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In Ecclesiastes 3:11, we read that God makes everything beautiful in its time. It is comforting to know that nothing is wasted in God's economy, but all of it will be used for our good and His glory. You're invited to join us for poignant conversations and compelling interviews centered on believing for His beauty in every season.
Shannon Scott (00:02)
Hey friends, so glad that you're here today. And when I say I'm glad that you're here, I am genuinely glad. It means so much to me that you take the time to listen to the Everything Made Beautiful podcast. Just know that I don't take it for granted. And today's episode is a personal one, like maybe the most personal one I've ever done. ⁓ because yesterday was Father's Day. And coincidentally, I am turning 50.
On July 1st, 50. ⁓ and those two things landing kind of in the same season within two weeks of each other has had me in my feelings, but in the best possible way, because my dad has been on my mind constantly. His name was Kent Merrill, M-E-R-R-I-L-L Richards. And I looked up his name once, and Merrill means bright sea.
And I just think that tracks completely with my dad. ⁓ he went to be with Jesus in February of twenty eighteen. And I want to tell you, not a week goes by that I don't think about something he said or something he modeled or some way he showed up that frankly I'm still learning from. You know, and the funny thing about grief, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, is that it doesn't get smaller exactly. You just get bigger around it.
And at 50, having now been in full-time ministry over several decades, having navigated some seasons I genuinely could not have anticipated, and recently having moved to six acres in the Tennessee woods and starting to really figure out who I am when I'm not defined by what I produce, I find myself returning to him constantly and to the things he taught me and to the way he lived. So here's what we're gonna do today.
in February of twenty eighteen, when dad went to be with Jesus, I stood up at his Celebration of Life service and I delivered a eulogy. I fought my brother, Ryan, about who would go first. He's bigger, so he won, which got me pretty emotional. ⁓ that should tell you something about both of us that he won anyway, even though I'm older.
But I'm gonna read that eulogy to you today. But after each of these 10 things that I learned from Kent Richards, I'm gonna stop and tell you what that particular lesson looks like from where I'm standing right now in 2026 at just a few days shy of 50 years old. ⁓ if your dad is still here, I hope this episode makes you call him. If you guys have a good, healthy, safe relationship. And if your dad's not still here,
Then I hope maybe this will feel like good company for you. Okay, here we go. The first of ten things that I learned from my dad. Number one, just look like you know what you're doing. Whether it was hospitals or various other restricted areas, dad paid no attention to signs saying no more than two visitors or restricted access or really any other warning.
They literally had no effect on him. We'd just walk up to a door like that and he'd say, just look like you know what you're doing. It worked every time. I am a compulsive rule follower, so I would never walk through a door marked with a warning. But when I'm nervous, feeling ill-equipped, or like I don't belong, I think of those words and I decide to just look like I know what I'm doing. And eventually people believe I do know what I'm doing.
Okay, so present day. I want to sit here for a second because I think about this one a lot. To be clear, Dad wasn't teaching me to fake it. Because there's a version of just look like you know what you're doing that becomes performance, and performance will hollow you out faster than almost anything else I know. But what he was actually teaching me was move anyway. In the face of fear.
In the face of inadequacy, to not let the feeling of not belonging become the reason you don't walk through the door. I've stood on stages and in rooms where I was absolutely certain someone had made a catastrophic error in judgment by putting me there. But every single time I heard him and I went anyway. And here's what I've learned. The confidence was never supposed to be in me. It was always supposed to be in the one who sent me through the door.
Philippians 4 13, you guys know it, but it doesn't say I can do all things because I feel really prepared. It says I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. And I don't mean like a bumper sticker. I mean like that's the operating system. So two things are true simultaneously. I am profoundly unqualified by my own merit, and I have been called to do it anyway.
Dad knew that about himself. He walked through the door, and I am trying to do the same. The second thing I read that day: don't see how close to the line you can get, see how far away you can stay. In setting boundaries, fleeing temptations and the like, Dad used to say, Why would you see how close you can get without falling over the line? Wisdom sets the boundary and then sets a second boundary.
