TLP 349: Talking with Your Kids about Jesus | Natasha Crain interview

Tidy people don't act like slobs all day. Literally, this was the language. Instead, tidy people are constantly in this state of low-grade tidy.

Welcome to Truth, Love, Parents, where we use God's Word to become intentional, premeditated parents. Here's your host, A .M. Brewster.

Of all the people I've had on this show, my guest today, I think, honestly, she just gets the grand prize, okay, because this is her fifth TLP interview. Honestly, she's practically a staple. I think I owe it to her to just get her a parking spot with her name on it.

I don't know if that will do her any good, a parking spot in North Carolina when she lives in California, but if nothing else, I should at least get her a gold sticker. In fact, I did that. I got her a gold sticker.

You can go to truthloveparent .com. You can click on the Special Guest tab, and then if you click on Natasha Crane's name, you will see her amazing gold sticker in all of its glory. It is a sight to see.

I hope you check that out. Not because the sticker's really that big a deal, but you will be able to see that aforementioned sticker, but you'll also, even more importantly, be able to learn a lot about our guest today.

So, Natasha, I welcome you back to the show. How does it feel to receive the prestigious, be the first one, by the way, to receive the prestigious Five Star Five Interview Award? Did you take the time to view it in all of its glory?

I feel amazing.

I gotta tell you, it's a huge honor to get the gold sticker, and it sounds so funny, but our kids, they get stickers all the time, right?

For everything.

They get stickers for their home or for all kinds of stuff. As adults, we don't get the sticker, so I am super excited about my sticker. I indeed went to the website to check out the sticker. I saw it in all its glory.

It was fantastic. Totally appreciate it. And the parking spot thing, that sounds pretty awesome, too. I've never had my own parking spot, so I would totally take it just in case I ever get to North Carolina.

So, thank you.

In all seriousness, it is such a pleasure to talk with you, and I'm so glad that we have another chance to do that today.

I am super excited, too, and I'm relatively certain, because you've been on the show so often, that a lot of people already know who you are, but then again, our audience is always growing, so why don't you take a moment just to kind of introduce yourself, tell us about your work, tell us about your family, your ministries, just kind of your current phase of life.

Yeah, so I'm a married mom of three kids. We've been married for a little over 20 years now, and I have 11-year-old twins, and a nine-year-old, and basically, I know we talked about this on a prior episode, so I won't go into too much detail, but just for those who might not have heard it before, very briefly, I started a Christian parenting blog back in 2011.

Sounds like so long ago, but it doesn't feel like that, and when I started it, I really just started it to be a fun Christian parenting blog to talk about how we were raising our kids to know and love the Lord, even though they were very little at the time, and very quickly, I started getting attacked by skeptics, people who were coming to my website, leaving all kinds of comments about how Christianity wasn't true, and how it's harmful, and how the Bible is filled with errors and contradictions, and science has disproved God, all these kinds of things, and I was a lifelong Christian, but had no idea how to answer those things, so basically, that led me to discover what's called apologetics, and that just means how do you make a case for and defend the truth of Christianity, and I went into a really intense reading journey where I learned as much as I could, and was turning around and writing about these things on my blog, and that eventually led to me having the opportunity to write some books, and so now I've written three apologetics books for parents, Keeping Your Kids on God's Side, Talking With Your Kids About God, and my newest one, which comes out this week, Talking With Your Kids About Jesus, so that's where I am right now, and this will be the first place I say it out loud to the world, but I'm actually gonna make a big change this fall, and I'm gonna start homeschooling my twins for middle school, so I'm really excited about that.

My kids have all been in a private Christian school for elementary, but I'm gonna homeschool my twins for middle school, and let my younger one finish up at the elementary school, so I'm very excited about that.

Oh, that's very cool. As a homeschooling dad, I'm excited for you. I really enjoyed that process, so if you ever hit a roadblock or whatnot, just send me an email, give me a call, say, what do I do?

I bet I will hit many of those roadblocks. Maybe I just need to drive across the country and get to that parking spot in North Carolina, and walk right in with my questions. I know I will have many.

That'd be awesome. Well, thank you for that introduction to who you are. I think your story is one that I think a lot of people resonate with, but oftentimes not because they have been confronted by people who have questions, but because their kids come home with questions, and that's a far more disconcerting place to be, so I praise God that you were able to get into this and start preparing yourself to answer these questions, before your kids are being targeted, and before they came home looking for help.

