Luminary Interview: Andy Crouch

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Practicing the Way Podcast, where we explore a life of apprenticeship to Jesus in the modern world. - Andy, thank you so much for having this conversation. It's really great to see you. - It's wonderful to be together. - It's always great to see you. You are, I don't wanna start with flattery, but you are one of my favorite human beings. (laughing) You have such a beautiful mind, and I mean that not just in the sense of horsepower, but you have a beautiful mind. You have a beautiful way that you sit lensed by which you see the world, and you walk with such thoughtfulness, but also joy. I feel like those things often are mutually exclusive. And so it's just really good to be with you. And I wanna have the conversation because you're one of the few short lists that people I know in the contemporary Christian world that is thinking and talking about this ancient paradigm of a rule of life. And so I just wanna assess all the gold out of you. So let's just start for people that are new to this concept. What is a rule of life and how did you, this is not language or paradigm that I at least was familiar with and I spent many decades growing up deep in the heart of the American church. What is a rule of life and how did you come to it? - Yeah, I mean, a rule of life is familiar in the Catholic church more than in the Protestant. - But even in the Catholic church is associated with particular communities and with a monastic order. - Exactly, yeah. - And of course, Catholics often speak of the religious, which is not everybody, it's actually people who have vowed themselves to a particular way. And every community of religious, which we would think of as monks and nuns and so forth, have a rule, at least since the days of St. Benedict. And so a rule is a, usually set of communal practices that guide a particular community in how they live and express their faith. And it is something that was not, I think, you know, the Reformation kind of collapsed the distinction between lay and religious. And now we think of everybody, if you're Christian, you're religious. - We're all religious, we're all spiritual. - Yeah. And of course, there's deep truth in that. And this deep, profound idea that we are all meant to consecrate our lives. It's not just a special location. It's not a higher level of discipleship or a monk or a nun than for you and I. - Right, that would be the Protestant way of thinking about it. But what was sort of lost along the way was the idea of if that's actually going to be true, if there really is a pre-state of all believers and a kind of consecrated life that typifies every believer that maybe you would actually need a rule to live that out. And instead, we kind of lost that vision. - And do you think with it a call to a more rigorous life of discipleship? - The bar has been so lower to let everybody in that then you lose some level of like, okay, but this is what it means to follow Jesus. - Yes, this is the danger. I mean, I think the beautiful insight of the Reformation, which our Catholic brothers and sisters also have a way of expressing is it's all grace. This is not anything you achieve. And so there's no rule that can kind of, there's no latter you can climb to get. - To make you a real Christian. - Right, yeah. - But if you have been rescued by grace and infused with grace, what would you want your life to look like? That's where a rule can be helpful. And so I think more and more, well, and I would also say, under the conditions of Christendom, in which the whole culture, without any individual having to really think about it or do anything conscious or intentional, the whole culture has been to some extent a range to follow some set of patterns that are thought to match up to what the kingdom requires. - And just really quick to find Christendom. - Oh, so Christendom, the era where the church and the political and civil authorities overlapped, whether in a Catholic country or a Protestant country, or a place where there's an established church, where everybody gets baptized. And most people show up to church, at least on notable occasions, and all the ceremonies of the culture inculcate the gospel. So like even as recently as the coronation of a king, you can see still a vestige of Christendom in the United Kingdom, where just by being a citizen or a subject of that kingdom, when you watch the coronation, you're inducted into a sequence of things you do when some important event happens. The kinds of prayers you pray, the kinds of words that are appropriate. And without having to think about it or choose it under the conditions of Christendom, culture kind of forms you. And now, always imperfectly, and there's lots of critiques to be leveled at that era of Christendom, but in any case, it's now gone. - Yeah, it doesn't matter. We're not living there, anyway. - Even in the United Kingdom, really, it's functionally gone in all kinds of ways that was not true just a generation or two ago. So now we live in a time where I cannot expect that anything in the world around me is going to form me in the direction of the upside down kingdom of Jesus. And if I am going to be shaped into the kind of person I actually want to be and have discovered by grace that I can be, I'm going to need some sort of formative practice. And this is where rule actually becomes worth considering, again, answer. - And how did you come to this concept of a rule of life and begin by a little bit by one? - So only indirectly in that I had joined this community of Christians who were entrepreneurs. So Praxis, which is my daily work, my full-time work, is as part of the theology and culture at this organization that exists to develop a kind of ecosystem or a community of people who start and sustain new ventures in the world, for profit, non-profit. So we have founders, I mean, think of entrepreneurs, you think of people starting things and every sector, we've got people in tech, we've got people in clean water, we've got people in agriculture, we've got people in storytelling in LA, we've got like every biotech, like any possible sector of human activity, there are Christians who are starting new ventures with all the risk and all the uncertainty and all the possibility that involves. And Praxis was founded 13 years ago as we speak to try to serve and convene those folks and help them see fruit and what they're doing. So this was already underway, I joined as a partner and one of the very first conversations that was happening as I joined was, it's one thing just to sort of hoover up all the Christians who do something and put them in a room, which is maybe not un-valuable to do. But you actually find out, well, there's lots of different Christian ways of, or there's lots of ways of doing this, that Christians do. So Christians are more and less honest in their dealings. Christians are more and less humble in what they do. Christians are more and less ambitious in what they do. And we had this vision, not just of sort of collecting every possible Christian who also is an entrepreneur. - And get them in a room to listen to. - And lecture. - Yeah, exactly, or network, even network, you know, right? I mean, you could think, well, everyone needs a network. But we had this hunch that a particular kind of formation needed to happen. Fundamentally, the way we think about it is to create people who are humble and ambitious at very high levels both. So very humble and very ambitious. Now, in some ways, that almost sounds like a contradiction in terms like you can't have both. But we actually believe there is a way to be profoundly ambitious for the thing you've been given to do in the world that you perhaps can see in a way that other people can't see. And deeply humble in the sense of submitted to God, submitted to other people, aware of your own smallness, aware of your own sinfulness. But generally speaking, that kind of combination does not happen by accident. And it definitely doesn't sustain itself by accident. So the-- - Which could likely be said of any strong Christian for you. Doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't sustain itself by accident. - Yeah, exactly. And you can start well and finish poorly. Like you can start with amazing. And I think most people, I mean, when you start out life, unless you are really fairly psychopathic, you feel pretty humble. You feel pretty small before the challenges before you. - You have good desires, you want to end well. - Your intentions are good. - You're coming up, yeah. But formative things come along in your life. - And deformative things come along. - And deforming things. - Go instantly. - And one is actually success. And if you look at the world of startups that we're trying to serve, and the good intentions with which people go in, compared to the very minimum complex and troubling things that come out the other end. I mean, so you think about a huge firm like Google, who in their founding charter, when they go public, they say, our motto is, don't be evil. And then literally, if you're saying