Episode 7 - Rob Bell, Part 2: Spoiler Alert

Rob and Anni dive deeper into Where’d You Park Your Spaceship? Lots of spoilers in this episode, so if you haven’t read the story yet and plan to, get yourself a copy and enjoy, then come back. If not, still listen. Lots of good stuff here about life in our universe (and others) and how to be authentically ourselves.

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Transcript

Hello, welcome to Barely Christian, Fully Christian. This is Anni Ponder. This podcast explores loving Jesus, being repulsed by much of Christianity, and relating to the Holy Spirit as the divine feminine, or I prefer to call Her, Mama God.

Today's episode is part two of my conversation with Rob Bell, and in this conversation we dive deep into Where’d You Park Your Spaceship? his most recent book. Plenty of spoilers in this episode, so if you're planning on reading the story but haven't yet, grab yourself a copy, enjoy, and then come back and listen.

If not, still listen. We talk about a whole lot of things, you know, like life in this universe and other universes, and how to be authentically ourselves.

Alright, well now would be a good time to…

Oh, yes. Where are we on the 13? Where are we on the 13? How are we doing?

That was three.

Oh, I love it. I love it.

We don't have to get to all of them, but to anybody listening, if you've not read this story yet, please hang up. I don't know, do we hang up phones? Stop listening now. Go read this book and then come back. All kinds of spoilers coming up here.

Okay.

Okay, okay, so full stop. All done. Alright, part two. The chairs.

Yeah. Okay. So, early on when Heen is learning about the arrangements from Sir Pong, Sir Pong mentions compassion. So, he says that The Chairs make and adjust The Arrangements so everybody has a job to do, right?

And later on, he talked about turning the knobs, but I don't think at that point he does. And he mentions all of these beautiful things, compassion and I didn't write any of the other ones down.

But then later we come to learn The Chairs, this terrible, dark underbelly of who they are. Okay, here's my big 30,000 foot view question. I was reading along for the longest time, really hoping that The Chairs and The Arrangements were benevolent.

Utopia.

Yeah, yeah, I was like, oh, good. Here's how to do it better. Here's how to do it better. Right, earth sucked, we figured it out, we improved. And now it's, look, it's so organized and there's a library at the center that actually, I used to be a librarian for a minute after I was a teacher.

And so that really like stoked my heart. Libraries at the center, that makes perfect sense. Look how beautifully this is done. Sir Pong, he's got all these teachers who are fabulous individuals. And so this must be a good, isn't that weird to put a judgment on a thing? I'm reading this thinking, okay, this is how we do it.

Improvement, evolution, forward movement.

This is progress, yes. And then, oh, it's not at all what I was thinking it was. Oh, look at that. Okay, so big question. Can humans actually do it?

Yeah, because Heen realizes, oh, when Sir Pong was talking about exchanges, these are the, like, in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the people who don't have houses is like a whole sections of the city are just like taken over.

Yeah.

So, we could clean that up.

Right.

There are lots of people who would gladly elect somebody who'd be like, I'll take care of it. You want your downtown clean? We can do that. It's just, we'll get a little Singapore. We'll go a little Singapore. The streets will be gleaming. They'll be very clean. You won't have any problems driving around. And it's just that then you'll have a different outrage.

Right.

Human rights, violation of autonomy. So the exchanges, and like Heen’s even, wait, did Sir Pong, when he was talking about they make exchanges, Heen did grow up in like an outwardly pretty great world.

Yeah, a veritable utopia.

Was there a cost?

