What in the World Have We Been Up To?

While I'm doing that, I mean, it's probably not even been five minutes. She calls me on the phone and she was telling me, hey, we're not going to make it to the hospital. Call 9 -1 -1. So I called 9 -1 -1 and the firefighters arrived.

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Catching Up After a Month and a Half Away

Welcome to Bible Bash, where we aim to equip the saints for the work of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask. We're your hosts, Harrison Kerrig and Pastor Tim Mullett, and today we'll answer the age-old question, what in the world have we been up to for a month and a half?

So if you've been following the podcast for a little while, you'll know, and if you follow us on Twitter or Facebook or anything like that, I think we posted on our YouTube channel as well, but it probably didn't get to everyone who listens to us, but we decided to take about a month, a month and a half off because Tim and I, we both had various significant life changes going on, and so we've been away, we've been handling all that stuff, and we decided it's about time that we get back to things now that we're both a little more settled in with our new changes.

So, this is going to be a little bit of a more informal episode where we just kind of catch you guys up on what we've been up to while we've been gone and what were some of those changes that have been going on, because they're good things.

They're really great things, actually. And so, Tim, why don't we just start with you? I mean, you love to talk about yourself. You love to let everyone see behind the curtain all the time, pulling all the levers.

So, while we've been gone, what have you been up to?

Tim Jones Yeah, I mean, I wonder if there's a mental illness that is related to inability to do small talk.

Pete Taylor. Because you would have that one, right?

Tim Jones Yeah, I think I suffer from that one. I've determined it's a biological illness that I suffer from.

Pete Taylor. Maybe they make a pill for it. There's probably a pill for it that would make you better at small talk.

Tim Jones. Yeah, I mean, obviously, I need to get that pill. Pete Taylor.

So, what have you been doing in the meantime? Tim Jones.

Yeah, so we have a whole episode devoted to that, but no. Yeah, no, I've been recently called to be a primary teaching elder at a church in California. So, me and my family, we've basically been moving for the past month and a half and jumping through all the hoops necessary to get to a cross-country move.

So, yeah, that's kind of been what's going on in the background for us. We've basically been trying to sell our house and load our pod and relocate and get to a new place and all that. So, yeah, it's been pretty difficult to keep up with much of anything.

I think we've been basically just trying to keep one foot in front of the other and get everything taken care of as it relates to that. But yeah, that's what Pete Taylor.

Yeah, and there was a lot going on with that whole move, right? I mean, you had to figure you're kind of on a bit of a time crunch. I mean, it's a pretty big change to have to move, I mean, pretty much completely across to the other side of the country, right?

I mean, you were in Alabama and then now you're in California, the most wretched place in all of the US. Has that been your experience so far now that you're out in California?

We've decided to fight by fight.

So, how close are you to places like San Francisco and all the places you think of.

When you think of California? Yeah, we're in Northern California. So, we're in Sunnyvale. We're in Silicon Valley, essentially. So, the church I'm at is Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church. So, yeah, we're about maybe an hour's drive from San Francisco.

So, we're actually pretty close to that.

Yeah. Oh, I didn't realize it was that close to San Francisco. I'm not really, I guess, well-versed in my California geography, so I don't know where exactly all the cities are. But have you been to San Francisco yet?

We did, yeah. We did go to San Francisco. We went to a beach there. We went to the pier and looked at Alcatraz from a distance and all that. I mean, it's pretty funny. There was an anti-Israel protest that was going on near the beach or whatever.

Was there really?

There was an anti-Israel protest. There was a guy who was randomly disrobed in this protest or whatever. So, as we're driving out of San Francisco, Elizabeth has to see some old guy with wrinkly skin and all that.

So, welcome to California.

Did you make use of the poop map?

What is that?

You don't know about the poop map?

I don't know.

It's basically like, I mean, you've used GPS before, like Google Maps or Waze or something like that. It's basically that, but instead of giving you directions, it warns you where all of the places are that people have left human feces on the sidewalks and on the streets and whatnot so that you don't accidentally walk into any of them.

Yeah.

So, you didn't use that, but I guess...

I didn't know about this. Yeah, I didn't know there was such a thing.