So a lot of parents out there looking for help, looking for answers, they're uncertain what to do, so I'm really excited about telling them about your resources. I wanna talk about your new book, Talking With Your Kids About Jesus, but why don't you go ahead and just give us a flyover of your previous two books.

Apologetics for Parents and the Need to Equip Kids Early

Yeah, my first book was called Keeping Your Kids on God's Side, and it walks you through 40 of the biggest challenges to faith today for our kids, and I know 40 sounds like a huge, huge, giant book, but the chapters are only about four or five pages each, and that's how it is with all my books, it's a parent-to-parent kind of voice, just to introduce you to what the world is saying and what your kids need to hear about, because like you said, a lot of times parents, they understand, I need to be able to answer my kids' questions, and they see that as important, but they don't necessarily realize the importance of knowing what the world will ask their kids, and proactively bringing those questions to them.

So I see my books as really tools for parents to get equipped with an understanding of what those questions are that the world will be putting toward their kids, and then giving them the understanding of how they can reply and how they can talk with their kids about them.

So that first book, Keeping Your Kids on God's Side, my first one, is like an apologetics 101 for Christian parents, it's just gonna walk you through the basics on God, Jesus, truth and worldviews, the Bible, and science questions.

And then my second book, and this came about because after reading the first book, a lot of parents came and said, okay, I see this is super important, I need to learn more, what do I do next? And so that's what kind of spurred the books coming out of that.

And the next one was Talking With Your Kids About God, and that one just focused specifically in on 30 questions about God. So how do we know God exists? What's the evidence for God's existence? What about all these questions about, does God and science somehow conflict with each other?

Those kinds of God-level questions, and my newest one, Talking With Your Kids About Jesus, you guessed it, now focuses on 30 conversations specifically about Jesus in terms of who he was and what he taught.

And I know we're gonna get into that, but it's just a different level of focus for each of the books.

Now, we have all of Natasha's books listed on our Best Apologetic Parenting Books page. You can go learn more about them there if you're interested in seeing what they're about. You can also click on any of the links and be sent directly to Amazon, where you can then purchase the book.

And if you buy any of them using TLP's Amazon links, then you'll not only purchase an amazing resource that will help you parent to the glory of God, but you've also been a blessing to Natasha, and Amazon will send a portion of the sale back to TLP.

So it really is the best way to go if you're looking to pick up a copy of her books, go to TLP, look for the Best Apologetic Parenting Books page, and you can learn everything about them right there. In fact, and while you're there, you can do some wire shopping for her books.

Really, anything that you purchase on Amazon using the affiliate links earns TLP a commission. So, yeah, that's pretty cool. Now, when it comes to Natasha's newest book, you can preorder it now, okay?

It will be officially released on March 31st. So you can preorder it. That's always a really helpful encouraging thing to do. That way you're one of the first ones to get it, and it's a huge blessing to the author.

Or you could also try to win the book.

That's right.

At the end of today's show, I will tell you how you might be able to win a copy of Natasha's newest book, Talking With Your Kids About Jesus. She has graciously offered to give us two copies of the book.

So, we're hoping that two of you will walk away with a brand new copy of Natasha's new book. All right, now, Natasha, let's jump in at the beginning of your most recent work, okay? I honestly, I love the introduction of the book, and I love the story that you shared with me about how the introduction came to be.

So, tell us about how you kind of came up with the idea for the intro, and then help us understand how this analogy of keeping a tidy house has anything to do with helping our kids understand who Jesus is.

Low-Grade Tidying as a Model for Ongoing Discipleship

Sure. So, with my first book, the Keeping Your.

Kids on God's Side book, I remember getting some advice from my editor since I was a first-time author about different parts of the writing process. And one of the things that stood out to me that really didn't seem intuitive was he told me, write the introduction after you finish writing the entire book.

That sounds a little strange. That makes a lot of sense, yeah. Right. It seems weird, and I'm a very A to B linear kind of person. And so, you know, that seemed difficult to me. I wanted to start at the beginning and get to the end.

But I took his advice, and I did it that way. And it's brilliant advice, really, because when you get to the end of the writing process, that's when you want to ask yourself, okay, given everything that I just did, what do I most need people to know when they're going to start reading this book, now that I fully know what this content looks like?