Yeah. Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you even see it now with people going great. That t -shirt was $13. Great. The factory in Bangladesh collapsed two weeks ago. And the people who work in that factory, 12 hours a day, who can't afford to send their kids to school, so that you can have even, my friend Andrew Morgan made a film about fast-fashion called True Cost, which was like, great that you can get that jeans for that cost. That's nice, it's just, there actually is a larger cost. So what's interesting is you have human beings becoming more aware of the interdependency of all these systems and actual costs of things. Even people who are like, yeah, but organic food is too expensive. Yeah, it's also expensive to have glyphosate in your kid's cereal, because that chemical is used to kill whatever it kills so that those crops can grow. So you have people going, you know what, I think I'm gonna pay a, tad extra for breakfast cereal that doesn't have glyphosate in it because it's what kills humans.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So think about how many things think about the think about like we got some data about car crashes and in no time people started wearing seatbelts. I'm not going to wear some belt around my waist in a car. It's uncomfortable. And now if you get in a car and you don't put on a seatbelt, not only is it illegal, but you feel naked. So human beings make these massive shifts in consciousness, understanding in behavior, like instantly. Regardless of the sort of sort of nonsensical conflict about masks during COVID, hundreds and hundreds of millions of people were like, yeah, I'll wear a mask. It's fine. It's not like a political thing. That's just like, yes, not a big deal. Mask is not a big deal. Surgeons have been wearing them for years. Not all surgeons are idiots. Like, you know, so you can just see human beings are actually extraordinarily adaptive in certain times and settings. So like, what could be just around the corner even notice in the air right now you can sense people going hold on a second. Hours in the office is actually not a direct correlation with what got done. I was actually talking. Oh, the two days in Ohio. No, where was I? I think it was here, somewhere. I'm talking to a woman who's her job at her company was to move everybody out of the office to work from home and she's like, I can literally show you the data that people working from home how much more productive our company is since we gave people just free license to work from home and just so even the ways that people think of productivity, etc. can radically shift in a brief window of time.

So as opposed to is it getting better, is it getting worse? I think it's much more interesting how there are these shifts when all of a sudden everybody goes. Like was it 1770 to 1870, a hundred-year window in human history when every major civilization on planet Earth outlawed slavery?

So something that was just baked into the fundamental way human beings arranged themselves, suddenly, and that's the proper word, suddenly in this little window of time, we're like not only is that wrong and immoral and unjust, but it's illegal and abhorrent.

So there's lots and lots of examples where like massive portion of humanity went, wait a second, wait a second, let's do it this way. So who knows what's coming? I just know my kids, there's a whole world of things that my kids are like, that's like the dumbest thing ever.

Why do we do it that way?

I think about, oh here's like a duh example, but we live in what purports to be a representative democracy. Imagine in the Republican and Democratic primary debates next year leading up to the 2024 election, imagine if every candidate when they were speaking. Right now it'll say like their state, where they're from, it'll say, what if just next to them on the screen was all of the corporations that they received donations from. Just so whenever they were speaking, I mean obviously you can find that on the interwebs right now, but imagine if it was just moved from the interweb to the television screen. That would be a no brainer, that would take somebody five minutes to do I assume. So who knows what things in no time will be just basic that right now are like, well that's kind of a new idea.

Right. Yeah, so maybe instead of humanity aiming for a utopia and a whole new, let's just make it perfect. Listening in when conscience or observation tells us, hey this way that we've always been doing it actually sucks. Let's try something better.

And it'll probably begin with an ache, an anger, an angst, an outrage. Like think about all of the criticism of white people, fair or not, but even the phrase white privilege is now something, it's like what, ten years ago that wasn't in the lexicon.

So anybody who's like, yeah but that's just language, no, no, no, no, no. That's how it works. A thing that isn't even on the radar comes on the radar. That's actually how human beings, that's actually how it works.

Yeah.

Something that didn't even, people didn't even know was a thing. Even the widening gap between rich and poor, wasn't like, I think you grow up in the 80s, when Reagan was president, these policies were America. They were free enterprise. They were of course lower taxes. Of course, that was just all like a, sort of in the world I grew up in, obvious. And now it's like, oh, actually this system works for a few people way better than a bunch of other, like we actually now have the data.

Yeah. I wonder tying this back to your book, if the progress, the evolution, the improving starts with noticing the way Heen does.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And as soon as a person, as soon as the boundary between the interior and exterior dissolves, so for many people there's a world out there and then there's me and my little old life in here with all the things I know happening inside of me.

Yeah.

That's actually an illusion. The individual is the collective, the collective is the individual. The person who is finding freedom from the inner capitalist in which the work is never done and there's never enough. That is the changing of capitalism. That is the...

It's starting here.

That is the correct... Yeah. So the person who is most angry about that thing, corporations, capitalists, whatever the thing is they are enraged about, you find it in yourself.

So they have a... What appears to be an empowered activism against that thing but often is actually a disempowered passivity about their own interior. So what we're learning is that there is no boundary between the two and you and Guy, seeing the illusion and the lie and busyness is the healing of the system.

Absolutely.

And so you are learning that the whole thing is a projection. We're the projector, that's the screen and you're the projector. Just clean the projector.

It's just a mirror.

And then you begin to realize the people who are the most, oftentimes the most outspoken and the most cranked up, you become even more like, actually, you're actually telling us a lot about your projector. Telling us about you.