Well, on your second trip to San Francisco, if I were you, I would make a heavy utilization of the poop map.

There you go. The more you know, the more you know.

Yeah, there you go. I'm surprised no one told you about that. I thought you knew about the poop map.

Nah, man. No.

Well, I guess there's still plenty to learn living out there in California. That's pretty silly that there's actually... I mean, it is a legitimate thing, like a legitimate interactive map where people report places where they see that, which is really gross, but I do think it is hilarious that your first trip to San Francisco, you saw an anti-Israel protest and a dude get completely naked.

I mean, you know, it is what it is. I mean, mostly, I think where we're at, we're not in the midst of a lot of that kind of craziness here. So, we're in tech world. I've actually... I'm serving as an elder at a church with Conley Owens, so we've had him on a few times.

He basically has... Oh, man. What was I going to say? I've lost it.

Conley was... He's probably a name that the old heads of the podcast would remember. He was the first guy that we ever interviewed on the podcast.

Was he the first guy we interviewed?

I think he was. It was either him or C .R. Wiley, but I thought Conley was the first one. He's either the first one or the second one, I think, but he had... Way back when we were just getting started on the podcast, he had reached out to us about doing an interview on his book, The Dorian Principle, and that was how we met.

We ended up staying in touch with him. We've had him on a couple other times since then. I don't remember what the last episode we did.

We did. It was probably the baby one. Probably the baby salvation.

Was it? I thought there was another one after that that we did.

I think he did a small mini episode after that, but yeah. Oh, yeah. Where I was going with that was basically he was making fun of me for living in Alabama, and so he pulled up on the internet like the happiest places to live.

Apparently, the happiest place to live in America is Sunnyvale, which is where we moved. Oh, really? Yeah. The least happy place was Birmingham, where we were coming from.

Is it really? There's no way. That's true. There's no way.

I think it's downtown. They're talking about downtown. Downtown, there's a lot of crime downtown.

Yeah. Downtown's pretty rough in Birmingham. I think it's actually one of the worst. I don't think it's the worst. That honor is probably reserved for Chicago or Detroit, maybe, but Birmingham's surprisingly high in terms of the crime rate.

I think it was top five or something crazy like that. It was pretty high, but yeah. I think a lot of that has to do with we're in tech world around here, so this is where big tech is, and so a lot.

Of the standards. All the crimes being committed there are white-collar crimes, right?

I guess so. I guess so.

They're the kind you don't go to jail for.

Yeah. The crimes that are committed here are done by the governor who is stealing all of our money and socialism and all that, so there's that. Yeah. The move for you, that was a big thing.

I can't imagine moving that far and having to sell a house and then move to a place that you're really not very familiar. Were you familiar with the area? I know you've been to California before for school, but I don't know how close that was to where you are now.

Yeah. We're in Northern California right now, and then I went to school near LA, essentially, so Santa Clarita. I went to the master's college. I've lived in California before. It definitely is a little bit different, Northern California and Southern California, but in a lot of ways, I guess I'm used to the kind of culture that's here.

I grew up in South Florida, so I wouldn't consider myself a true Southerner or something like that. But yeah, we're actually, I think, maybe around six, seven hours away from LA, something along those lines, so we're pretty far.

It's a big state.

Is it pretty conservative in the area that you're in, or is it still really liberal?

Yeah, our church is pretty conservative, but no. It's pretty liberal. Yeah, we were selling some of our stuff because the housing market here is pretty ridiculous. It's kind of crazy. Like the house prices are just third of the roof, they're out of this world, that kind of thing.

We were coming from Alabama in a normal-sized house and trying to figure out how to fit everything here. We've had to do a lot of downsizing and selling and everything else. We didn't realize how materialistic we were, apparently.

We're just entitled living lives of luxury in Alabama and all that. But no, we've come over here and we were selling something to someone. Elizabeth just tries to sell everything through Facebook Marketplace or whatever.

But there was a girl who was asking about the church. I mean, it was pretty funny because she was a liberal asking about our church and asking how conservative it was, or asking what kind of church it was.