they just quietly drop that, they're like, well, that's a little too high of a bar. And I'm not saying, of course, that Google is entirely evil, but there's this drift that comes with scale success. And we don't, we're gonna see a range of outcomes in the practice community. not everybody's going to build a Google for sure, but some of them might. And wouldn't it be amazing to have a community that can actually be Continually forming us so that as whatever comes along because failure also is very Formative and deformative for people and then people make really bad choices in the face of failure How could we have a community that would like in a way transcend success and failure and be creating all along humble amations? So that's the the question that's the problem you're solving for that's when you timestamp this How do we form a community that your example is humble and ambitious? Construered both success and failure well and how do we sustain that formation? Yes, and you're saying yes answer the solution the problem you came up with was a rule of life Certainly a piece of the answer. I mean there's ultimately You know, there's no solutions to it's all relationship and love ultimately but what holds us in those relationships? There are tools and practices that can help so so we did decide to actually put into writing a rule of life for Redemptive entrepreneurs, which is our way of framing what we're after redemptive entrepreneurs and You know, I think one helpful way to think of this is It's what we wrote down for our community is not it's not like a general purpose manual and how to be a Christian Generally speaking it really addresses the vocational Potentiality and temptation that is specific to being involved in starting new things that have a high degree of uncertainty and risk Interest with a who's not your role of life is not your summary of all Christian spirituality There's all of you Christian all kinds of things like should Christians go to war not addressed in our rule of life Not because we aren't implicated in war You know, but that like this massive question when can you use violence? how Sexuality like how do we handle our creation is male and female and all that comes in that? There we do talk about in the context of power because that's a very important thing and we need to address that But we don't have a whole sexual there's not a whole sexual ethic in our role of life Not because entrepreneurs who are Christian don't need to think about this but because there's nothing specific to the entrepreneurial vocation Particularly that impinges on that massive area of being human. I have a friend who was writing a rule of life for their church And he had this great line. He said a rule of life is not all that we do It's how we do all that we do. Oh well, yeah, so it's not our attempt to summarize all of the things that a serious disciple of Jesus does or He does this is our our lifestyle template Right. This is the foundation that is undergirding the whole of our Christian life together. Right. It's how we do all that we do Yeah, I think that's right and and it is I think to be helpful it's always fairly context dependent in some way in somewhere another so we gathered a little group of spiritual directors who had mentored people in our community couple theologians real theologians not like me like real credentialed theologians a couple entrepreneurs a couple investors around a table and Started drafting this and it went through about a year and a half of Exploration revision a substantive we had a substantial revision. There's one whole section that wasn't in the first draft that that we tried with our first class of fellows and they said we really need this thing So we ended up with a document that lays out six areas that we think If you don't attend to these as a Redenta bunch of honor you probably will end up miss shape it Yeah, and what are the could you name the six? Let's see if I could even all Is this really live in you or not? So I believe in order time money imagination power decision-making and community so I honestly don't know if those the order that we use by no we start with time Because it is the scaricest thing actually in every human life anyway or it's like the most non not adjustable thing you can have more or less money, but you can't have more or less time and and one of the things about entrepreneurship is I mean there's lots of jobs and lots of Vocations that are very demanding time wise, but but there is a ticking clock in every venture and One way that I think about it is money comes with a clock and part of entrepreneurship is raising money If you're nonprofit you raise philanthropic the capital if you're a for-profit you raise investment capital And that money always comes with a time horizon in which some kind of Return is expected return on mission return on Yeah, you know financial financial return And so the time pressure and then the number of things you have to fit into every day when you are just starting out I mean, it's truly starting everything from scratch So we felt like gosh if we don't address You know the dynamics of hurry and anxiety and so forth that swirl around time will be in trouble Money is number two for a reason which is that money swirls around entrepreneurship as well And even nonprofit because we work equally with for-profit and nonprofit But even nonprofits which are ultimately mission driven and they're not driven by a financial bottom line in the way that for-profits are But they require I mean, it's money is the oxygen of organizational life in our company and so People have entrusted you with money The very nature of doing what our entrepreneurs do means you probably have Access to money that not all people do I don't mean that everyone in our community comes from a whole lot of wealth or has a whole lot of wealth But you you're certainly thinking about money all the time So we've got to have some practices with that and then entrepreneurship is about imagination It's about seeing something that doesn't exist yet and bringing it to being and so stewarding and caring for our imagination is really critical So those I know those are the they're in a kind of there's two groups of three Because these first three are like the they're the essential Like ingredients of your daily life But they're also the essential areas of temptation and distraction and devastation if you let them kind of spin out of time money and then And then there are these other realities which are decision-making every day you've got to make tons of decisions How do you do that a faithful way um power which is if you're a founder and then eventually a CEO or executive director You have the power has accumulated in you. How do you handle that and then community? How do you do this not alone because entrepreneurship so often is conceived of as this kind of heroic journey by this brave individual It's never actually that but it is a temptation to become very isolated in the work of entrepreneurship So those were the sex for our community and then did you come up with practices at a kind of baseline level for that or tell us about that right So so then for each of those we kind of went through this iterative process of asking Do you start it at more of like here are the problems? Here are the yeah here are the here's the kind of people we want to be in a yes time bound culture where the norm and start up is Insane hours very stress overload burn out chewing people up You want to be people that move at a different kind of pace with the different kind of ease So then you have to go from aspiration to practice at some level, you know, yes exactly So So there were a lot of wells we could draw from right like all of these the Christian tradition has Resources to offer so we tried to plumb those um Draw from those wells, but then we also had um The the great thing about having this sense up and running community at that time, you know kind of a couple hundred people who are meaningfully Connected with what we're doing Among them in any given area where people you were like, oh my goodness There's something about you know this person's relationship to money and wealth that just feels healthy feels Same feels trustworthy. Let's go find out what they do with you. What do they do? Here's this person who just doesn't ever seem worried never seems worried about time Well, what in the world do you do to make that possible because you've got this really complicated job you're doing So so there was that just kind of mining the community for what are the practices? Yeah for the Inbet kind of practical wisdom that they were living out which means I mean I think a lot of people don't think that way connecting the dots between Are there practices in this person's life? We just kind of think well just that's how it is That's how she is that's how Sarah is they're great and we don't necessarily realize that might not actually be how Sarah is or And he is they might be actually radically different and so they've had to build their life in a way to to counteract that I think I think this is so important Because