It’s that whole thing that Jesus said about the plank.

Yeah, yeah, so you So there is no world out there.

Yeah.

Yeah, I got enough to do I got enough to do in here and weirdly enough you do that and The people you see who have done that they they do tilt things they they inspire you in a movie and you're like, wow, whatever they are it's like stuff like it's different.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah

They're cleaning their projector.

Isn't that great. Uh, okay new question This is a total spoiler Maybe you can't tell us this because this is probably in book two or three or four.

I just I wonder if is Heen’s job? Actually, the job that he's doing that he doesn't know that he's doing, is he out looking for the Dill Tudd’s of the universe? Is that really what he's out there looking for and noticing?

Oh, that's funny. Because he certainly isn't looking for him. Dill Tudd just finds him and when it still does find him, he's completely annoyed, although he begins to be strangely...

Strangely drawn in.

Yeah. ...fond of this man. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. He's so annoyed that he's fond of him. He hates that he's so... he can't get him out of his head.

And actually, what's interesting about what you just said that I hadn't thought of is... The power of The Chairs is the mythology.

Mm -hmm.

And so you don't ever get any actual details. They remain removed in removed and aloof and out of sight, which gives them this authority and honor. Well, at least with some.

But you just...

Like as you said in the book, the unknown always runs to show.

Yeah, right. So they have this tremendous power. But it's fascinating when you think about... Like when Heen says to Noon Yeah at the end, like, yeah, we could die.

Like, yeah.

Oh, yeah. We're gonna be fine. It's like, no, we could get killed, obviously. But you also wonder if the... There's just this really interesting, if the two of them just stop doing what they're doing, will they?

The threat, how much of the threat is real? How much of the threat is... The threat of the threat is... The threat of the threat is the power. Like how much of this... How much of this... How much of this do we make up in our heads? It's not actually real.

Going back to your thing about the world and the future of the world in and can humans do it and all this opposition and such. How much of it is real and how much of it is a stuff in your head?

And how much of it manifests because we've expected it to?

Right. Like there's a restaurant down the street from my house here who they gave someone just told me that they gave 70% of the rest to owners gave 70% of the restaurant to the kitchen staff.

Wow.

We just went. Yeah, let's just do this. Let's just do it like this.

Radical.

Like this is very like very straightforward. And then I'd heard other stories about these owners. Two different people just in the past couple months told me stories about the owners helping them do different things in their work for free just because they're like, yeah, we just love to help you out here.

And they're like literally these people, they just like go around using their tremendous skill and wealth and connections to just help people like there weren't any strings attached. It was just straight up we believe in you.

How can we help?

So you do that? So you just you see enough of that and It's enough people in business and education and farming who are just doing really interesting things that are just like very straightforward. Yeah, there's there's good to do here. Let's do that. Patagonia, the first company to be given to the earth. Like literally Shanaard the founder of Patagonia, just he just gave Patagonia to the earth.

Wow, I had never heard that that's beautiful.

A couple years ago on Black Friday Patagonia took it out Please don't buy our clothing Bring it in to repair. You know, we don't people don't you don't need more You don't anything of ours that you bought just bring it in and we'll repair it. I was just at their flagship down the street and getting my daughter a coat and there's like a there's like a whole thing about just bring your thing in and we'll repair it. And then you just keep wearing it. So like they they take out an ad I think it was New York Times Don't buy our stuff and then of course sales go up So There's lots of things people are doing that are just completely different than what is conventional. Well, that's just how you do that Yeah, so they're like ,There's this wonderful. I don't know what she is teacher, Person, guide comedian named Jessa Reid who has this wonderful phrase Wired for the New World. Yeah, it's like yeah Do you feel like if you feel out of whack with it how things are you're probably just wired for the New World?

At least we're different way.

I listened to her podcast after you told me to.

Oh, that's good I was gonna say I think I told you about her.

Yeah, you did. Still listening. Love her.

Yeah, Wired for the New World because maybe this one, it's not fitting, but we're here living it out in this space where we're... Well, the more and more we step into this who we really are, again, not trying to take on other people's personas and personalities, but I think that's where the magic happens.

Yes.

And something else that I've heard you talk about a whole lot and then really came through for me in this book is the theme of what grieving does to us.

Mm.

