. You know, I don't like the way I look today. I want to act different. I want to act like somebody else. I want to follow someone else. You know, these things get so inflated in the human mind that we completely lose sight of the fact that we exist for one purpose, and that is His purpose. To serve God. And for me and Tanner, I think something started to really click when we realized that if we can posture ourselves, not physically leave our town, our city where we live and go move to Jerusalem and not anything like that, but in our minds as people of God, if we can start to posture ourselves towards the rebuilding of the temple and towards God calling His people back to Jerusalem, all of a sudden there's this feeling of, I call it only going where the Spirit goes. In the first chapter of Ezekiel, he describes a chariot that he saw in his vision, in his dream from God. And in this vision, the chariot is described as a four-wheeled chariot, and it only goes where the Spirit goes. It has one job. It doesn't turn left. It doesn't turn right. It doesn't look back. It only goes where the Spirit goes. And so Tanner and I have adopted this idea in our hearts and in our minds where we treat ourselves as part of that four-wheeled chariot, and we say, we only go where the Spirit goes. And this is something we say every day, right? I know you do. Every time I leave for work, I hop into our cool little JDM van, and I say, I'm in the chariot, and I'm going to work for a purpose. Right? I say that every morning. That's the thing is, if you conduct yourself in a way where you're saying, I only go where the Spirit goes, I don't look left, and I don't look right, then all of a sudden, over time, these sort of earthly, these fleshly temptations that we live in this idea of, well, I don't like this thing about myself, because I subscribe so hard to this model, and I am so attached to my own separateness, that I'm just going to get cling to that and get so stuck on that today. The grass is greener model. That's right. And, you know, we could go off on a whole tangent about the grass is greener model. Like, that's, it's just terrible. But when we start to posture ourselves towards the chariot, the Holy Land, and heading back there and realizing that wherever you are in this place, Jew or Gentile, or anything, any other organization or belief system that you subscribe to, if we look at the same truth, the Old Testament and the New Testament, we can we put it all together, we realize that there is a bridge there, that all of us need to get on that there's a train going in the same direction. It doesn't matter where you started from, we all need to get on this train, because it's only going in one direction on one track. We don't know when Armageddon will hit. But we need to be thinking in the right direction. That's the thing is, I, I've noticed an influx, maybe not an influx, maybe we're just hearing about it more now than we used to, about these sort of offside groups, self proclaimed spiritual leaders, running these sort of organizations. And I don't know if they're referencing the Bible, I don't know what sort of material they're using. But they're convincing their congregation, their followers, quote, unquote followers here that they can somehow attain some sort of enlightenment. I knew recently where we live in the news, there was this self proclaimed spiritual leader who convinced grown women in the church, yeah, to have sex with him. And I guess the the act itself was consensual. But what he told them was that if they did this with him, that they would be able to attain some sort of enlightenment. And I'm not I'm not sure, in the minds of these women, what what they were expecting, like what enlightenment looks like to them. But I know a lot of people are looking at it, where I live, just hearing conversation about it, a lot of people are looking at it saying, Well, how dare he? How dare he? Yeah. You know, swindle these women under false pretenses. And I have to play devil's advocate here for a second, because at the end of the day, these are adults. Women who I'm going to go ahead and assume are of sound mind, educated women, you know, probably can think for themselves, they probably have jobs. But, you know, it's, it's boring to dig into your Bible, right? It's not cool to sit there and read Old Testament all day, and pray and connect with your creator and ask him to work through you and ask him to, to set your mind as the four wheeled chariot and to posture you towards Jerusalem. And the rebuilding of the temple, it's not fun to do that. It tickles your ears, when someone who's charismatic comes along, who maybe wrote a book or is referencing these different things and telling you, Hey, if you do this thing, I can you can get enlightenment, you can achieve enlightenment. And this is just I will touch you. This is just a human man in the flesh telling you this, but you believe him. And so if I'm going to play devil's advocate, what I would say here is that this guy actually has a really good defense in court. Because what is the difference between a guy walking up to a woman at a bar and saying, you know, consensual, I'm a millionaire, I'm this, I'm that, you know, like, come sleep with me, and I'll promise you the world and she goes and does that, and finds out the next day he's broke. Oh, well, I'm going to file assault charges now, because you know, he swindled me under false pretenses. Well, at