97: When Believers Come Undone: A Counselor's Perspective

Welcome to the Ready for Eternity podcast, a podcast and blog for inquisitive Bible students. I'm Eddie Lawrence, and I'm joined today by Devin Leach. Welcome, Devin. Thank you for having me, Eddie. I'm excited to be here.

I'm glad to have you. I was a guest on Devin's podcast, what, was it about three weeks ago, something like that? Yeah, a couple weeks ago, yeah. So Devin has a podcast, is it Form? Tell me the name of your podcast.

Yeah, it's Form, a counseling podcast, and it's on Apple, YouTube, and Spotify. So on that podcast episode, we talked about some of George Barna's research, and I had blogged about that in a blog series.

And I was just, although late to the party, because this is not new information, I was shocked to find out about the percentages, the low percentages of Christians who actually have a biblical worldview.

It turns out that according to his research, only about 13 of what he classifies as born again Christians have a biblical worldview, meaning that they view the world through the lens of scripture and pretty much exclusively through the lens of scripture.

And I think I summarized that by saying that an indicator of a biblical worldview is that someone who has one, their first impulse is to always go to scripture to say, what does the Bible say about this or that, when I have a big decision to make or just in the way that I live my life.

I was shocked to find out that 87 of born again believers do not have a biblical worldview. And the numbers for pastors were not encouraging either. Overall, less than 50 of pastors. But I have a bone to pick with you about that podcast episode.

So I have a reputation for not smiling in photos. And I want to know, did you pick that thumbnail picture on purpose? Because I had this big goofy grin on and you were straight faced. You reversed roles.

Eddie, I have not only, I've memorialized that picture. It's hanging up above my fire plate, plate, plate, plate, plate, plate, plate. I'm actually wrapping it. I'm going to give it to your family for their Christmas gifts because I caught you smiling.

And I feel like I've won a prize. Do you know how many people have ribbed me over that? I can't imagine. There's one again though. We have fun when we talk. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to get you back, but the podcast isn't published yet.

So I've got time. Let me tell you, the thumbnails they suggest on those things after you record one are usually with my eyes closed. My nostrils are flaring. I've got a lip, upper lip that's angry. I mean, I look terrible in all those thumbnails.

So I was probably trying to find one that was flattering for both of us when I did that thumbnail. Well, you had a follow-up podcast episode the following week where you talked about some of the implications of a, I guess, of the hopelessness and the loneliness that comes or is that can be associated with a lack of a biblical worldview.

And by the way, I will put links to both of your episodes in my show description. But I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about that follow-up episode because I thought you had some really insightful comments and observations in there.

So I don't know if we would call today part two or part three. Could be either. Yeah, but definitely an ongoing conversation. Yeah, in this podcast, I'd like to talk more about some of the practical and personal implications of this problem, not just the statistics.

So now you're a leader in your local church and you also have a counseling ministry. So that kind of gives you a unique perspective that most people don't have. But tell us a little bit about your counseling ministry.

So I'm one of the elders at Belle Point Baptist Church in Frankfort, Kentucky. And about, I guess, four years ago now, I started, I did what I was told for a long time I was supposed to do and never really thought it was a honest with you, and that was to be a counselor.

And so I called it Form Counseling Ministry, Form, F-O-R-M, the root word for a lot of the things that are important to me. You know, do not be conformed to this world, be transformed in the renewal of your mind until Christ is formed in us, reformed.

All of these things were part of me. And it seemed to be that root word that was a part of so many of the things that made up the counseling ministry. And so that's why it's called that. And I started this counseling ministry because, you know, it's typically counseling is a female dominated world.

I particularly really like it. I like counseling and I've always had a kind of a proclivity toward trying to help people on that one to one basis. And the Lord kept sending people my way. And I was trying to be faithful, had people in my life telling me, you know, you should just you should be a counselor, you should be a counselor.

And I, you know, COVID hit and I wasn't pastoring at that time and then quickly became a pastor where I am now and then started this ministry as a kind of a parachurch ministry. So I counsel people both within my church, but also within the community and then also outside the community.

I have some people from outside of Frankfort, both in Louisville, Lexington, and then people who by association know me. So I see online from other states, states, states, states, states, states, states, states be blessing it.

So I have continued to to do it and I'm thankful to do it. So, you know, I think most people when when they come to you, they probably don't say, hey, I've got a biblical worldview problem I need you to help me fix.