I mean, I told her it was a pretty conservative church. Her response was, well, is it conservative for California or is it conservative for the rest of the country or whatever? I was like, no, it's pretty conservative for California.

She's like, well, I mean, people are conservative here, but not compared to the rest of the country. I'm like, well, we're against abortion and we like guns and pro-death penalty, male-female roles.

She's like, oh, so you are really conservative.

She was like, actually, I don't need this thing that I'm here to buy.

It's as bad as you expect. But her comment about that was pretty funny. She is a liberal, but then living out here with the economic policies the way that they actually are, she says that she realizes that she doesn't want to live in a place that is, in terms of economics, liberal or whatever.

She's just realized how much of a train wreck it is when you actually implement these things. She's become much more libertarian leaning in her politics as a result of seeing how it actually carries out.

She's a self-identified liberal who basically was, in terms of her economic policies, liberal until she saw it face-to-face.

Until she was blessed enough to actually experience the policies that she supported.

Right, right. For her, that was pretty eye-opening. I think that there's a lot of crazy out here, but then there's more pushback to the crazy than you might realize. For instance, there was a park pretty close to us that I think Google built or whatever.

It's a really nice park, but then there was a man pretending to be a woman, but then a child. A man pretending to be a woman and a child at this park. He's running around wearing a diaper, and apparently that's illegal.

You're not really allowed to go to a child's park as an adult without a child. Does that make sense? Yeah. He's running around with a diaper, identifying as a girl child or something, trying to play with the kids.

Then Elizabeth was looking on Facebook and seeing all the comments related to that. Apparently, there's a lot of people who are basically saying, we've gone too far. This has to stop. This is crazy. It has to stop.

All right, guys. I draw the line at grown men pretending to be women and children.

Oh, that's really funny. She was a little bit shocked that that was the tone of all the comments. There wasn't supporting the pervert in his rebellion or whatever. It was the tone of all the comments were, this has to stop.

It's too much. There were no map rights. None of that. Yeah, none of that. Well, that's good. Yeah, I mean, we're pretty deep blue out here. Apparently, yeah, Colleen was telling me that if you wear a MAGA hat, you may get assaulted.

It's that kind of thing. Metaphorically assaulted or physically assaulted?

He was saying physically. I was thinking about testing that out just to see what happens.

All right. Well, if this is the last episode we ever have, y 'all know why.

I mean, I get myself a body cam as a social experiment and just see what happens.

Maybe that'll be the last video we post from the podcast. I'll see if Elizabeth can recover the footage from your body and we'll post it in memory of Pastor Tim Wallet.

That was the end. That's how we went. You could edit the video and then go from this conversation to the tombstone.

Oh, hey, you know, it was, I will say, I was really impressed talking about y 'all were downsizing and y 'all were very materialistic. Y 'all were trying to get rid of things to make sure the move could happen.

You had this moving pod, like a shipping container, basically. What were the dimensions of it? It was like a 20 foot, right?

Well, it's the equivalent of a 20 foot moving truck. It was like 16 by 8 by 10, I think.

Okay. But the equivalent of a 20 foot moving truck. Me and a bunch of other guys from the church, we went to go help you load up stuff from your house here in Alabama. And I mean, that thing was packed.

I personally, I feel like it was probably packed as well as I've ever seen anything packed before. It was just from the floor to the roof or the ceiling, wall to wall, all the way up to the door. Did anything when you opened up the door or is it still in storage or have y 'all gotten that yet?

Yeah. So, we didn't know if we were going to have a place to live. So, we're having a lot of trouble basically trying to find a place like a cross country because you apply for houses and they think that you're basically a scammer because you can't see it, go to visit it or whatever.

So, we were just having a big problem even getting any interest in that. And then they see that we have five kids and so they would basically just ignore our application. I mean, we had several realtors who we called who told us that they just threw our application in the trash because we had so many kids and we're out of state or whatever.

So, that was kind of funny. But yeah, no, I was trying to get the pod so that we could have a month of storage because I didn't know if we would be in a hotel for a little bit. And so, I mean, it was kind of interesting.