And so... You know, Heen is there grieving from the loss of his mother, essentially, the loss of Goja. And, yeah, can you ever come back from that? He wonders. Maybe one, you can, but two, no, I'm never coming back, right? So here he is with this deep grief. And I've heard you talk about grief on the collective scale, too. I think you did a podcast not long ago about, yeah, are you feeling really heavy? Yeah, that's grief, right?

We have this collective grieving that we're experiencing.

Mm -hmm.

Okay. So I wondered, reading this story, if part of the reason that Heen so easily gets sucked in to working for The Chairs without realizing that, you know, it's funny, it's old language. I almost was going to say that he's working for the bad guys. I don't know that that even fits, but he's participating in something that he doesn't know he is, but that he wouldn't agree with if he knew the full extent of what's going on. And I'm wondering if he's blinded to that. He doesn't think to ask these questions because of the grieving that he's trying to numb.

Yes, so. Uh, I, you as the reader get why he gets on that spaceship.

Yeah.

It's not fuzzy. So you, what's interesting is as the reader, you have very little judgment of his, like, I was looking for a way out, right? And these people, and that's super important. I'm realizing now, as you said that, I hadn't thought about it that way. So later, when you realize what he's actually, you aren't like, how dare he, you understand one of 100%

Oh, of course.

What's interesting me is people who have been a part of something or belong to something or believe something or contributed to something and they're like, What was I thinking?

Wait, you know exactly what you were thinking. Belonging is the most intoxicating thing ever. Being a part of something, being a, especially has any sort of story about helping the world or serving or love or whatever. So of course the loving of all of your earlier selves. And I think it's interesting all of this plethora of documentaries now about cults, Nixxiom and The Vow, The Vow, I think it's The Vow that was called all these different documentaries and we're fascinated by them.

Yeah.

Of course we are. And it's not how could people have gotten sucked in. Our deeper selves know exactly why.

Right.

And we're kind of like, why would people follow that person? But then you look around and you're like, oh, God, I'm not going to be alone Saturday night. Going to be at this thing.

We're going to be talking about bettering ourselves. It's like, and purpose. Getting high on the fumes of all of this. I'm not isolated. There's it's just going somewhere. I can contribute. I'm valuable. I'm seen. It's funny. We watch them utterly transfixed, but we actually know exactly whether it whether aware of it or it's in our shadow. There's a part of us. It's like, yeah, I know exactly what this is exactly why this is like incredibly attractive.

Yeah, we can't fault these folks because we I have this phrase that I like to use: If I were you, I'd be you.

Oh, absolutely. You had it was so good. That's a really good one. Yeah. So this sort of, I don't have to understand what it's like to be you, but yeah, get it. Yeah. Yeah.

If I were you, I’d be

you. That's good. Okay. So then that leads me straight into the next question.

There's an actual segue here. That's exciting. All right. The reason people get sucked into cults. The reason did you see Shiny Happy People? No, no, I think I saw the trailer for that one and I was like, yeah, I'll probably pass on that one, but I get maybe a little PTSD right there.

No, I don't have it. I didn't have any. I just was like, oh, I, that's almost like the, sometimes the trailer you're like, okay, I've seen the movie. I got the plot.

I got it. Yeah. Yeah. For me, that one hit home. That was actually quite healing to watch.

Wow.

Okay, so the back of the book talks about, I have to read it because it's really well said, Is all of this a setup, one of the symptoms of a larger malaise that will continue to spread through the entire universe unless someone does something to stop it? Cue the music. Okay. I have my own convictions about what the larger malaise is here on this planet. I'm sure you have your own. I wonder if the Venn diagram would be quite large. I'm curious what in Heen's world, what is the underlying malaise that is driving the malady, or that's creating the opportunity for the arrangements to be the way they are without people noticing what's going on.

Yeah, right, right. Like, it all works. It appears to people, people appear to have nice solid, comfortable lives. So the idea that this is because somebody somewhere is making choices and eliminations and such, so that, grainings, so that it's all nice and tidy. And then I love when you talk about the trauma. Oh, they set it up this way because of how, like when Heen discovers the Skolnick writings and was like, God, he's describing like chaos, but it's weirdly got like, a certain kind of life to it. Yeah, it's like, he's like, if I can feel like who's in control, no one who's running the show, everyone? He's like flummoxed by it, but it also has something about it that's like super compelling. So it's like you describe a utopia and then you describe what you and I know to be this chaos and then go, this chaos. Yeah, I was probably working through something there about this moment in time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, how does this thing actually run? You don't, what you don't care. You don't care about lots of things until you do.