And so, I did that with my second book, and now with this new book. I got to the end of the book, and I said, what do I really feel readers need to know at the beginning of this? And it occurred to me that I had just covered an enormous amount of ground.

There are a lot of subjects covered in this book, and between all three books, I cover 100 different conversations that parents need to have with their kids. But I realized that for most parents, that sounds like an enormous burden.

It sounds like something that really seems difficult to do. And so, I wanted to write an introduction to the book that just spoke to that to help parents understand that this is going to be a lot to read, but at the same time, it's really necessary.

And how do you go about doing that? And so, one day, I was on Facebook, and I just found the perfect opportunity to incorporate one of the insights that I saw from an article linked there into this introduction.

And here's what it was. It was an article that was about five things that tidy people don't do. And so, I immediately clicked on this link, because I am one of these people that has a lot of trouble keeping the house tidy.

And I know it's not just, I know it's not just me, but yes, it's really hard. We always have homework papers all over the floor, pencils on seat cushions, all those kinds of things, and it is hard to keep a tidy house.

So, I immediately wanted to know what kind of insight it had. And basically, the treasure that I found in this article was it pointed out that tidy people don't act like slobs all day. Literally, this was the language.

You don't act like a slob all day and then clean everything up in one fell swoop, because that's really overwhelming. It becomes a giant use of your time. It becomes the burden. Instead, tidy people are constantly in this state of low-grade tidying.

I love that term, low-grade tidying. They're just constantly picking up things as they go about their day. And I just realized this is exactly the concept that I want parents to take away when we talk about these kinds of conversations with our kids.

I'm not saying, here are three books that I have written, a hundred conversations. Now, go on a giant retreat with your kids and buckle down and get through everything and make sure they understand everything in one fell swoop.

That would be like a deep clean on your house, right? That would be something that would take hours upon hours and be extremely overwhelming. But instead, I realized I really want parents to see my books as their guide to the spiritual tidying in their house, that we're continually discipling our kids by identifying opportunities in the day when we can pick something up in their understanding, when we can identify something they've seen and say, oh, hey, that reminds me of something that I saw online the other day, where a skeptic said this.

And what do you think about that? And having those conversations. So it's not about discipleship and having these conversations. It's not about finding ways to set aside giant chunks of time. It's really about low-grade tidying in our lives over time and helping our kids see these conversations.

It's just a way of life, really. And my books hopefully will be a guide to parents in helping them know what to tidy specifically. We can't tidy everything, but what most needs tidying in your kids' understanding of God, given the challenges.

That they will face today. And what you're suggesting really, I think, at least from the families with whom I interact, is a huge paradigm shift. I know that for myself, coming out of the 90s in particular, there was this big idea, a push for programs.

Even now, you get a small group and you've got youth group and you've got these different ideas that if we want to reach our kids, we have to have these programs. When in actuality, the programs are nice if they're reinforcing what's already happening at home, that low-grade tidying that's happening at home.

The children who benefit from the programs are the ones who are getting all of that throughout-the-day type of parenting and discipleship at home. And so what you're saying is massively huge. And I think there are some parents out there who, if they looked at their day, they might kind of just blanch a little bit because they are realizing that, I don't do this.

I have these lecture moments. I wait for things to boil and boil and boil until I just can't handle it anymore. Then I sit the kids down and unload on them. Or we go to church or we have our family time, but there's really no other time throughout the day.

So maybe someone who, though they have those big program times, and I think those are great, go on a retreat with your kid, take them out on a date, spend some time deliberately pouring God's truth into their lives.

That's awesome. But at the same time, somebody's saying, how do I start this low-grade discipleship, this low-grade teaching and apologetics and parenting throughout my whole life? What would you say to that person?

What would be a good starting, other than obviously getting the book and maybe trying to work one of those topics in, maybe not so much the topics, but just the method. How do you change your mind? What do you do to get to the place where you're thinking about mentioning something here and.

Peppering in something there? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that honestly, it's a sense of urgency. When parents have an appropriate sense of urgency about the way the is today and how much it will challenge their kid's faith, then they have the motivation to do it.

When they get equipped with the knowledge itself, then they have the understanding with which to do it. So those are the two components. You could have all the knowledge in the world, but not have a sense of urgency and be unmotivated and have your life consumed with soccer practices.

So having the knowledge alone is never going to be enough. But a lot of people don't have the knowledge. Maybe they have the motivation. So they're not really sure what they should be doing. And that can be overwhelming as well.