the end of the day, it's pretty similar. Because, let's face it, I, as harsh as it sounds like, how dare you think that you can achieve enlightenment through the flesh, without your creator? How dare you think that you can be more than your creator, when you are just part of an unfolding process? And you, and instead of giving up the ego, reading about how incredibly grateful you should be for this opportunity, you're just giving up the ego. You're giving up the opportunity to be saved and to be loved by the creator of the world who molded you, like a, like a clay pot with his own hands. How dare you think that a man in the flesh could give you something that your creator could not? So, you know, I, you know, you and I, for instance, you know, you and I are both Pisces. We are six days apart, a year and six days apart for birthday, you just had your birthday today. Yeah. And mine is on next Sunday. I feel that, you know, our relationship is that you, God had plucked a rib from me and gave it to you. And that's how the universe put us together. Yeah. I fully believe that. So that's, and that's the thing that we need to be careful is and all right, let's, let's give a cautionary tale here to, to anyone who is thinking about these organization or whose ears have been tickled by someone in the flesh telling them that they can achieve something that is not at all biblical. You know, God is not a God of confusion. You know, if someone can point somewhere in the Bible that tells me that having sexual relations out of wedlock with someone who's promising you enlightenment will actually get you enlightenment, then we need to have a conversation because I think your, your Bible might be altered a little bit. Exactly. And that's what we, and that's kind of why we titled the episode here is who's becoming or who's between you and your maker. Because you need to be very careful of this Messiah complex. It's very easy to lead a congregation or lead a group of people. And when you start to feel that power, and you start to realize that you're charismatic enough to tickle the ears of your congregation, and they're starting to listen to you. You know, don't think that Satan doesn't have a foothold, like Satan has free reign of the earth, the earth is the lowest of all worlds, and it is getting and it is the harshest and don't think for a second that he's not doing that. It's very easy to adopt a Messiah complex. Rather, you know, any, I will tell you that anyone who labels himself as a teacher or a rabbi and a rabbi, all it means is teacher, a true teacher is someone who teaches his people. How to teach themselves. It's not someone who collects followers. It's someone who teaches the people who come to them how to teach themselves. And, you know, Tanner and I have had a very personal experience with starting to really learn how to live life as a partner with God instead of as someone who attends church and has anxiety, and is fearful and it feels that, you know, as long as, if we can be more accepted by the church, if we can feel like we fit into the church, then therefore God will love us more, because that's where God lives, right? God lives in the church. And we've learned a lot of lessons. We won't go into all of those, but we've learned lessons time and time again about why that's not necessarily true. I'm not saying that God's not in the church. God can be anywhere you want him to be. He is willing to meet you anywhere. He will meet you in the forest. He will meet you on another plane of consciousness. He will meet you in your living room. He will meet you in the forest. He will meet you at your place of work, wherever you are at. He's willing to come to you. Do you not think that it's not pleasing to God for someone to get excited about knowing him, to open his book and to read about him and to really, really want to get to know him? You know, for me, you know, I go to work every day. He works through me every single day. You know, I'm struggling. I shouldn't say struggling. I am working towards becoming a full-fledged Journeyman Automotive Service Technician. And I feel like just in this last year alone that I have actually felt his presence in every single thing that I do under the hood of those cars. And it's truly remarkable. And I think one of the most surprising things for us in the last year is we found a vehicle to God that didn't come from the church. And it came from someone who is not identified with the church. And it came from someone who no longer has a physical body because he passed away almost three years ago. And that is Ram Dass. And anyone who knows Ram Dass or who subscribes to his philosophy or his theories knows how much absolute sense they make, like to the point where I feel as though every church should be reading a little bit of Ram Dass or even he has a movie, a documentary about his life on Amazon Prime called Becoming Nobody. And it's absolutely brilliant. Totally helps you and I in everyday life. Yeah. So Tanner and I went back to church after a bit of a hiatus. We went back a few years ago because we were feeling a bit lost. We didn't like our living situation. We were feeling depressed. Just didn't feel like ourselves. I was getting to the point where I didn't know whether or not I was making my own decisions or if it was some other voice in my head who's making my decisions. Just struggling. And so the first thing we thought of is, well, we're just