No, no, they don't. They're probably becoming because, you know, they're feeling stuck or empty or they're just having some sort of a problem they haven't been able to resolve on their own. But I'm going to guess that at least some of these issues are related to biblical worldview problems.

Absolutely. There's a definite case of, you know, symptoms that people want relief from that actually aren't part of the core problem. That's very typical. They're called presenting problems. Someone comes in and says I'm miserable or something's not working or I've got this issue and it's causing me problems.

I want to get rid of it. It's usually what the presenting problem is not usually the problem. For instance, you know, you come in and feel depressed if you've been dealing with depression. Depression is usually a symptom of something, you know, it's a problem for you and that's the indication you need to get help.

But it's not the actual problem, if you know what I mean by that. So a lot of times the biblical foundation, the biblical worldview is most helpful for people in actually helping them determine whether the suffering that they're going through is the suffering that they're supposed to have or whether it's unnecessary.

Now do you think they're aware that the symptom is not the real problem or are they and they're not admitting it? Most of the time, no. So especially for believers, there's like an already, there's like a foundation of seeing throughout scripture.

If they're familiar with the Bible at all, they know suffering is part of living, right? So I think people in general have the idea that they're not getting out of this life unscathed. We're all going to suffer to some degree.

But the difference between is the Lord actively working in my life, like say a Joseph, right? Am I going through getting beat up and thrown in the well and sold into slavery and in Potter's house and falsely accused and put in prison and lied about and forgotten about so that I can make it in front of Pharaoh?

Like is this the Lord's will that I suffer in order to grow and His will is being accomplished in the suffering? Or am I suffering as a result of my sin and stupid decisions? Or maybe not even my own sin and stupid decisions, but the circumstances around me I have no control over.

And so often sorting that out means helping someone understand a more biblical worldview. What you're describing there is a problem that I've kind of termed the fig leaf. And what I have experienced in interacting with people is, and this is not a counseling issue, it's more of a just of a personal interaction.

A lot of times people will say, I need such and such for such and such reason. And you know, that's not the real reason they're asking for it, because the real reason is so petty that they don't want to admit what the real reason is.

And I have just come to recognize some of those situations and I call it the fig leaf. They're covering something that they don't want anybody else to see. I got you. I got you. But yeah, so that's my term for a totally different kind of issue.

Sure. But when you said that, that's what it reminded me of, is that someone's approaching you with a problem. And in your case, they don't probably realize that what they're approaching you to get help with is a symptom and not the root cause.

The Isolation of Modern Life

So one of the things that I thought was very insightful in your follow-up episode was your description of how people today are isolating themselves. And that just about everything in our life is encouraging and promoting that isolation.

You know, technology, the way a lot of us work from home. I can't remember all the things that you attributed that to. You want to recap that just a little bit, because I thought there was some very insightful things in there.

Yeah, so I was trying to lay out how everything in our life is keeping us isolated and really individualized. And, you know, the New Testament calls us to community. We need the church. We need one another.

The way that we fulfill the numerous, numerous, numerous, and I meant to have it in front of me. I don't remember the exact number of one another commands is in the New Testament, but it ain't 10, you know, it's like 50 or even more than that.

But there's a tremendous amount of one another commands in the New Testament. The only way to fulfill those is to be alongside somebody. Well, the world right now is in such a way that everything seems to be isolating us and they market it to us as individualized.

So they don't say, hey, look, this is going to isolate you and you won't have to deal with people. They'll never market to you that way. The way they market things is like, look, your iPhone is now all yours.

It's your library. It's your contacts. Right. And you can be separate from your family, even though you're on the family plane. And so there's this marketing toward all of us that like, look, I can have my own.

But if you go through society and look at all the things that are available to us through technology, we have social media, which gives us our what's now like reads what we spend the most time looking at and then feeds that back to us in suggestions over and over and over again.

And then we have things like, you know, I can literally door dash fast food to my door and click a button that says contactless. Yeah, well, that's that's a pretty darn good way to avoid human contact because it literally is on the app.

It says I can click. I don't want to deal with people today. Contactless boom. One of the things I mentioned is we don't go like watching a movie used to be a community event to some degree. I remember growing up in the 90s, early 2000s.

And if you want to watch a movie, you needed to go to the movie store. There was a place some people listening might not even remember this, but there was a place where you went and rented a movie. So you had to ask your parents.