I think we have this idea That people are just innately good or bad people. Yes, and oh John Martin's such a good guy Which for sure is first up my hand was saying that true Hey, come on Andy come on But to the extent and and you know, I mean I think having had Only two children so end of two very small and You know there are temperamental things like so when you're a baby like there are sweet temperate There's enough truth in that myth to keep us all believing it But if you meet a 50 year old especially who has been through the crucible of either success or failure And there is something deeply admirable in that person. It is not by accident. I've never seen it I've never seen the answer be oh well, they were just like that all along. They even if they had some maybe advantages of a kind of even temperament or whatever, you know, that they were just given by nature and grace. They have cultivated and so what we have found in our community is the exemplary people in our community are the most intentional people in our community. They are not they're not accidental saints or accidental heroes. They are they're and usually there's deep stories of suffering and sacrifice but that are behind that that led them or moments of great crisis. We at one of our mentors who talks about this publicly and has written about it and informed very deeply our decision making practice is a businessman from Houston and Terry Looper. He's had a whole lifetime of business now built a very successful private business in Houston who had an absolute total ways spoken about all this publicly just absolute total breakdown in his I think mid 30s as an ambitious Seattle and kind of would be world changer and Christian all along but completely out of touch with the resources he needed to do and be who he really was called to be. Yeah. And had this profound profound break in every way emotional spiritual physical but on the other side of that embraced these unbelievably radical practices like just would believe our radical this guy is that as it happens have born amazing fruit in every kind of dimension of his life and so we went to Terry and we said how how do you talk to what are those practices what do you do and we literally just with permission copied it and put it in the room because like but it's not by accident it's not just that he's a good guy it's that no he he went through this curse ball he made some choices on the other side and and then just through compounding time. So you mine your community for you started looking for people that have been formed along the lines of what you want to be formed into and you want your community to be formed into and then you started reverse engineers out of their autobiography like what are the practices what what are the experiences how have you organized your life in such a way that over a long period of time you become this kind of a person. Yeah so what we ended up with was for each of the six a baseline practice that felt like the the floor of maturity you could say like so the well to start with time the baseline practice is Salath one day a week where you do no work because first of all it is radical for entrepreneurs huh well it's oh my gosh it is so unthinkable it's so so I mean we select you know we're pretty selected program for our core offering which is this year long accelerator program and these are all people who have chosen to be in a Christian of Christian environment you know a lot of them are also in Y-combinator and these other accelerators that are great you know but just aren't specifically Christian so these are all folks who have chosen to be in a Christian environment but they come in to the first week that we do and honestly I mean I don't know maybe one every three years has any Salath practice yeah it is just not it's not how anyone is in our culture right let alone people start to be pretty true of most Christians in your average middle-class church right totally so and and we present this practice this baseline we're like we think this is the baseline this is the floor one seventh of your life you rest and worship and delight in God it's it is it is unthinkable if you haven't done it and it feels impossible and then when it becomes a part of your life it's unthinkable that you spent so many years without keeping Salath yeah so one of the most beautiful things I mean this is a bit of a tangent but after the first we we do these kind of essentially we have three times during the year where we're together in an intensive way so at the end of the first week that we're together we ask them to prototype Salath in their life to find a way to build this in and everybody takes a deep breath they're like this is not going to work I don't know how to do it and the amazing thing is when they come back a few months later and and it's never perfect and never you know none of us get this right quickly but the the delight and the freedom and the discoveries that people make and and many people then build whole Salath policies for their whole company right because of course this is built into the Sabbath command it's not just you don't do any work but no one in your house no indentured servant no slave no animals yeah so how do you actually create a Sabbath create Sabbath yes which becomes a very important kind of a second step you could say in fact it is part of our baseline and pretty sure we say you know we we do know work one day and make it possible for everyone in our sphere authority to do know work because it's very easy for the CEO to set an expectation oh yeah I take vacations but you know you better answer every email every text message whatever so so the baseline practice for time is is Sabbath Sabbath baseline practice for money is tithing 10% of what whatever we're entrusted with income wise and that also is I mean these so these are not like easy things on average to adopt their what percentage of people coming into your program do you think are tithing I think your language I love it is with special attention to the church and the poor yeah with this special attention to the needs of the church and the needs of the poor and I don't I don't actually know what percentage but we know what percentage we want coming out of the program yes and incidentally of all these things tithing as the one that's like so much easier to start early in your life when you have usually very little money less you make easier and yes yeah and and and and and super ironically the more you make the harder it is to to embrace that and so it's so weird and we have actual it seems so counterintuitive but it will always be harder to give away the more you make the harder it'll be a million dollars than a hundred dollars no matter how much what do you make and there are there's literal I mean I would know you know there's literal studies that like look at household income and generosity as a percentage basis and it goes down it goes down re bracket until you get to the very top bracket when people the percentage takes up but but it isn't even for the top bracket the percentage given is not as high as the people in the smallest bracket so it's just start early start small and it will be a lot easier to keep doing it do you want to go through the other sure I'm just real glad I was so tired to be sad with yeah I think it would be tithing imagination imagination a little harder to put into a single word but it's we have limits on the quantity frequency and character of the media we consume so the huge I love that tripart thing right there a little round of quantity yeah frequency frequency and character of this film series or youtube channel or podcast or movie and the the belief behind this is that we are in this unusual time in human history I think it's a well it certainly feels unusual in some ways where there's just such competition for our imaginations and and maybe it's that the fidelity of the false alternative is so powerful so I mean people have always told stories people always had myths those myths were not always edifying you know but but even the difference between sitting around a camp sitting on a fire and hearing the village storyteller tell a story that that that doesn't just like take over your senses the way an iMac screen does right or the way even a small glowing rectangle does there's just something about the screen and the amount of work that's being put and the commercial incentives that are being put into colonizing your imagination through the screen it just felt like we needed to name if you're going to be a person of deep imagination you're going to it's not that we say you never watch entertainment at all it's that you have a plan for how you consume it and it involves how much how often and what kind and so that's you got to have a plan so then on the other three the we can sum up the power one in a single word which is maybe an unexpected word the word leaning which is this beautiful idea from the Hebrew Bible that you leave the edges of a field unharvested so that the poor who do not own land in in an ancient context have the dignity of meaningful work that it's not just chair