not being good enough Christians. We just need to go back to church and the church will help us. And, you know, by golly, did we ever try? Like we tried to get involved. The pastor tried to give me some advice on different things. And it just, things just felt very disjointed. It didn't feel right. And the idea of going home and actually really digging into my Bible and even digging into Old Testament for that matter, never mind the life of Jesus. Seemed totally unappealing to me at that time. And at some point during this spiritual awakening I referenced earlier with Ezekiel, this man by the name of Ram Dass popped into my head and it was almost as if God was saying to me, this person is going to become really important to you and you need to get to know him a little bit more. And so I started, and to me, it wasn't really making a lot of sense because I'm like, well, he's, he's someone who kind of just subscribes to, you know, Buddhist beliefs, like, is that anti Christian? Is that anti God? I don't know, maybe that's dark sided. But I started listening more and more to Ram Dass philosophy. And I realized that he was embodying the things that I had heard people in the church talk about so often, but he was actually doing these things. From his heart, he was really doing these things. And I think the clincher for me on Ram Dass was when he discussed the idea of, of addiction, and the idea of, we can we can lump, you know, sin and temptation and all that into the same thing, whether it be drug, alcohol, porn, whatever it is. Quite often in mainstream society, if we're not engaging in our vice, or our addiction, we're pushing very hard not to do that thing. We're pushing against it. If we have struggled with alcohol, alcoholism for a number of years, and we've maybe gone to AA, or something, and we're clean now, then often, that person can tell you how many years, months, days, minutes, seconds it's been since they've had their last drink. And they will likely tell you that they still consider themselves an alcoholic, because every day of their life, they wake up and they're pushing against it. And for me, I noticed in the church, that there was a lot of pushing and pulling, like there's going to youth group, going to small groups, having conversations in the church, I realized there's a lot of people who are pushing against things in their life. Not unlike myself, there was a constant pushing and pulling, but they were never really free from anything. And when I started listening to Ram Dass, and I listened to his lectures, I realized that what he discusses is that if you're pushing against something, you are being controlled by something, you're not free from it, you're subscribing to that model. This is your separateness. I said to Tanner the other day, I said, you know, I've, I've been studying Ram Dass for over a year now. And it's only been recently where I've realized what it actually means. Ram Dass often talks about the form and the formless, and how it's the same thing. And what he means by that is, we come into our form, we come into our human form, and we can become attached to our human form of this model. Our separateness. But essentially, we are all one, we are a collective consciousness. So we can move from the form into the formless, and realize that we are just souls that are taking part in a circumstance and an experience that's unraveling. We're just simply part of this process. And you can, whether it be pain, whether it be addiction, whether it be anger, sadness, anything, you, you can choose to not identify with it. Or to stand on a bridge and watch it go by, if you will, the less you identify with your separateness and your attachments, the easier it is to sit there. And when you get angry, or you notice something, it gets to the point where you simply just notice it, and you don't have to do a thing about it, you don't acknowledge it, you can just sit with it, you can, I and I love saying this over and over again, because it is so true, you can get to the point where you can be the one who's standing on the bridge, watching yourself go by and all of these things. things come in, and they go out. And from the form into the formless, and there you are just there you are, you just are you're not any of these things. And that it's so it's so freeing. And it's made me so much more excited. And I feel as though my creator has really just become so much more of my partner in life, because I feel so much more excited now. about the fact that these are all just processes happening. And I'm grateful for every single one of them. Like I, I don't have to identify with one thing I simply, people love to say like, What are you? Well, I am this I am, I am a 35 year old Caucasian woman who, you know, does this job. And these are my hobbies. And this is my home and this and that. And instead of identifying with all of that, it's simply, these are just things. And I'm just here, I'm simply just a soul looking back at looking back at you looking back at my husband here saying, Hey, how'd you get into that body? Right? We don as Ram Dass loves to say, we don this spacesuit with the steering mechanism, our prefrontal cortex. And we walk down the street, and we see these people passing on the street. And it's, and we and we agree to subscribe to this illusion of each other's. You know, if I'll agree that, that you're this and you agree that I'm that. And we won't tell anyone and