That's contact number one. You had to talk to somebody that you wanted to see this movie. And then you probably would tell your friends. But a blockbuster night and rent this movie. So now you've talked to multiple people about it.

And then if you got permission, your parents had to drive you or you had to go with someone to the store. When you walked in, you saw people work in the counter. You saw other people in the movie store.

You had to look behind the little thing to hope to find that empty plastic case that you could take up front, talk to someone who would then put a disc or if you were old enough, a VHS in that thing. And then they would hand it to you for some reason, always on the other side of the counter.

And you had to talk to someone to do that. Well, then other people now knowing you want to watch the movie, they might want to watch it with you, right? Because there was typically only one VCR or one DVD player.

So you go home and watch it. Think about how many points of contact with people you would end up conversing with, even in a very small way, just to rent a movie. And now I want to watch a movie. I can bring it up on my phone.

I don't talk to anybody about it. I'm never in communication with anybody about it. I can literally watch whole movies. No one even knows I'm doing it. And then I may not discuss it with anybody. I may not.

No one ever may know I do it because even on the streaming app, I have my own individualized profile. And so those are just a couple of examples of how we set up for us to be able to just avoid people as much as we would like.

Well, for those who are watching who actually know me personally, they know you just described my entire lifestyle. I'm introverted. Being around people saps every last ounce of strength that I have. On Sunday afternoons, I come home from church and I'm just wasted.

I'm on the couch for the rest of the day because I had to be around a bunch of people today. But that's it, though. You do put yourself around people. Yeah, I go. I go because I know that God has said that's what's good for us.

Amen. Now, left alone to myself, I would say I don't want to go. I don't get energy from being around a bunch of people. It saps energy from me. That doesn't mean I can't interact or that I refuse to.

It's just that for me, the reward is after it's over. Right, right. That's right. For someone like my wife, who is extroverted, the reward is getting to be around a bunch of people. That's right, yeah.

And that's a really good, by the way, that's just a side note. That's a really good description of introvert, extrovert. Introverts are energized by being alone, whereas extroverts are energized by being with people.

I think we often confuse that, that extroverts are the loudest, talkative people and introverts are the quietest people, and that's not always the truth. That's true, yeah. I think that is the true definition.

I think a lot of people say they are introverts when maybe they're not. Because being a true one, it's probably offensive to have someone call yourself that. You don't introvert the way I introvert, so I question you.

Isolation, Hopelessness, and the Need for Community

Now, you said this isolation is leading to hopelessness. What's the cause and effect there? Well, I guess on the forefront, we could just easily say anytime we're outside of the parameters that God has given us foundationally, we're going to feel wrong.

There's something off. We're going to know it in our spirit. We're going to know it in our conscience. The Lord has written the law upon our hearts, and I think that the further outside of the good, orderly, created way that God intended for us to be, the further outside of that we are, the worse we feel, just in general.

So if we're created, it is not good for man to be alone. I quoted that in the podcast. Now, that we know is meant to be for a husband and wife, that you're supposed to find a wife, supposed to find a husband, and a husband's supposed to find a wife.

But I think that the application for that is even broader than that. I think that there's implications to that command that says man was not meant to be a lone wolf, meaning humanity, humans, were not meant to be lone wolves that go off on their own and avoid people and make their way without a community or without interactions.

The more that we isolate ourselves and only contend ever with our own thoughts, the things that set in, and this is just from my experience of watching people, we become more and more hopeless. There's one of the greatest cures, for instance, for social anxiety.

People walk into a crowded room, they get social anxiety. One of the greatest cures for social anxiety is to walk into a room with people and look for someone you think would have social anxiety and try to go talk to them.

Hmm. I'll have to remember that. There you go. There's a tip. You know why that is? Because again, Philippians 2, we are to consider one another as more important than ourselves, demonstrating the humility of Christ, that he, being equal with the Father, did not consider that the thing to be grasped, but instead humbled himself, lowered himself, becoming a man, as it tells us, right?

As Paul writes that letter. So, serving someone, seeking someone else's good in the head is really, really helpful in curing social anxiety, or at least helping. I shouldn't say cure, perhaps, but really helping a person go a long way in overcoming social anxiety.

It also helps with people who feel depressed oftentimes, right? Now, there's such thing, I believe, absolutely, as clinical depression, hormonal imbalances, physiological, biological problems. You can feel severely depressed if your thyroid is going bad, for instance.