you don't just hand out food you provide a place for those who don't own land to do the work of of landowners and have the dignity of providing for their family and the way we translate this is um we want everyone our community to be asking actually ideally every day what am i leaving undone so that someone else who may have less agency or intrinsic authority or ascribed authority that they have a chance to do it so uh just as important as like for me as a public speaker what speaking invitations do i say yes to today just as important are some things that i would have really like to do that i intentionally say no to and also say oh but you should meet this other person who you don't know who i actually think would do an amazing job with this so gleeing is this practice that i don't just sort of gather up to myself all the opportunities and and take all you know all the way to the edges of the field like i'm going to take all zero sum right it's this practice of letting go of the edges of opportunity and possibility, and raising up other people who also were image-bearers, also have something to contribute. Decision-making, we pretty much took this straight from Terry Littleper and the baseline practice is just daily prayer, having a moment in your day where you stop and Terry has this beautiful, we also talk about this later in the rule, but this beautiful thing, he says, you start every decision by consulting your friend Jesus, and just having a daily practice of consulting your friend Jesus, the challenges and beauty of the day. And then community just starts, the baseline is participating in a worshiping community, the goal there being that you are part of something that you are not in charge of, and you are part of something that doesn't really have much to do with your work, a community that will know you, that ultimately one day God willing will bury you, and will know you as a whole person rather than as the figurehead or the leader of a particular venture. So the baseline's, that's how we set the base. - Six kind of values that you're wanting to build into your community, all of which are counter-cultural. Six baseline practices to kind of move from aspiration to hopefully formation. And then you have, tell us about what you call reach practices. - Yeah, so this is, I think our co-founder at COJ, Magic gets a lot of credit for this aspect. I don't remember if it was his idea, but certainly his instinct was if we give entrepreneurs just a set of rules to follow, they will break. - Follow the rules. - This is not a good people. We're like, please show me how to check the right boxes and color within the lives. Like the very nature of the people we work with is that they are, they're innovators, they're not, they're not rules. - Rule of breakers, yes. - So it was vulnerable to ask a community, like this to embrace a rule of life at all. And so we say, well, look, let's do this. Let's give everyone a baseline, 'cause we do need a baseline. It's not meaningful without a baseline. We can't have everybody just make up their time practice. - Or keep it in this kind of aspirational, yeah, we wanna be, yeah, it's very busy. We wanna, that's where let's see so many people fail. - Wow. - They're like, yeah, I'm with you. I wanna be less worried. I wanna be less anxious. I wanna be easy. - And they stop at this kind of, so I'm gonna just try to, I'm gonna try to be a less worried person and they stop there. And then they are just a chronically hurried person. - Wow. - No matter, even if their intention is a thousand percent genuine, and as part felt, I think. - That's, I think that's very right. Statements of values don't go that far. I mean, it's better than not saying values, but communal practices. - But communal practices. - Not just practice, but communal. We are doing this together as a community. - Yeah, that's really good. So, to go beyond the baseline, we have two further sections in each of the six, which is, we call them reach practices, which are things you could try once you're like, oh, all these I've come from, you know, I'm tithing, I'm taking a exam. Well, here are some things that people in our community actually do. So, for example, on the money one, tithing is conventionally done on your income. That's your flow of money through a given year let's say, you aim to give away 10%. But we have people in our community who tithe on their assets. So, one of the reach practices is add up all your assets and take 10% of that and give it, which is a very different thing from just sort of looking at what's coming in and diverting 10% to charity. So, then we have reach practices and then we also have this section called creative approaches, which is an even more open-ended category. If like, how could you really rethink your approach in this area? So, you know, at this moment, I'm sort of blanking on specific creative approaches that are in our official rule. But we've tried to encourage, and the Praxis team, every month we take one of these six and we talk through it as a team, 'cause all of our partners are committed to the rule of life and everyone in our community is invited to it. And often what we do is we actually ask people to share, like what's something that's helped you keep the Sabbath in a deeper way, like beyond the baseline. And we get very different answers because people are beautifully creative. So, yeah, baseline, creative, reach practices, creative approaches. And then for every one of these, we end that section of the rule with what we call the hope for abundance, which is what's the, this is not a law for the sake of constraining or constructing us. This is an invitation that we hope, if we actually lived this way, you know, if I actually kept the Sabbath, that there would be a kind of restfulness and hopefulness in the way I do my work six days a week that I'm not gonna get any other way. So try to articulate that briefly. - We'll put a link in the show notes to the Praxis rule of life, which people can look at online for the specifics. But one thing I love about what you're doing is, you know, this tiny little micro-researchance in rule of life that this conversation is a part of, and the modern church is, beautiful, and is tragically nine times out of 10, or 99 times out of 100 run through the grid of the assumption of Western culture, which is radical individualism. So Andy is writing his rule of life. John Marks writing, I just talked about myself from the third person. Should be part of our rule of life, so you never do that. You get the idea. You get the drift with individual people writing their own personalized, which again, I'm not against that at all, but historically, it's a little odd because it's not really what a rule of life is, right? So what I love about what you're doing is, you're doing this as a community. - Yeah. - So I mean, talk to us about that. What power are we missing? If I go away on a two day retreat and I write a rule of life for myself, which is a good thing, that's still giant step forward direction. - Yeah, awesome. But what are we missing there without the community, whether it's 500 people who are entrepreneurs all around the world, or a thousand people, or five friends that are in a small group together, or dorm room together? What are we missing without the communal element? - I'm sure there's multiple answers. I mean, one is, simply, you know, Kurt Thompson, who's a psychiatrist that loves, we know a lot of people will know. Talks about the power of other minds. You know, we need other minds with our mind to actually choose the good. So it's simply knowing there are other people doing this, actually strengthens your resolve to pursue it. But you know, what came to mind is a simpler thing in a way, which is almost certainly the case. If you join a communal rule of life, that there will be things in it that you would not have put in your person. - Yes, exactly where my mind was going right now. - So for me, and this is an extremely humbling thing to have to say, or I don't know, extremely humbling, but it's humbling to say that I had every intention of having a rhythm of daily prayer in my life when I joined praxis. I mean, it's not like I intended not to have daily prayer. And at some seasons of my life, I've had a praxis of daily prayer. But honestly, when I joined praxis for various reasons, I hadn't neglected this, you know, it's not that I didn't seek to be in communion with God. And it's very embarrassing. It's not, you're praying everyday and you just say it. (laughing) Well, I certainly was not, I had no plan to pray everyday and no doubt there were days I never prayed. And well, so we go through this process. We discover-- - And one of your baselines is daily prayer. - And one of your baselines is daily prayer. And so the time comes for all the partners, like we go first, right? It's like the Declaration of Independence. Like, you know, we pledge our lives for our fortunes and our sacred honor. We're going to do this, you all come with us. And I want to do it. But if I had gone on a retreat and written a rule of life, honestly, I think I would have been