Until you do, right?

That's why people are hard on themselves for, how come I never noticed? Because you didn't notice. You just didn't. How can I be, how can I be aware of when I'm not aware of? I didn't, I wasn't enough, didn't affect me. I didn’t have enough pain. There's always this like, you didn't say anything. Yeah, I didn't say anything. I didn't even know there was a thing.

Right. You can't know what you don't know.

Fine, judge me. I was, I don't know, I was eating a sandwich trying to get the through schools trying to pay some bills that you don't ever whatever or even the even right now the like sort of that's not moving fast enough even the idea of progressive requires a linear understanding of time and understood and immediately if you have the word progressive then you have ranking, these people are ahead of these people, and then immediately you have a subset of that which is they don't see what we see and then you instantly have a layer of assumption and judgment about they need to see what we see so they can move at our speed like they're not moving fast enough I am moving fast enough what about some future being who's like you are you so you just instantly end up with all kinds of suffering happening in your mind alone.

Yes.

These people these everybody should be moving your speed are you sure yeah What is the proper speed? Maybe there is no speed. There just is what is. There just is how fast, how long it's taking. Race, gender, income inequality, the care for the earth. Like, is, do I want everybody to move on my speed?

Like, what's speed exactly other than this is the speed that's happening? So everybody relax. And this is the speed that it is happening at. This. So you, you obviously you wanted to go fast that's fine, but you have, you are punching yourself in the face and then looking around for fists.

That's my new, I just said that the other day and Kristen was like, that's a good one.

That's a good one. That might be a Robcast right there.

That might be the problem. So I, yeah, so, so at least clean up the war with reality that's going on inside of you. Let's at least start there.

Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think this all just continues to come back to the work is in our own selves.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And recognizing that whatever we're sensing out there that's wrong is a call to putting in order.

Find it in yourself.

Ourselves.

That's the activism. Yes. We're not against activism. We're completely 100% for it. Just follow it the whole way. Like actually follow it in true integrity, which is find this stuff in you and you'll be a completely different kind of force in the world.

You know what? Yeah. I have this friend who she's a brilliant scientist. She does studies with Yale and she's a primatologist and she's been all over the world and I love to pick her brain and have big conversations. And so one day I asked her, okay, she's an activist. She's just like this plugged in human, although she has a very unique experience of herself in the world. Okay. So I asked her one day, from your point of view, from where you sit, what is the one thing you would want me to be doing? What can I do to help? Right? How can I help the world? You see this beautiful vantage point, you understand the way the animal kingdom works in a way that very few other humans on this planet get. Tell me what I can do. How can I help? I want to help. And you know what she said? Be vegan. Don't go out and preach about it. Don't buy t-shirts. Just be. You just be vegan. And that transforms you. And then that's all you need to worry about.

That's so interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's great.

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Just starts with you.

That's great. You got one more?

I have a few more, but I think let's close with this.

Yes.

Yes. All right. I want to circle back to the grief in our world that is just so beautifully represented there in Heen’s world. You say there is so much ungrieved grief and we see how Heen gets sideways until he comes face to face with his grief. And that is the story of all of us to a certain extent. How, Rob Bell, can we begin the process of grieving? What? Where do we start to grieve properly? To grieve well. I don't think properly is the right word. Let me retract that word. How do we begin to grieve well?

Well, it's more like waves that pass through the body, so the mind will have to submit to something larger than itself. It's a wonderful servant, not the best master. We're trying to think your way through and often it comes because a person has some sense of being stuck or jammed. Like you saw when you were here in Ohio, how many people first had to grieve something. And the relationship between grief and imagination. So one way is just when you have some sense of stuck or blocked or jammed up, just ask is there something that hasn't passed through or something that I haven't let go of? And oftentimes is there any ungrieved grief? Is there any loss that you haven't realized was a loss? So change is a form of loss, loss is a form of change. So some basic self -inquiry, oh, I am, I'm sad about that. Or disappointment is one that has such a mild undertone and yet disappointments stack up. So sometimes a sense of complacency, a sense of lethargy, a sense of passivity, a sense like your cynicism keeps undercutting, it just keeps like kneecapping you. And oftentimes some sort of ungriefed grief in there that is some sadness. For me, it's discovering all kinds of sadness and disappointment that I did, but I just flew right over top of and seeing it and naming it. Oh, I'm sad about that. And that requires, and why the mind has to get quiet, is the mind is quick to judge. Yeah, what are you doing? You're still thinking about that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So oftentimes what happens is when a person is still and notices what's arising, sense, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, emotions, a whole nother kind of play -by -play commentary arises. And you should be over this by now. Seriously, that's kind of petty. What is your problem? And for most of us, there's a critical voice on the shoulder. But it's nonsensical. So you are learning that that's, yes, this is what's real. This feels like this feels. So part of it's just a sort of ruthless honesty about what's actually present within, without judgment.