we'll both subscribe to this illusion. And it's just absolutely brilliant, because you realize that you are all and you are none of these things at the same time. It's kind of like me, you know, like, yeah, my job is an automotive service technician, but I don't identify as it. I come home, the wrenches stay at work. And I'm just me. I am. And that's the thing is, you don't subscribe to any one model, you simply you simply just are because you realize that you took birth here, because your creator had certain work for you to do. And that I don't have any needs, you don't have any needs, we didn't ask to be born. God has needs, he needs us to do this for him, he needs us to fulfill a purpose for him. You know, you don't build a car and then try and figure out what a car is used for. You realize that a need exists, and then you build that thing to fulfill the need. God didn't create us and then say, well, what am I going to use this for? What is a human used for? I don't know, I haven't figured it out yet. No, he decided I'm going to create this. These are my creations, I'm going to mold them with my hands and create them and they are going to fulfill a very specific purpose. And once you realize that you realize that there is no room for anxiety, for jealousy, for envy, for anger, for any of these things, because you no longer have to identify with these things, you can identify as the formless and realize that we are just all existing as a collective consciousness. And we've agreed on a, on a collective illusion, if you will. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And, you know, the illusion is only what you want it to be. Right. That's right. I, we've recently kind of unsubscribed to the idea of, of the five year plan. We always talk about that. I've, I've talked to many people who there's very specific in five year plans or 10 year plans in their life and how things are going to go and don't get me wrong, it is, it is absolutely prudent to have some sort of an idea, you know, about, about where you think your life is going or about what you want to do or to safeguard. Or ensure certain things. But at the same time, if five years ago, if I had written down a five year plan, and I subscribed to that to the T, and I did not defer from that at all, boy, what I miss what I have missed out on what I think is a complete 180 in my life, just I would have missed out on so much beauty on creating a partnership with God on improving our marriage. Exactly. And when improving our marriage, there was a time that Tanner and I went to marriage counseling to try and work on some issues. And we were, we were close to separation. And looking back on that now, I can't, I can't believe we had to do that. Because we've just become, we've become partners, we've become teammates, like we have, we have so much fun, living life together on the same team now that it seems like, like, it seems like completely other people in a different world. That's right. Who had to do that. So it's just been amazing in that way. So I would say, create a plan if you must, but don't identify with that plan. Leave openness. Don't identify with that model, because there's, there's so much around the corner. Like if you're, if you're working towards, you know, a promotion that you think you might get in five years, that's a, that is a good goal. But leave everything else open, because something could change. Like for us, we lost a very close family member. And we had a plan to have Christmas and birthdays and to see our nephew get married and graduate and who knew, right? Death wasn't part of the five year plan. But it's also not our plan. It's not it's not up to us. We're simply just existing in this series of unfolding circumstances. Exactly. You know, life is a lesson and you have to learn it. And so back in 2018, Ram Dass suffered a stroke. And it's so beautiful. He, he said, you know, before I had the stroke, I wrote this book called How can I help? I was going to help. And I might get emotional over this because I just I have an unconditional love for this man, and the vehicle that he's been to bring me back to, to a relationship with my creator. But he said, after I had the stroke, I would have called the book, How can you help me? Because I learned a lesson on dependence. And that is such a hard thing in our society to admit is that we need dependence sometimes and the stroke forced me to go inside myself. And to me, that was such a beautiful thing that someone in the whole right side of his body was paralyzed. And the fact that he could come out of that and say, Wow, that is, that is brilliant. Like that is, that is such grace through suffering to say, I am so grateful, because I was a public speaker. And I went around and gave all these lectures and all this amazing advice. But now I've been forced to go inside myself. And what a beautiful thing that is. And for someone, you know, it's in his 80s to sit there and say, I am so grateful that I have been forced to go inside myself. And I don't wish the stroke on anyone. I don't wish you the stroke, but I wish you the grace from the stroke. That's right. That's a beautiful way to say it. I think that's a great place to end. I wish you the grace from the stroke. Absolutely. Well, tune in next time. And we'll tackle some more issues and try and help everyone with their relationship with God. And we'll leave it at that. Leave it at that. Zoom out. Zoom out.