embarrassed to put it in my role because I wasn't doing it. And it would seem too elementary. And I'm like, am I not a teacher in Israel? I should be attempting something really impressive, right? But this basic thing I honestly was not doing, I sign onto the role of life. I'm like, well, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, why, I'm not gonna not have integrity. So I just re-regained a practice of daily prayer. And that's only because our community's discerned as a community that's ever thought about it, as discerned. If you don't have a practice of daily approaching God, you're missing a key piece. And I had to submit myself to that communal discernment. So, you know, and I'm the author, I mean, I was the lead author of it. But I wasn't doing everything that clearly needed to be in it. And if I'd been authoring it just for me, I don't think, I think I wouldn't have evaded that. That's one of the great gifts of a community in general and a community rule in particular, in that we're so biased, particularly on the consumption culture that we're part of toward like a preference-based spirituality. So our kind of model discipleship, our way of following Jesus can quickly be denuded into like, hey, well, these are like the things I like to do. I'm drawn to. Which is not bad, it can't be not bad. That's a giant step forward. But often they're not rounding out the uneven edges. And so it's all the extroverted people are like, yeah, we do community in celebration. Like, but no silent prayer or, you know, sabbath or whatever. And all the introverts at the opposite, they're like, yes, I do like to be in every single day, but I'm not gonna confess my sin and talk bolderably and emotionally with another person about my shabby. like no way, you know? So it's like we need that community. That's one of the reasons I'm doing this with other people is because they push me toward things that I don't want to be pushed right? Right. And it's just like gosh, but I need that because there's some deeper part of me that that does want to be rounded out into a whole person, you know? Now historically, I think it's just absolutely fascinating that you built your rule around the assumption of cultural deformation. You started with the assumption that if these people, well-meaning people who love Jesus and are somehow stamped with the Christian faith, if they go into this world of entrepreneurship, for profit, not for profit, they will be deformed by the larger and more powerful cultural forces that will outweigh their good intentions. That was your starting assumption, which is a not a christened-dom assumption. It is a post-christened-dom assumption. I think it's the right one. And I mean, tragically, a lot of people don't start their life plan or community plan with that assumption. And then you named like, hey, here are some of the major challenges that we are facing as entrepreneurs in our time and place. Is that, is there historic precedence for this, for rule of life being contextualized to the challenges of a particular people in a particular place? Oh, yes. I think that's the essence of it. And it starts with this flight from the urban, in some ways, the allegedly Christian empire. It's technically Christian. But this is the shadow side of Christendom that when it's-- Are you thinking like fourth century? We're talking about fourth, fourth century of the common era, that everybody's now Christian. But that means the bar is very, very low. So a bunch of serious people are like, no, we really want to follow Jesus. We believe this gospel is truly the transformative news for the world. And they leave the cities and they move out to the deserts and they sometimes form communities. And the thing is, I mean, it's a very noble thing to try to get out of the cultural mediocrity, the cultural Christianity. The main problem is you come with yourself. Exactly. So you end up with these monastic communities that come to be called. And this is where rule of life comes from. This where rule of life is an order. It's all come out of this. Right. And so the way that I sometimes describe it when I'm teaching this in practice is, so what problems do monks have? What's the particular vocational temptation of being a monk? Or a religious order male or female? So there's two big ones. The first is pride, spiritual pride, because you know you have made choices to follow Jesus that you're family to. I'm more serious. I'm not like those normal Christians back in Rome. The monastery is like this hot house for spiritual pride. Aren't we amazing? Which is unbelievably toxic to genuine Christian life. Yes. So second problem is other monks. We're going to be a community. We're going to live in the same rest of our lives. Vows stability until we die together. The third of us. Oh gosh, the conflict, right? So you combine spiritual pride and other monks. So when you look at Benedict's rule, a lot of it, I mean, including, for example, the principle of or a labora, in other words, we pray, but we also work. Like you're not so good that you don't work. And there are there are times in history when I mean, there's an interesting example that's in contemporary life that there's a kind of orthodox Judaism where the people say our boys are so busy studying Torah that can't serve in the military. Can't do anything in public, right? Because they're so devoted to the world. Yes, government is absolutely. Yes. And Benedict's for his part said for his community, that's not right. We're actually going to labor with our hands to provide for our community rather than just sort of soliciting donations so we can be our spiritual monasteries. We're not nonprofits. They were businesses as well. Right. Yeah. And that was maybe partly practical, but also actually a spiritual intervention. Yes. To prevent it becoming this kind of hot house of spirituality disconnected from like providing provide for your family. You need to do that through work. So the rule of life, I mean, we can all of us kind of learn a lot from the monastic rules, but they really are targeted at this moment in time, this particular group of people. And I think every kind of in a sense, every Christian community needs to assess, drawing on and borrowing from the wisdom of others, what is the particular thing that's the particular temptation? And it's going to be different in Santa Monica versus Charlottesville versus Miami versus Pongalad. And it's going to be different in our century than it was 10 centuries ago. Yes. I mean, we're the first Christian generation to solve for the problem of screens. Yes. Exactly. So if we were to widen this scope out, because I think what you're saying is beyond important, they're one of the major problems we're facing right now with the kind of crisis of discipleship and the breakdown of the church in the West, in particular in America, is almost that we have like you and I both like this idea that even if you've never heard the language rule of life before, you have a rule of life. You have some like way that you're living, some schedule, some set of practices, some for whether it's intentional or unintentional conscious or unconscious, wise or utterly foolish, we all have some kind of paradigm by which we live. And so a rule of life is a Christian paradigm that's more intentional about discipleship. But all that to say, I think part of the crisis, I think, my conviction is that we're living through is Christian spirituality that the version of Christian spirituality that many of us were handed coming up in the Western Church is contextualized for previous cultural moment, a christened of moments, a more kind of stable family moment, a pre-digital moment, and now we're living in the wild west of a whole new pluralistic digital fast paced, urbanized, breakdown of the family, socially isolated moment. And we have this almost kind of version of Christian spirituality that's for a world that unless if you live in some remote corner of America, really does not exist anymore. And so if you were to widen your scope out, I think you guys have done an amazing job of naming some of the particular temptations to the vocation of a redemptive bunch of nerve. Let's just widen the scope out. Let's say you're not an entrepreneur. You're stay at home mom or dad or a barista or a software engineer or a small business owner, whatever. You're living in this world that we call home right now. You have access to the internet. You live in some kind of a quasi metropolitan context. What would you name as, hey, these are some of the major temptations, major challenges that a Christian spirituality for the modern world has to solve for or you will be deformed no matter what your heart's intentions are. So I won't give you a exhaustive list, but three things come very prominently to mind that I think we haven't paid enough attention to it. So I'll list them liquidity, media, and algorithms. So and I'm this is a I'm a worse this. So let's see if this is this is Andy Crouch off the top of his head. It is so all caveats applied. But and I'm saying them in that order because they are the they are they