There are definitely reasons that depression hits that don't necessarily have to do with your choices. But what we're talking about a lot is that biblical foundation part. And for a lot of people, it's the choices that we're making for our own immediate comforts that are actually causing us a tremendous amount of hopelessness.

And something that we probably ought to say is when Barna did his research and what we're saying here in this podcast, we're not saying that there is no such thing as mental illness. It's all caused because people don't follow the Bible or don't look to it first.

That's not what we're saying. What Barna is saying is that there is some subset of people who are misdiagnosed with a mental health problem, when in reality, it is just basically a hopelessness induced by the fact that they don't share the Bible's optimism about where this is all heading.

They see no reason to have any hope. And if I'm connecting the dots right, I think what you're trying to say is that the hopelessness that people feel when they isolate themselves, inadvertently isolate themselves often, is because we're kind of going against the ideal that God had for humans to begin with, and that was for us to function with other people, not in isolation.

Absolutely agree with that. I want to say two quick things. One is, there's also probably, in Barna's research, a lot of unregenerate people claiming to be born again. There's a very good chance that's almost certainly.

And number two is, I'm going to steal this from Jordan Peterson, but he would say, do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. And so that's kind of the line I like to use. Expediency or kind of whatever's the most efficient thing is often what we tend toward, and what is most efficient for us is often what's most comfortable and what makes us most immediately happy.

And so there's a little bit of a loss of a long-term view of what's good for us and other people around us in the choices that we're making. And the more we focus on what makes us happy right now, the less happy we are over the long haul.

And so there's a degree of hopelessness that you just said, people aren't seeing where this is all headed. I don't know how many people are even looking to the future or trying to decide what the future looks like because so much of our life and so much of what is marketed to us, give you pleasure and make you comfortable and happy right now.

You know, I don't remember who I learned this from. It was not an observation I made on my own, but someone pointed out to me at some time in the past that the reason God created humanity to be in community is because God himself lives in community.

That's right. And if you think about it, back before he created any angels, back before he created humans, he still existed in community, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It may have been a community of just three, but they were not isolated.

They functioned as one. That's right. And if we are going to be what God intended us to be, we are going to have to take that view as well, although that runs against the grain for people like me. I think that's when we know we're on the right track, is when we start to realize that it's running against us.

So do you think there's like a, for lack of a better term, is there like a low grade hopelessness that people have just accepted as normal? Well, I do, and I don't want to make this political, so I don't mean for it to go that way at all, but I just want to acknowledge that one of the reasons is because of the lack of trust in all the major institutions.

I mean, government and pharmacology and transparency among... I don't want to be overly bombastic, but even recently this past year in the refusal of the release of the Epstein files, for instance, a lot of people were really hoping that would come to light.

And again, it doesn't matter who you voted for. I'm not trying to get into all that. It's that I see among people on the left and right, because I've counseled both and they've indicated to me their political persuasion, so I know that there's been multiple people both from the left and the right that I have seen.

And the overall general consensus is there's just a lack of trust. That is all true, and if that were all that there was, that would be bad enough. But unfortunately, people are seeing scandals within the church as well, and I'm going to fall back on what you just said, because I think there's truth to it.

I think a lot of the scandals that we're seeing may be because there are unregenerate church leaders in some cases, or at the very least, some who may have been qualified to be in that role at some point in the past and may no longer be qualified, but through inertia, they continue on and damage results.

So yeah, even in the one place where we should see the most optimism and hope, sometimes even that is failing us. That's right. That's why God has a high moral standard for the leaders of the church. Right.

And it kind of goes back to what we were talking about in the first episode. It's a catch -22. How do you fix this? Because the people who are lacking a biblical worldview are the ones who are choosing their next leaders in the church, often, and they're not choosing them based upon scriptural criteria, often.

Coping Mechanisms, Process Addictions, and Normalized Dysfunction

Now, when people feel this level of hopelessness, whether it's kind of just a low-grade continuous or if it has escalated to something more, they don't typically just remain idle, right? I mean, there's a vacuum there that needs to be filled with something and they're going to put something in it.

What kind of things are you seeing that people are using to try to, I don't know, medicate that hopelessness, so to speak? I mean, I hope you don't have to cut this part out. I'm trying to be as careful as I can.

One is food. One is an epidemic of pornography. Another is, and there's been books written about this, entertaining ourselves to death. Again, that expediency versus meaningfulness. The people who are most hopeless are often comparing themselves to people they see on social media because, for some reason, our brains watch social media and just do not make the connection of the production that goes into creating what we're looking at.