I mean, God's good. I mean, He would have been good even if He didn't do this, but He was kind to us. And I had come up here a week earlier than the rest of my family. And I mean, I told them with all the dad joke tone I could muster that I was going to prepare a place for them.

That's good. That's really good.

But no, she lined me up a house. I mean, she lined me up a house rental and we actually got one pretty close to the church. So, it was the last week. So, I mean, we were able to load the pod the day that they were flying in, essentially.

So, everything worked out to where we actually had beds in the house and everything. But yeah, no, it was a pretty impressive pack job. I was I was probably simply proud of myself and dad and you guys for packing that.

Connelly was pretty impressed by it, too. He was like, did he see it? Yeah. I mean, I did have a hard time getting the door open for sure.

Yeah. I was wondering how the door was going to do because right there at the end, I mean, you run out of boxes and you're just kind of loading things loose at that point. And it looked like it was probably going to shift.

And I'm assuming it did.

It did. Now, we even we forgot Vivian's dresser, too, in the house.

Oh, no.

So, I had to take out that last little bit and rack my brain to try to repack. But I mean, we got everything important. I think we ended up I mean, it ended up working out, you know, pretty well. But I mean, I did have a lot of trouble trying to get the thing open.

I was debating what my options were at that point, because I was like, I don't know if it's going to come up. How did you get it open? I mean, I yeah, I just went Hulk mode, man.

And just you just ripped the door completely off.

Yeah, I pushed it up at the top, you know, and then I just I said, it's got to open. So, if anything breaks, it breaks, you know. So, I pulled. And after a significant effort, it came up. But yeah.

Yeah. It was pretty packed for sure, all the way up to the door. And even then, I mean, there was still I mean, y 'all still left some stuff, right? Or y 'all threw it away or gave it away or whatever.

Yeah. I mean, the house sizes here are very different from where they're at in Birmingham. So, we have a normal size house in Birmingham, but it's very different. But we ended up selling a lot and it all worked out.

It was good. Yeah. We repented of our materialism, you know.

The Move to California and Life in Silicon Valley

Yeah, that's good. Maybe one day I'll repent of mine too.

There you go.

We did a little bit, you know, on our end of things, you know, my big life change stuff was, you know, we had my wife and I, we had our third child.

And you set the church on fire.

And we set the church on fire in the same month. It was a pretty busy month for me too. But the nice thing about, you know, setting the church on fire was I got to get rid of a lot of things that we didn't need.

I mean, I think I told my wife at one point that we had enough toys and books to start a daycare. And that's just far too many for us. And so, we got to get rid of a lot of that stuff, a lot of clothes, a lot of shoes and whatnot.

Now, I say we set the church on fire. We didn't actually burn the church down. But I did have a kitchen fire, yeah, that was surprisingly, you know, like the fire itself really didn't do very much damage at all.

I mean, it probably only burned for, I don't know, like a minute or two. I mean, you know, maybe like three or four minutes max. But essentially, what had happened was, you know, my wife and kids were away and I was making something in our air fryer.

It was set on top of the oven. And I set it to run for like eight minutes. I was there for the first five. And then I went downstairs to check on something. It was gone for probably three minutes, three to five minutes.

And I started walking back up the stairs and I heard this beeping noise. And I thought to myself, that better not be what I think it is. I opened the door into our apartment and I mean, it's just dark in there.

I mean, it was probably, you know, 1130 in the middle of the day. It was just completely dark in our apartment. The lights were all off. The smoke detectors were going off and there was smoke everywhere.

It's not, you know, it's obviously, it's not like in the movies. In the movies, whenever a building's burning, you can see plain as day. You can see all the fire around. You can see everyone's faces and everything.

But, you know, in real life, it's not actually like that. It's mostly just smoke that fills up the whole place. And so you can't see really much of anything. And so I ran in there and I turned the corner to look into our kitchen and there's just a ball of fire on top of our oven.

And I was like, oh. So I ran into the kitchen and was looking for our fire extinguisher and I could not find it anywhere. I was like, well, I've got to put this out. I've got to go find something. And so I went out and luckily we had another one that was much larger in the hallway.