stack on top of each other. So the defining economic reality that we all live in is is a world of liquid wealth or liquid money. Money and liquidity go to yeah define that for. So well wealth and up until the blink of an eye go in human history resided mostly in land. So it was the wealth of the land the productive capacity of the land was the source of wealth. So a wealthy person a wealthy family in even up to the time of Jesus is someone who owns land and can benefit it's you know from the harvest. There's a series of things that happen to shift the kind of center of wealth from land to money and the key thing about money is you can carry it around and you can exchange it for other things. And in fact you want to in fact it's only use is to be exchanged for other things. So there's a lot to say about this but but where where it ends up taking us is to a world where we're actually in a way everything is liquidatable. That is interchangeable. Exactly. Based on preference. Yes based on preference and relative value and your desire to exchange one thing for another. So this translates even into mobility like where is your home. Fewer and fewer people can answer that and it's it's not necessarily because they don't wish they had a home or didn't once have a home but they live under the pressures of liquidity that basically say you have to liquidate your home and move somewhere else and that can happen under political pressure but mostly it happens for economic reasons and people. For your career or preference or I want to live this place. People follow the money. But there's so many dimensions of this and it's one of these things there's this social theorist Ziegmebbel who's written about this as liquidity as the defining kind of feature of majority that everything is going to be. that's liquidated in a way. Your identity, your body, your career, all these things become your relationships, your family of origin. Yeah, yeah. All of it is changeable. Exchange is fungible material all to be turned into money that you believe is going to give you optionality to pursue whatever you want. The only problem is by the time you've liquidated everything, you don't even know who you are or what you want anymore. So I think liquidity, there's so many dimensions to it, we could talk about it for a long time, but let me maybe say why I think the other two are different. So then on top, so we build this economic system that's very money-driven. And then we start to try to figure out like what generates the most money basically. And one massive thing is media. So the revolution in media that mostly happened in the 20th century. So liquidity is like a, I mean, yeah, that's been happening for a while. It's the rise of the merchant class in Europe. I date if you have to date at 16th century, the invention of double entry accounting, the meta cheese is like where it starts. So that's a multi-hundred year thing. In the 20th century, we invent these media that harness the human imagination, that access the human imagination through visual images in a way that's in first radio and then TV and film. And these have a power in human life that the theater did not have as powerful as theater is, that poetry did not have, that music did not have as powerful as those things are when they are refracted and all of those arts, all those classical arts of drama and poetry and literature and music. They all get kind of brought into the mediated world and they become, I don't know, a hundred times more powerful in shaping the imagination of human beings. And the people who wield them, both on camera and behind camera, become the generators of incredible amounts of wealth, post-industrial wealth, right? Because you're not really, I mean, we're making a video right now. We're not really making anything. We're not making a chair, we're a table, or a house, or a socket. Right. In one sense, no good is coming out of this, but imagination is. And it's, and I'm not one of these people, but you kind of are the people who are really good on camera, the people who have like the charisma on screen end up with amazing amounts of power to shape our imagination of what it is to be human. Not based on their character necessarily. Oh, but entirely orthogonal to their character. Like irrelevant character because character is about depth, characters are revealed over time. The camera captures you out of carefully chosen moment. I mean, it's as true for you and me as anyone. Like, hey, you're getting the best Andy that I can figure out how to present right now, which is very dangerous, right? And so the dangers to those on camera, but the dangers also to those whose mode of imagination is shaped by media are profound. And I have to say after I mean, 55 years old, I should have gotten used to this by now, but I go for walks in my neighborhood. And it's just it is kind of overwhelming me that every house I pass at night, there is a glowing big, like 72 inch rectangle in the pride of place in the home that is just welcoming in like shape us. Tell us a story, entertain us. Raise us up to some some transcendent level, whether it's our favorite team, our favorite star, favorite game show or whatever. And every house, it's happening in every house. Yeah, even Albert Borgman's whole thing about how homes used to be built with a front porch, where you could sit and interact with neighbors. And then the inside is built around a hearth, the hearth where there's a fire and you come together as a community for conversational life around the fire. And now houses are built with a backyard and with a movie room in the back of the house. Oh my gosh. And just the symbolic architecture. It's not symbolic. Like that, that is a that is a very physical manifestation of a cultural radical change. And I am by the way, I'm not saying money is all bad. I'm not saying media is all bad by any means, but but gosh, if we're not intentional about it, then it is not the glowing screens will deform our soul. I will add, I'll give you my crazy unapproved by neurologist conviction that there's something neurological about the glue specifically. So the fire that we used to all sit around at the four artificial light, you would have a fire for some period of time after I fall. And you'd gather around it with other people. And if you've ever sat as hopefully most people have in front of like an actual fire, it's mesmerized. Because it glows and very little in creation glows, the sun glows, too bright to look at, the stars glow, the moon glows and glow worms or night lighting bugs glow. And all of them are mesmerizing because it's very rare. Most light that we encounter in our daily life is reflected light. But there are these handful of things fire basically and certain chemical reactions. Interesting. They are a source of light. The transmit light. All the light that you and I are seeing each other in right now is reflected. In other words, I'm seeing the light bouncing off of you to my eyes. But if I see you on a screen, it's transmitted light. And I think transmitted light is mesmerizing in a way that reflected light is not. Which is why if we had a monitor of you, like this, the thing that our viewers are seeing if they're watching this on video, they're seeing you on camera. If I had that next to you, real you, I had a monitor, which we could easily set up here that would show me the camera's view of you. I would not be able to focus on you. Interesting. I would be drawn to the screen because it's glowing you. It's me, but with filters. Me plus. Oh yeah, totally. I mean, then you add all the layers of processing that's possible to make that image more compelling. So I think we've got to reckon with like how our not just imagination is almost too small a word for it. It's because of the heart's little mind strength orientation toward the glowing thing rather than the real world of reflection that makes room for me to respond in a way that media kind of by definition does not. So then the third thing would be algorithms, which are stacked on top of this. So it's all good together. And the one depends on the previous one. And the algorithm is this new thing. And I want to credit my daughter because my daughter is 23 now and who wrote a book of her own about technology and kind of adolescence. She named this for me in a way that I hadn't other people had seen it, but I hadn't seen it until my daughter said it. She said, Dad, I cannot entrust myself to the algorithms. She said, I won't use any social media that's algorithm driven, which most of them are because what the algorithm does, unlike the sort of screen of the 20th century, the screen of the 20th century was not watching you. Big brother, notwithstanding. It didn't have any kind of way to see what you were doing. There was Neilson ratings and that kind of stuff. But very crude. And you were seeing the same screw screen that I was seeing. Yes, yes, yes. You on these coasts, you were seeing the same screen that I was seeing on the west. Yes, exactly. So there actually was a kind of vestigial communal experience that's completely gone now. Well, the algorithm is