Setting up a camera so that you can walk in front of it, so that you can look like you're playing with your kids takes multiple shots. It takes a lot of time to set up. It takes even longer to edit, even with AI, and it is not an immediate thing, and that is not how real life goes all the time.

Yet, if a hundred moms do that, then there's a thousand moms that watch that and go, I am failing. The doom scrolling and comparison is, I think, one of the things that eats away right now at people. Again, knowing God's Word, having a standard we compare to that is not just the other moms, which are actually fake, but really comparing ourselves to the Lord Jesus, who's the one who says, be holy as I am holy, and then recognizing that it's His grace that's sufficient for us, and resting in the truths that we would derive from that is an antidote to this, because what we put before our eyes all the time, it becomes our God.

It really does become the thing we fixate on. It becomes the thing we want the most. It becomes all we think about. So, we medicate then. I don't have the data right in front of me. I'm sure anybody listening could Google this and prove this is correct.

We have an opioid epidemic. We have an epidemic of alcoholics. No one talks about that. There is no longer a sexual revolution, but we have a lot of problems in that area, especially online. It's something that people run to for hope to relieve their stress and their mind.

Again, those immediate things are coping mechanisms. They're things that are an attempt to make them feel better immediately. Are there any coping mechanisms that might appear to be normal behavior or even viewed positively?

He only has to work 40 hours, but he's putting in 50 every week. Oh, yeah, like workaholics. So, there are things called process addictions. As a matter of fact, they were mentioned on the last episode of my podcast I did with Rick Dooley on the stages of change.

If anybody wants to go listen to that one, he actually talks about particularly the difference between substance addiction and process addictions. But process addictions, just to summarize quickly, are things that are typically normative that begin to have a hold on you and that you do in order to try to relieve pain.

So, process addictions could be video games, shopping, spending money, sex, even some versions of religious activity could all be kind of good things perverted in a way that are in an attempt to cope with the stressors of life, feeling hopeless, that sort of thing.

So, a lot of these coping mechanisms, even the ones that might appear to be respectable or even admirable, can kind of become a problem on top of the one they already have. And that may be, going back to what you were saying earlier, is a lot of people come to you for symptoms, which a lot of these coping mechanisms would be, and don't realize what the real problem is.

Barna said that, and this is one that I find to be somewhat troubling, that we are on a trajectory, we're on a trend where a lot of these, how did he say it? It was basically a normalization of poor mental health.

In other words, I guess I would refer to that as normalized dysfunction. Yeah, great way to say it. So, it's almost like it's gradually becoming invisible because what would have been seen as an aberrant behavior a generation ago is now just every day.

It's just normal. There's such little tolerance as well. I mean, I coach baseball locally, and the amount of inability to cope with normal disappointment and frustration has seemingly become worse and worse.

It would be easy for someone listening to this to go, well, listen, you're in your 30s now, and you're just older, and you don't see it like you did when you were playing at 12 years old. And I could understand someone making that accusation, but I could elaborate for an hour, which I won't, but I could elaborate for an hour on why it's worse and in what ways, because there is a lot less tolerance.

There's a lot less what I would call emotional intelligence. So, Daniel Coleman wrote the book Emotional Intelligence back in 1997, and was claiming even then that it was more important than IQ, because emotional intelligence, he divides into four domains, and that is basically self-awareness, self-management, relationship awareness, and relationship management.

And of those four domains, he has 12 aspects that he breaks that down into. And if you read that book or look through those, you can just recognize objectively that it seems like we're getting less and less emotionally intelligent.

And it's interesting to me, because with the rise of artificial intelligence, AI, to me, once we all have access to the same amount of intelligence, the only thing that will separate us is our emotional intelligence, because that's the thing AI doesn't have.

And so, as we look to talk about hopelessness and people's resilience, emotional resilience, especially, I often look at it and go, the thing we need the most are the things that Scripture would describe as the fruit of the Spirit.

What is patience that the Holy Spirit is supposed to give us, if not the ability to deal with the annoying in a godly way? You know what I mean? My friend Rick likes to say the fruit of the Spirit is for other people to taste.

Because truthfully, if you're annoying and I'm patient, you get to enjoy the patience. The Spirit's producing that within me, but it's really the other person that's going to get to enjoy that. And all the way through the line, kindness is the same thing.