Unfortunately, many parents have neither. They have neither the motivation with the sense of urgency, nor do they have the knowledge. And that's where I find actually most people are. So in terms of how to actually get into that mindset, I think that so much of it is really getting equipped yourself with this understanding.

So that when you have that and you start to see, oh, wow, this is where skeptics are coming from. Everywhere my kid is going to see this. This is where they're going to see it in textbooks. This is where they're going to see it in media.

This is where they're going to see it online. They're going to suddenly see it in all these places. And then the parent is in a position of saying, okay, I need to do something. I've got to do something.

And when you have that understanding, and this is what I always like to emphasize to parents, it seems intimidating to find ways to work things into your daily life. But once you do take the time to get equipped and you do start reading some books, watching some podcasts and watching videos, whatever the media is for you, you suddenly start to have a radar and you suddenly notice these things all the time.

And you will be surprised. You will surprise yourself at the things that you notice and the opportunities that you find. So it's not, it's not so much the how I think that it's a barrier for parents. It's really the knowledge first and the sense of urgency, because when you have that, you will see opportunities.

Unfortunately, in a way, given today's world, you will see opportunities.

Constantly. Yeah. And that is fantastic advice. Thank you for that. Now, obviously the book is called talking with your kids about Jesus. But I think sometimes we think about Jesus, our mind goes to these little flannel graph images, these stories, these, these events in his life, but you don't really focus too much on the typical, if I can call them quote unquote, Bible stories about which most people think when, you know, when we bring up the topic of Jesus, your book, isn't so much about talking about what he did, though, I have to admit, there's definitely really important things that he did that you do discuss in the book.

It seems to me that your book is more about who he is. And then additionally, how we can know he is who he is. And the book is broken into five different parts. Tell us a little bit about each section of the book helps to understand your thinking and why you wrote these sections.

Right? Well, I think you're absolutely correct that a lot of times we think of, you know, if you hear the title alone, it sounds a little generic, admittedly, talking with your kids about Jesus, that could be anything, right?

But we're not talking just about the average Bible story that and, you know, in no Bible story is average. But you know what I mean? The typical, the typical story that you hear in church, there are many, many, many resources, children's Bibles and other types of resources that where you can't your kids can hear things about Jesus.

But to my previous point, this book is specifically about the topics that kids need to understand, given the challenges that they're going to hear today. So I've broken it into five different parts. The first one is the identity of Jesus.

And the reason that this comes first is because nothing else matters in the book. If we don't get this question, right? How do we know that Jesus was who he said he was? How do we know Jesus was God? And I think a lot of times parents skip right over this point, because they're assuming Jesus is God.

And they say, well, the Bible says this, and Jesus did this. But wait, hold on. The huge challenge of today's world is that people think that Jesus was either a myth, he didn't exist at all, which I cover in chapter one, or he was just a guy who lived 2000 years ago, maybe you might think he's a good moral teacher, maybe you don't.

But people don't believe that Jesus was God. So we don't need to talk about anything else in Jesus's life at all, if we have not first addressed his identity. So in that first section, and each section, section, excuse me, has six chapters in it.

So I have six chapters on the identity of Jesus to help you set those questions up with your kids. And then that goes into a section on the teaching of Jesus, which again, we can have many, many topics on this.

But I've focused these on the topics that Christians and non believers alike tend to get wrong today in popular discussions, like what did Jesus teach about loving others? What does love even mean today?

What did Jesus teach about judging others? What did he teach about organized religion, the kinds of things that you hear often discussed, but a lot of times people have some unbiblical understandings of.

And then that leads to a section on the death of Jesus and helping kids really get beyond Jesus died for my sins. It's great that they know that they probably hear it all the time in church, but it becomes like a slogan after a while.

So my hope with this section is that it really takes you a little deeper into the theology or actually quite a bit deeper to understand things like how did the Old Testament sacrifices point forward to Jesus and what did Jesus's death on the cross accomplish?

And that leads into a section on the resurrection of Jesus, which gets into the apologetics of it. How would we even know that Jesus was raised from the dead? It's not just a matter of blind faith that skeptics would like to suggest, but rather there's a lot of historical evidence for the resurrection.

And then I end it with a section on the difference Jesus makes, because sometimes we can have all this knowledge about the right theology and what the Bible says and why we should believe it, but then we get to the end of the day and we say, well, now what?