watching you because it is giving you interaction opportunities and every interaction opportunity is measuring and it's measuring how quickly, how long, all the things we know they're measuring. And then it is iterating to present you based on what it learned about you with the thing that will keep you on the surface. Whatever will get your mark. Yeah, and it's not like wanting you to get into racism or pornography. It just wants you to get into whatever will distract you and steal your attention. Does it does not care if it's cat videos or plumbing YouTube. It does not even care what it is. Just whatever your brain will go to, which turns out to be not the good things. Or if I look at so YouTube does this and I do sometimes use YouTube to watch something and then I sometimes click on a link just because I have I think I have time or I'm lazy. I do what we all do, right? I've never done this. Never clicked on an unintentional unplanned link. It's not in my rule of life and in line with my deepest heart's design. With your quality frequency and marker. Never, never gone down the whole of Brad Pitt's houses. Never have I spent an hour on YouTube. So then you end up with this crazy mashup in the right column of all the videos that things you want to watch that are like this horrifying combination of reasonably edifying and utterly embarrassing like one after another, right? Because it knows. But what it knows of you is not who you are at your best. It knows you at your most impulses. Your basis. Your lowest resistance. Your fear. The moments when you're most tired. The moments when you're most anxious. That's what it captures, right? And your initial instinct. How often is my initial instinct? The healthiest thing in any in any conversation in any setting and the algorithm sees you in those moments and then reinforces and gives you another chance to kind of keep dwelling in that. Yeah, because it wants it wants to highlight that broken part of you. Yeah, or yeah, let's just lean on the fire. Yep, most monetize it. It wants to make money out of it. And that's different from the days when you you know you kind of chose which movie to watch out of four options with your friends or you watched the TV show on that prime time because now it's inside your dopamine cycle really. It's inside your your own personal reward cycle and it knows you better It knows this part of you. It doesn't know you well at all, but it knows this part of you better than you know yourself by far. And we all are living with how damaging that is. And every iteration of social media gets more algorithm driven. And so I still use the service frequently known as Twitter, now known as X as we speak, because I can actually evade the algorithm. There's a way to use Twitter that doesn't expose you to the algorithm. But there is no way to use TikTok without being exposed to the algorithm. The TikTok is the other of them. And it's the most engaging, the most compelling, and so many parents hand their kids phones because they want a way to get home from soccer practice. But what they're handing them is the algorithm. And the algorithm is going to get into their kids' lives in a stonishing way that has like world historical consequences potentially. So-- OK, so-- So you asked-- No, it's very helpful. Your name, liquidity, media, and the algorithms, is through the great challenges that we're facing for. Perfect example in that very few Christian discipleship programs or Christian spirituality that I know are built around solving for these three problems. Maybe the first one a little bit, certainly not the second. If anything, often Christian spirituality is just like co-op those very things. Hey, we're just going to use TikTok to breach the gospel. We're just going to-- as if we can use these things in a-- Is it for neutral? --as if they are neutral, exactly. So what are-- All right, Andy Crouch, as we wind down this conversation, Andy Crouch the world to the internet, to the interwebs, what are a few practices that most modern followers of Jesus would consider, quote, "normal" that you think need to go? And what are a few practices that may be obscure or radical or too much or unheard of or just not on people's radar that you think may you got to have these counterpractices in your life to solve for the problems of liquidity media and algorithms? Well, I hate to say this because it's unimaginable, but I just think it's necessary. We have to not expose ourselves to algorithms. I think they're the worst of the three. Interesting. Because they so sever us from even our own best intentions for ourselves, let alone the community that could help us actually pursue that intention. And I will say, once you get yourself out from under it, you can't imagine why you would go back. It's-- I think there's some things that are genuinely good, but that also become snares for us. I wonder sometimes-- I love wine and I drink wine. And I don't believe I have a fundamentally disordered relationship to wine. But I do wonder sometimes about wine is intoxicating even in small amounts. Money feels in that category. Money is-- like you got to handle money. But you always feel like-- And there's an aspect of it that feels like blessing. But then there's the shadow side. So I guess what I'm saying is, if I see a good-- I mean, wine in scripture is described as gladdening the human art. And it creates conviviality. It has these good things. But it also has this shadow side. I actually do not feel that way now that I've been off Facebook for many years. I just-- I know it's-- I know how people use it for relative good. But now that I'm away from it, suppose that my spiritual director, counselor, and family, or whatever said, Andy, you need to stop drinking wine. I would, I think I would. And I would be sad. And I would miss it. I think I'd miss the good things about for the rest of my life. There is nothing I miss about Facebook, except the people, the relationships that Facebook has colonized. And now the only thing I miss is that we have built no other way to find out when someone is getting married or has had a child, or some big life event that only gets announced on Facebook. Like that's the only thing I miss. But there's nothing about Facebook I miss. I'm like, I'm so glad I'm not ensnared in that. So I think-- and the reason I hate to say it is, you know, it's just-- it's very negative to say, you've got to stop doing this. And most of us can't imagine stopping. But I just have to say there is freedom on the other side. There's real life on the other side. My own kids are not on any of these apps. And they don't miss it. And they have amazing friends. And their friends don't miss it. And they are a minority. But they're a happy minority who are also incidentally as it happens with our kids following Jesus, which is a good thing. And it's not incidental that they've found a small group of people who are engaged in a very serious act of resistance against the algorithms. So that would be one thing. And that's the only way the model, the Silicon Valley business model will ever change. The only part we have is just this. Non-cooperation. There's any chance of a non-algorithm-based version ever existing in the world. You've got to have all the social community that you just can't reach that way. And I will say, one of the great things about Praxis right now is we have a whole host of entrepreneurs who are working with who are building alternatives in various ways. And whether it's someone like Greg Lutzie, who founded Viska, which is a non-algorithmically-driven on-line photo app. Now, Viska has had its own story that Greg will talk about, I think, of complexity, like how it got swept up in social media. But it was built as an alternative just to give you a very quick example. Because I hate to be so negative. Instagram, as originally designed, when you open up the app, which camera on your phone is active, do you know? No, I don't. The selfie camera. So when you open Instagram, your phone has-- can either look out at the world or look at you. Look at you. The default camera is me, right? Viska, by design, when you open the app, the camera is looking out at the world. And so is this invitation built into the design of the product to say, no, use this as an instrument. Use this as a medium of artistic expression, rather than self-gorgification. So there are things we can do to redesign that we should be doing. But you asked, what should we stop doing? And I would say, you've got to reduce the footprint of the algorithm in your life radically, radically. At cost, as a cost. Either it's gone, or it is so-- Or it's so-- It is a made it that it's no longer-- You're so illegitimate. You have to become illegible to the algorithm. So even though I'm still on Twitter, I'm illegible to Twitter's algorithm, because I don't use it in a way that it can then repackage its content for me. I just never give it the data it needs. And I never go to the parts of the site that feed that. Right? So then I would say, I'm working backwards. So I don't know how we do anything with the algorithm, but scorched earth. It's