Kindness is only kind if you could be mean and choose not to. Otherwise, it's just weakness. And so, if you don't have the ability to do the things that are the opposite of the fruit of the Spirit, then it's really not being produced in you.

And those fruit of the Spirit are all those aspects of the fruit singular. I don't want to be ripped by all your... I don't want to be beat up by your audience. I know it's fruit singular. No one messes up talking online worse than me.

So, if my audience has stuck with me, they're going to have no problem with you. Okay, good. Well, the aspects of the fruit of the Spirit all fall in line with emotional intelligence. And this is kind of an offshoot.

It leads to something totally different, perhaps. But I just wanted to say this. There's a book by Brad Bigney called Gospel Treason. Highly recommend it. It's a book on how we create hidden idols. And he defines worship as whatever we dwell on, whatever we fixate on, whatever we pursue and think about and daydream about.

Basically, the orientation of our hearts. Whatever we're normally going after. I've always appreciated that definition of worship because we have to define it where it's more than just singing. We're going to be worshipping for all eternity.

It's not just singing in a choir. It's not just singing to music or to the right lyrics. Worship is really the orientation of our life. And if that's the case, then a lot of these issues that we're discussing are an issue of, are we worshipping the right God?

So, I just wanted to throw that out there. Speaking of worshipping, these behaviors don't happen in isolation. It's going to, I mean, I'm sure you're seeing in your counseling ministry, you're seeing the impact that it has on families.

And I guess you're trying to help do damage control and correct some of those behaviors. But it's not just our families and our co-workers. You know, for those of us who are Christians are in the church, this is these coping mechanisms or these behaviors are going to show up there as well.

Authenticity in the Church Versus Performance and Consumer Christianity

Now, most people, when they go to church on Sundays, we tend to put on our best behavior. You may have been screaming and fussing with the wife in the car all the way to the church building. But as soon as you walk in the doors, everybody's all smiles.

But how do you think this is showing up in the church? Well, what you just described is part of what I mentioned in the podcast, right? We're fake. The persona you were talking about. The persona. So, I played a clip of a part of an interview with a man named Chase Hughes.

He's not a believer. He's an old intelligence agent that talks about facial expression, tone, how to handle manipulators, body language, that kind of thing. And in his clip, he was saying that there's an epidemic of loneliness, which I found to be very much in tandem with hopelessness.

And he said that the pandemic of loneliness is due to the fact that everyone's trying to be this thing that they see on social media. They're trying to create this persona, right? Which is literally means a mask that everyone views them as.

But even if they achieve it, when someone says, hey, you do that really well, if they know that's not who they really are, then even that makes them feel more lonely because no one really sees who they really are.

That is crept its way into the church in a major way. I mean, you and I both have been a part of churches where you walk in and you can almost feel it like everyone's on their best behavior. And so I'll tell you, based on my background, when I walk into an environment like that, what I feel is that nobody here is trustworthy.

It's all fake. It's all fake, man. I mean, the red flags are everywhere, right now. A lot of times people think that the antidote to that is to walk in a church and air all your dirty laundry all the time, too, right?

And that's not the solution. Being the person that walks in like, well, I had a fight again. My kids are the worst. That's also the guy you're like, whoa, buddy, you're kind of running and dodging from that guy or woman as well.

So the antidote is not just to be loud and obnoxious or air kind of all of the faults and feelings you have about everything all the time. That's not the solution. But there needs to be an authenticity, especially for believers, that I think we have lost by trying, and we've lost it with the best intentions.

Because I really do believe for most people, our intentions were to reverence the gathering of God's people, to be reverent. I think that for some people, in their minds, it's a pursuit of godliness, of righteousness, of holiness.

But there's a ditch on both sides of the road. The one is a licentious life where you just say grace covers everything, and the other ditch on the other side of the road is a legalistic life where you say, I want to be holy, and this is what it looks like, and if you don't join me, you're bad.

And I'll tell you what, it's been my experience that finding a church that's truly in the middle of those two extremes is not an easy thing to do. You're exactly right. Because the way is narrow, and few there are that find it.

And so trying to walk that road, it's very difficult. But I think that authenticity comes when we take Christ seriously, and when humility defines us. So let me make a connection, and you see if you think it's valid.

I was really struck when I watched your follow-up podcast about the contrast between isolating yourself all week long and then going to church and having to be around people. Do you think, or let me phrase it as a statement so you can evaluate it.