And I grabbed that and I sprayed everything down. And, you know, really, like, so we had that fire, but the fire was probably the least destructive part of the whole thing. I mean, it destroyed the air fryer, obviously, and it melted the oven and the microwave, which I guess is pretty, pretty destructive from a pure cost perspective to replace those things.

But really it was the smoke that did the most because you know, it filled up every room in the apartment, even though the doors were shut. And so like all of our, I mean, we literally had to take everything at all of our clothes that were hanging up, everything in the drawers was fine.

They didn't really smell like smoke, but everything that was hanging up are, you know, our clothes, the kids clothes, all of it just reeked of smoke. And so we had to pull it all down and, you know, wash all of it.

The cabinets were, the cabinets and the backsplash on the kitchen were just black in certain spots. The wall behind the cabinets was black and, you know, and then the fire extinguisher actually was, it created a pretty big mess and got on pretty much everything in the kitchen.

And even though I didn't spray it very long, I pretty much just sprayed it long enough to put everything out. But I mean, you saw, you saw it, you know, it was all over the stove. It was all over the floor.

It got on like the air vents and inside of the air vents. And so, um, you know, luckily I was on paternity leave because my wife had just had a baby and with my, you know, with my day job, I get, I get six weeks of paternity leave per year, which is insane.

I've never had, I've never had paternity leave like that ever in my entire life. Um, but so, so the nice thing was at any of my jobs, I never got any, yeah, especially at my, you know, at my first couple jobs, um, when, when Kayla and I were first married, you know, there wasn't paternity leave.

At least I don't think there was. Um, I don't remember there ever being any and, you know, the, where I work now, uh, there really wasn't, um, paternity leave there either, but then they got bought out by a much larger company and they offer a really great, really great paternity leave package.

I, I, uh, I made a lot of good use out of it. And part of that was, you know, probably like a two week span of it was just me, uh, cleaning, you know, we, we stayed with Kayla's parents, um, for about a week or so while we were trying to get everything cleaned up just because the apartment was, uh, you know, just not good for the kids, especially a newborn.

I remember, uh, the day that it happened, I had, I had breathed in so much smoke that first day from just putting it out and then being in the apartment, um, while the smoke was still dissipating throughout the day.

And, you know, at the end of the day, you, you and me, we had gone to go get dinner and then I came back and was supposed to just grab a couple things and, and then go to Kay, go to Kayla's parents. Um, but I was so exhausted.

I, I sat down and I fell asleep on our bed and I woke up like 30 minutes later and I had the worst migraine from just breathing in all that, all that smoke that was still there from the fire and everything.

But it was definitely, um, is it resolved at this point? Yeah. Yeah. So we got everything cleaned up. Um, I mean, like I said, we had to, we had to wash all our clothes. We had to pull the cabinets off the walls, um, pull out the, the microwave and the oven.

We repainted that whole, um, wall, you know, where the backsplash wasn't everything. Luckily the backsplash, that was one of the things we were the most worried about because that would have been, you know, pretty, you know, out of everything we would have had to do, that would have been probably the most, uh, work intensive thing to replace the backsplash.

Um, but luckily we were able to basically just scrub it clean. Um, I used a bunch of Dawn and, uh, you know, water, Dawn and vinegar mixed together. And then what really helped, which I never would have guessed this, but what really helped was like those little magic erasers, you know, um, like the Mr. Clean magic erasers or whoever makes them.

I just bought like, um, I don't know, like 20 of those or something, or maybe it was 12 and I would just go to town and it, it would just take the, the soot and everything that it's, you know, kind of soaked into the stone and all of its, and the grout and all of its like porous areas and it would just take it right off.

Um, so, so it just looks, it looks completely fine. Now, um, we repainted the wall with some paint that gets rid of that, that smoke smell. And, um, now it's like it never happened. Um, my father-in-law, he, he worked on the cabinet some and some spots where they were pretty, where they were pretty charred and they look fine now.

So it all got figured out. Um, but it definitely was a wrench in the middle of, uh, in the middle of still trying to get back to a sense of normalcy from, from, you know, our, our newborn son, um,.

Which that was, that was pretty crazy too. Yeah. He decided to forego going to the hospital.