just too insidious to have a half measure. With screens, my belief is, there are ways to use them. But if I could just take one-- I mean, do one thing, I'd get them out of bedrooms. Yes. Just out of bedrooms. Let's just start. If all we did was-- and both TVs and phones just not have them in any bedroom, you wouldn't believe what would change in Western life, American life. So I mean, there's a lot of other things I could say about that. But just start with no phones in bedrooms, no TVs in bedrooms. And the rest you would experience, there's this really, really poignant thing happening with kids, which is that most-- the great majority of kids, as of today, take their phones with them to bed. And what happens on the phones overnight is a constant stream. Parents do not understand this. They're constant stream of messages. From their friends, often about distress, because it's at night that the distress comes up. And these poor kids are trying to help you to-- you have kids who are thinking about suicide. You have kids who are struggling with whatever and they're messaging their friends. And their friends are trying to help all of them in the solitariness of their bedrooms. If you take the phone out of the bedroom, that kid in distress opens the door and walks-- sorry, it's a little emotional to imagine how normal this was and how normal it's not anymore. But would walk down the hall, maybe to their older sister's room or to their parents' room and say, mom, I can't sleep. I need help. And they would get a relational connection that instead is being mediated with a bunch of adolescents who have no idea how to handle this stuff. So the effects on mental health, on emotional health, on just our restiveness for the next day. It would just be, wow. Liquidity is the hardest one, because it's the deepest one. It is the foundation of whatever-- all of us think we enjoy-- prosperity and affluence and opportunity. And it's not all wrong. And the only-- you've got to make some decisions for stability. You've got to make some parts of your life not liquidatable. To not trade up. Yeah. So right, so staying in the house rather than if you're the kind of family that has that option, like you could move to the bigger house, stay in the smaller house. like actually people don't need more bedrooms. They need fewer bedrooms. Like we need to be close to each other. Stay put when it gets hard. I mean there's just so many versions of this but and maybe this is too broad an answer for what you were asking but we've got to We've got to decide my life is not all Convertible into currency. There's there are there are things I will not liquidate But to do that is is very these are very costly decisions Yeah, but I mean the other way to think about it is Yes, they cost you a lot but they cost you a lot less than what we're paying right now No, I mean this is the bargain of a lifetime You know that was whole bonhoeffer had the whole cost of discipleship thing Yeah, but you know and he was a rebuttal to the what he called cheap grace But willard another has said yes and you also have to calculate the cost of non-disappreciate Yes, it will cost you a lot to become a serious follower of Jesus But it will cost you far more to not become a serious follower of Jesus whether you're agnostic or just Anominal Christian that will cost you this extraordinary life that's on offer Jesus that you will miss out on are you just barely taste Well could have been a feast and so yes It will cost people, but I think so many people have the experience where when you win yourself off of let's say Social media or the out what you would call the algorithm. It's like Literally going your body going through addiction symptoms Oh, please and then you reach a point if you stay with it where there's almost the switch to like revulsion So you know this is embarrassing, but I've had this mixed relationship with social media Which mostly means I hate it, but it is a lock-in system. It's a show online years whole things like the problem with social media It's a lock-in system if you do certain types of work. It's very hard to do that type of work Can you imagine yes, especially the one you're not for Exactly and so I have so many contradictory mixed thoughts about it So where I'm at now time stamp this moment and I hopefully will be somewhere better in the near future as I you know on Instagram I deleted off my phone I go on once a week I read download it and I post like one or two through three things all for work just like to put stuff It's just you know people know here's where you can find more work or whatever and then I delete it off my phone again I don't even think about it and I don't follow anybody right and so I'm zero followers or whatever But every once in a while my thumb will just air a half inch to the side and so all I see then is just whatever the algorithm is feeding me Oh boy Sometimes I'll take two or three minutes You see like This is not like me and my friends and what's in there? Oh Andy It's just got married. It's none of that. This is just like whatever This is just like the same total of humanity The algorithm thinks my brain wants to look at and it's it's it's it's it's humiliating me accurate at times, you know and but the revulsion in my spirit Now that I and it's not virtue. It's not like I'm there being a disciplined virtuous person I'm going to rise above this it's I will look at that page for two minutes and think what I know I will do this Multiple times a day and it's not virtue in me that is saying no to that your heart switches over and you're like no my life is So much better so much freer so much like more at ease and at peace free of this So I just think that's one very common example for anybody that's ever spent time away from the algorithms Most people would say oh yeah, I just I was a healthier person. I was a happier person. I was a more peaceful person Yeah, and so few people have experimented say with money or with stability or with these other things To imagine so I think yes, it isn't costly call But I don't I don't hear it in a negative way. I hear it in a aspirational way of yes, but because the cost we're all paying right now is so much higher You know, well, that's right. That's right Well, Andy, thank you for not being a normal person. I Mean that the best most complimentary sense of the word. I just think I just think You know when the desert fathers and mothers left what was considered civilization to go off Everybody thought they were crazy, but they thought everybody else was nuts That just to live the status quo life of Compromise with the world was nuts, you know, and I think there is something about like one of the things I love about as people get older They tend to get a little weirder You know like most older people have their quirks because at some point they stop they stop kind of carrying What the herd is doing a little bit more and they're especially the really interesting ones are really thoughtful ones and they tend to just be like I'm living on the sound of living and there's something just so compelling and beautiful about that that I think Beyond quirkiness, there's a Jesus version of that that I think you model so beautifully and I want that to become more and more True by life. So thank you for your life. Thank you for your work. Thank you. You're just a gift to talk to I know this is one more conversation on a long list of conversations we have about this stuff Anything in closing you want to say to round us off? closing words Keep coming back it works. Yeah I mean, you know it the fruit My my life is a mess like start finish Anyone who knows me well knows versions of that but it's also like way better than it could have been and it's because We keep coming back right to the way of Jesus and it actually works it Like to be at my mid middle of middle older stage of life and To know joy Which is just not a given in your fifties, you know and to know joy and know the gospel is true and that Jesus is real That's not not an accident. It's not by doing not by like achieving but wow it keep coming back it works Thanks for listening to season one of the practicing the way podcast this conversation was based on John Mark's newest book Practicing the way be with Jesus become like Jesus do as he did which is available now wherever books are sold This podcast was created by practicing the way a non-profit working to integrate the best learnings of spiritual Formation into the church at large We offer a library of free resources for churches and small groups including practices Four-week experiences designed to be run in community that train you to integrate ancient disciplines like Sabbath prayer and more Into your everyday life with God and Upcoming practicing the way course and eight-week primer on apprenticeship to Jesus a Digital tool called the Rule of Life Builder podcasts and more We are a crowdfunded non-profit and all of these resources are completely free thanks to the generosity of the circle and Other givers from around the world to join the circle run a practice or learn more visit practicing the way dot org