Our kids need to have a big, really solid answer to that. Now what? What does the difference, what is the difference that.

Jesus makes in our lives? Now these five topics, they are important. I think everyone listening would understand that, would say, yeah, okay, there's definitely importance to each of those concepts. I need to understand it.

My kids need to understand it. But I guess maybe the question I want to ask next is not unique to each specific part or to each specific chapter, but really to the whole of the book. Why are these 30 conversations every parent needs to have?

I mean, you're saying right there on the subtitle of the book, every parent has to have these conversations. Why do you believe that this topic is so important that you went ahead and wrote a.

Whole book on the subject? Yeah, it's true. It's a big claim to say these are must-have conversations. You have to have these conversations with your kids, right? But this is based on my experience in engaging with skeptics and with parents and kids who are walking away.

It's based on research about why kids are walking away over the last 10 years or so. And there are so many questions that parents don't even get close to answering because like I talked about earlier, they don't even realize that this is a thing.

So one chapter in the book, for example, I'll ask the question about, did ancient people believe in miracles just because they were more gullible? That's not your standard Sunday school question. That's not the kind of question that most parents are really thinking about answering.

And there are a lot of questions like that. So as I encountered more and more of these questions and saw, wait a second, there's this huge gap here between what the world is asking and what the world is challenging our kids on and what most kids are hearing at church and at home.

That's a giant gap and parents need to start paying attention. They need to start understanding. These aren't just statistics. I think most people listening have probably heard that at least 60 of kids are walking away from their faith by their early twenties today.

It's easy for that to go in one ear and out the other, but really think about that. The majority, the majority, most kids who grew up in a Christian home are walking away by their early twenties. We should all be asking why not just, Oh wow, that's crazy.

The world's really challenging. Oh my goodness. What am I going to do? No, we should actually be looking at, well, what what's doing this? What are the questions that are being asked? And ultimately, if you summed them all up into one ball, the challenges come down to Christianity is not true.

And not only is Christianity not true, it's also bad. It's bad for you. It's bad for the world. It's not true. And it's harmful. Those are the two things. And really this book breaks down those questions into showing why we have such good reason to believe that Christianity is true and helping our set up our kids to understand these key points that they're going to be confronted.

With. This is a huge topic that we don't really even have time to dig into too much, but not only are skeptics and atheists claiming that these things aren't true, Christianity is bad for you. But in addition, there's a whole swath of quote unquote Christians, people who call themselves Christians, who also think that there are things in the Bible that aren't true and that certain elements of quote unquote Christianity are bad for you.

I mean, so it's like the the proclaimed non-religious people, but also even the religious people are saying that this is bad. And really, I think I love that the motivation for this grows in part because you are aware of the attack that our children are going to face and you want to do something about that.

And Christ is Christ is the.

Place to turn for sure. You're so you're so right about that in terms of it being about Christians as well. And that's I address that several times throughout the book, actually, that that progressive Christians, usually people who would turn themselves as progressive Christians are taking things and they're moving an understanding of the Bible and of what historically has been Christian theology.

They're moving very much away. And yet it sounds good to a lot of people. And our kids sometimes can be more compelled by that kind of Christianity, this false version of Christianity. And maybe that sounds good to them.

They don't want to completely abandon faith, like the skeptic over here is saying. But hey, this Christian over here, they seem really loving and accepting. And they don't think that, you know, I need to do exactly everything that's in the Bible.

You know, the Bible is kind of an old book. So, yeah, it can sound good. It can sound compelling. But it can also be totally and completely wrong. So I do delve into that.

Quite a few times in the book. And that's very powerful, because I think sometimes if we're not familiar with, like you said, the quote unquote progressive Christianity movement, that our kids are coming home saying that they heard something by a Christian or they have a friend that's a Christian and their friends go to this church and we let their kids go.

But we don't know what they're saying. We don't know what they're believing. Our kids are coming home with these Christian authors and these Christian groups and these Christian ideas, quote unquote. And we're accepting it because, hey, better they talk about Christian stuff than they talk about secular stuff.

But really, the Christian stuff is just skepticism and doubt wrapped up in this kind of professing fake faith in a way. So, yeah, that's really powerful. Again, huge, huge topic. But we parents need to be aware.