On accident. Yeah, we, uh, we had, we had a home birth, but it was not a planned home birth. Um, so, you know, I mean, my wife, she's so, she's so great. And, um, and, you know, I, I felt so bad for her because we, uh, it was, it was probably like the last Sunday of July, maybe we, I ended up taking her to the hospital because, you know, supposedly once you're, once your contractions get to like, Hey, once they're this many minutes apart and they last for this long, you need to go ahead and come.

And, and those, those numbers kind of diminish the longer or the, you know, um, the more children you have, like it gets faster each time. So, um, you know, with the first kid, if it's, Hey, wait, every, every, you know, three minutes with the second, the third kid is, Hey, once it's four minutes or five minutes in between each contraction, go ahead and come.

Um, just because the baby, you know, typically they come faster the second, the third time. And, you know, so my wife, she hit whatever the thresholds were. So we go to the hospital and the contractions just stop completely.

And, you know, we're sitting there, they're monitoring her. And eventually they're just like, Hey, we, we, you know, we can't admit you. We've got to send you home. And so we go home contractions immediately start again.

And for the next week, she has contractions, you know, every like eight to 10 minutes. Um, and she's like just outside of that threshold, but we were like, Hey, we can't go back to the hospital because they're just gonna, you know, they're just gonna turn us away again.

And we're gonna, we're gonna get a bill for going just to get turned away. So we were just, we were just like, Hey, we're just gonna have to wait until the water breaks. And then that's when we go. Um, and so the next, you know, the next Sunday, a week later, uh, I woke up that morning and I checked on, I checked on Kayla and she was, she was like, Hey, my, my contractions are so painful that we've just got to go.

And maybe they can at least give me something for the pain. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to go get everything ready for us to go. I went downstairs to get some stuff ready, you know, for, for everyone at the church to be okay without me.

And, uh, while I'm doing that, I mean, it's probably not even been five minutes. She calls me on the phone and, and she was telling me, Hey, we're not going to make it to the hospital call nine one one.

So I called nine one one and the firefighters arrived and it was just one guy, just one guy showed up and I showed him where to go. And I asked him, were there any other guys with him? And he said, yes.

So I went downstairs to go find them and show them where to go. And they, uh, there was no one there. I walked all around his truck. There was no one there. So I go back upstairs and I find them again.

And, you know, keep in mind, it's been about a minute and a half from when I, when I showed, when I showed the firefighter where my wife was to when I came back upstairs. And at that point, like the, our son was already crowning.

Um, and so it was basically like, uh, I left and then her, her water broke. And she said it was like a, it was like hearing a balloon pop. And then just seconds later, he was, you know, he was like out basically.

So, you know, so in the middle of our home where we're having, we're having our baby delivered, the firefighter is standing there to catch him and, uh, you know, like all of our, all of our towels get ruined.

So, but, uh, but everyone, you know, everyone was healthy. Um, uh, they, they took her to the hospital and, you know, it was funny because our, our son, he, he came out and the firefighter, you know, swaddles them in one of our unsoiled towels, the, one of the few remaining unsoiled ones, and then hands them to me and I'm holding him while they're taking care of Kayla and getting everything set up there and, you know, um, everything that that entails and they get her, um, loaded up and I, I hand the baby back to her at that point.

Uh, and I look down and he, he just, he pooped all over me. Like the very first thing he decided to do after, after, you know, soiling all my towels and, and, uh, you know, causing us to miss the Sunday services.

He just poops all over me and it, and it gets all over the stairs. I should've checked out the poop map, the Birmingham poop map. Um, but yeah, you know, the first thing he decides to do after, after all that is poop all over me and I don't realize it and I track it everywhere and I, I had to, I had to clean all that up.

Um, but you know, but it was great. I mean, it was good to see, uh, my wife Kayla, she, she had said that she always wanted to, uh, have at least one natural birth and she got it without, without, uh, realizing she was going to get it.

So, um, um, but yeah, everyone was healthy. Um, he's still, he's still really healthy. He actually, he's already holding his head. He's been holding his head up for like weeks at this point, which, uh, has been, has been a little surprising.