I had an experience where this happened. I was on a hike that I didn't want to be on. It was a 10 -mile hike.

There you go.

And more athletic than I like to be. And I was angry with my husband that we were going on this hike. And I was showing him with my body. I was stomping and scuffing and huffing around. And I have learned to ask if I am maybe more upset than makes sense for the scene that I'm in. I'm learning this beautiful thing to ask, is there, when's the first time I felt this way? And so I'm on this hike and I'm scuffling my feet and I'm falling down because I'm so angry. And I'm really not very mature in this moment. But I have the wherewithal to say, when's the first time I felt this way? And Rob, it was amazing. Instantly a memory surface from my childhood.

Oh, there you go.

Oh, wow. I had not grieved. Oh, wow. I had felt the same way in this situation in my childhood. It was a recurring thing that I had to experience. And I didn't have a choice, and I was forced to be in this situation. I didn't want to be in this situation. I felt lonely. I felt bewildered. I didn't think I could do it. All of the same feelings that were showing up on this hike. So there out in the wilderness, I'm doing this like, OK. OK, I'm listening in. All right. Of course, I felt that way then. And I needed to hold some space for that in order to then be fully present and just tell my husband, oh, OK. I am upset because I didn't know we were going to be hiking 10 miles today. That surprised me. I didn't like it. And then I could be back in the present moment without the extra grief that was coming from three decades before.

Yeah, that was on the hike with you.

It was. It was in my boots.

Yeah, no, oh, see that's powerful. Yeah. Yeah, just a brief bit of self-inquiry. Yeah, and all of that's right there.

It came out, I didn't start to think and comb through the annals of my history. It presented itself to me when I asked.

Amazing. Yeah. Amazing. That's so good.

So that's what happens when we start listening.

Amazing. Wow. Well, I.

Good times.

I am so grateful for this time. Thank you. I think what I'm going to do is try and listen to two podcasts. You can listen to the first one if you haven't read the book and then second one. Yeah, there we go.

Brilliant.

That's how this is going to work.

Spoiler. No spoilers. Spoiler.

Yeah, absolutely. No spoilers. Spoiler. Yeah, that's what's going to happen. So. That's great. Well, I like so many other people am really looking forward to book two because now I need, I need to know what happened to the people of earth. I need to know what is going to happen next. I just have so many questions, but mostly who is this Dill Tudd guy and where can we get more of him? So more, more will be revealed. I certainly love it. Yeah.

I love it.

Well, thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me on. A two parter.

A two part series. A duology, if you will.

Great. It’s so good. Such good questions. So much. I'm lost. I'm like four questions back. Like, oh, that's something I have to think about. I'll be like turning this over for a while. So good.

Excellent. Well, that's what I'm doing with your story. So thank you.

Excellent. I love to hear it.

Whoa. How fun was that? Hey, thanks for joining me and sorry about the echo. It turns out I'm such a noob I forgot to tell Rob to click the button on his end that says Cancel the echo in this recording. So I couldn't scrub it out. There you have it. It's raw. It's real. It's what happened. Hey, if you want to get a hold of Rob, the best way to do that is to go to robbell.com You can find his book and you can sign up for things that are super cool like his two days in Ojai which is where I first met him, and it was nothing short of transformational. So I highly recommend. If you'd like to get a hold of me I am as always at BarelyChristianFullyChristian.com or if you don't feel like typing quite so much AnniPonder.com will get you to the same place. Just remember there's no E in Anni. From there you can connect with me on Facebook, Instagram, you can send me a message or sign up for my newsletter so you never miss a beat. Thanks again for joining. We'll talk to you soon

The artwork for Barely Christian, Fully Christian was lovingly created by Lauren Leith of Little Moon Market You can find her on Instagram if you'd like a beautiful moon of your own. This gorgeous song by Wyn Doran and Paul Cray is called “Banks of Massachusetts.” Enjoy