And Natasha's book is going to help make you aware, which is where I need to stop here for a second, because I just need to I need to diatribe for a moment. I need to get my soapbox right before we dive into any specific part of the book.

And I do want to do that. I just want to jump in here and I want to share with you, the listener, my initial impression of talking with your kids about Jesus. OK, now, for those of you who don't know, I graduated from seminary in 05 with my Master's of Science in Biblical Counseling.

Now, those years in seminary were filled with more Bible study than I had ever done any year of my life up until that point, all put together. OK. In addition to the reading we had to do as part of our classes and all the classwork and the teaching and everything that was poured into it, all the papers that we had to write and all the reading we had to do to write the papers, we had these monthly reading assignments.

And the point of these reading assignments was simply to read. All right. We were never tested on the information. We never had to write a paper based off of our reading. And this extra reading, OK, this bonus reading in a way, and it wasn't bonus points, it was required.

But this extra reading was close to a thousand pages a month, strictly from Bible commentaries, which generally tend to be a little dry. So I'm sure you can imagine the quantity of information that we students were ingesting.

Now, this is not some ridiculous, humble brag or a terrible attempt at it. OK, notice that I'm not saying anything about my grades. All right. That's nothing to do about me. I'm really just simply trying to give you an idea of the sheer amount and weight of biblical knowledge that was being injected into our brains on a daily basis.

And this is why back in episode 17, way long time ago, it was entitled The Most Important Thing I Can Say to Parents. I stress that the key to good parenting is to get as much biblical training as you possibly can.

Now, Natasha's already alluded to this, the importance of getting the information and then developing that sense of urgency to share that information. And that's what I'm saying here. I shared on that particular episode that it wasn't uncommon before the turn of the 20th century for women to prepare for motherhood by enrolling in seminary.

Many of them understood that the single most important information they would need to be a victorious mother was the truth of God's word. However, though nowadays in order to operate a vehicle or fire a gun or even to work at McDonald's, you need extensive training and certification.

And by the way, we happily sign up for those opportunities. Yet every day people have children without a single clue about what they're doing. And so often they even balk at the idea that they should get some training on the subject.

Really, how crazy is that? Of course, that's obviously not describing you. Otherwise, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast or be interested in Natasha's book. Anyway, but on episode 17, I listed out what I believed were the most important steps a parent could take to prepare for parenting.

So in addition to being a follower of Christ, I included that it would be good to get a degree in biblical counseling. I said that if you can't go back to school, the answer is just to read and read some more and then read a whole bunch more.

I mentioned too that if you've had kids for a while and you still feel ill-equipped, don't give in to hopelessness. And then I said that even if your kids are grown and gone, you need to pass on your knowledge of God's word to the next generation.

Now, I say all this for one main reason. Natasha's books are filled with all four of these points. Okay, this particular one, it's just an ultra valuable read that will both fill you with hope and the desperately important information you need to pass on to the next generation.

And I truly believe that reading these books are really, honestly, just the next best thing to getting a degree. Okay, because I say this for, I know what I'm talking about here. You gotta listen to me.

In my systematic theology class, we studied every single point that Natasha's book covers in talking with your kids about Jesus. Talking with your kids about Jesus is a Christology class for full-time parents who enjoy reading intelligent, practical parenting books.

So, if knowing who God is and introducing your kids to him is the single most important thing you can do, and it is, then books like this are exactly what we need to be reading because they take the deep concepts of the Bible, they make it accessible to dads and moms, who then can make it accessible to their children.

Now, that is my very impassioned, okay, completely shameless plug for the book because that's really what wowed me about it. So many of the books being written today for parents are so, in many ways, they're subpar.

Some of the better ones are superficial at best. They're covering all the same things. They're talking about the basics of Christianity, which are super important, but they're not taking people beyond that.

They're not digging down deeper, which is why we're having families that are not able to address the questions and the criticisms that are coming from the world. Now, I know I've been talking for a while.

You really want to hear Natasha talk, okay? We want to get to the book, but Natasha, I'm just curious. Did you expect someone to read your book and walk away with that response?

Well, you never know what someone is going to take away from the book, good or bad. So you never know in terms of excitations, but I'm so, so honored and encouraged to hear all that you just said. And I can't tell you how much that means to me.

You pour your heart and soul into, and so much time and energy, emotional, physical, everything into writing a book. And it does take a lot of time to write a book like this because I am indeed trying to do exactly what you just said.