Even further back. And dad did this, and I would say he did it perfectly. In the 41 years I knew my dad, there was never even one integrity issue. There was none of the sea unseemly or regrettable behavior so often lurking in the backgrounds of pastors, teachers, worship leaders. My dad was exceedingly wise and his integrity and character marked him.
And now I can say we live in an age that sprints toward every line and then acts genuinely surprised when people fall over it. And I have watched, and I mean up close over those decades in ministry, what happens when leaders don't build the second fence? It is not pretty and it is not rare. Here's what I have just come to understand, I think, through so much observation and so ⁓
Often being up close to really high quality, high caliber leaders, but having been in some situations where I saw those leaders make a really regrettable choice. Proximity to temptation is itself a choice. It doesn't just happen to you. You make a series of small decisions that get you close to the line, and then you act like the line is the problem.
But Proverbs 423 says to guard your heart above everything else, because everything flows from it. That's not passive. That's a literal active architecture. You have to build on purpose before you need it. My dad had 50 years in full-time ministry and zero integrity failures. I didn't fully understand what I was watching when I was in it, but I do now.
That kind of track record doesn't happen by accident and it doesn't happen by willpower alone. It happens because a person decided early and often where their actual boundaries were and then backed up from there. I want to be that person. By God's grace, I want to build the second fence. Third thing I learned: if you're not laughing, you're not doing it right.
Y'all, nobody could time a quip better than my dad. Now my brother carries on this legacy, and my uncle is the well known humor connoisseur of the family. That's my dad's brother. His eyes twinkle and there is constant mischief up his sleeve. My dad, though, he would shock you with a zinger out of left field, and it would always be perfectly worded.
My favorite times were the ones when he would make mom double over with tears streaming down her face from laughing. Over the years, the inside jokes have piled up in our family, and they are treasures for us now. For Kent Richards, life and faith were fun.
And now I can look at this and and say very, very resolutely that I don't think we talk enough about joy as a theological category. I don't mean happiness. Happiness can be real circumstantial and really pretty fickle. But joy, the kind that coexists with genuinely hard things, the kind that doesn't require everything to be going well in order to show up, that is a theological category.
Nehemiah 8.10 tells us the joy of the Lord is our strength. And for a long time, I read that as an instruction to manufacture something like be happy, produce the joy, display the joy, make sure everyone can see the joy. But what I actually watched modeled my entire life was something completely different. It was joy that was received, stewarded, and then deployed in the best way possible, kind of as an act of defiance against.
Cynicism and despair. Dad's laughter wasn't escapism. He wasn't living in a dream world where nothing was hard. It was resistance. He was a man who had seen the worst of human behavior, navigated genuinely painful seasons, and still chose, and I think actively and repeatedly chose to find the funny thing. To be the person who made his wife cry laughing and to keep the mischief going.
I wanna be that person. I'm I'm working on it. And I think the world and honestly the church could use a lot more people who understand that joy is not the absence of hard things, but it is what's gonna carry you through them. I've had some people say to me that if my career in ministry dries up, I could maybe try stand-up comedy. And I kinda tip my cap to my dad if people find me funny.
The fourth thing I learned from dad don't just do it good if you can do it better. Details matter. More than one print job was thrown into the trash entirely because of a small error on margins or typesetting. My dad ran the print ministry for Charles Stanley and In Touch for many, many, many decades at First Baptist Atlanta. So he was a pastor on staff, he taught
The largest Sunday school at the church and would often teach and preach. But his nine to five, his Monday through Friday, was that he was a printer by trade. He had actually run ⁓ print ministries for lots of well known people. But the one that I was living in and most familiar with was the one at First Baptist and In Touch. And to him,
details mattered. They were producing thousands and thousands of print jobs ⁓ every week, all the time. Okay, that was an aside. I didn't read that at the Celebration of Life because people knew that. But just so you knew it, that is what the print jobs I'm referring to are. Because he thought it shouldn't just be good if it can be better. He also brought this to his Bible teaching. He could have gotten up and shot from the hip.
He had the Bible knowledge and the seminary training and all of that to do it. But he studied for hours on end ahead of teaching Sunday school or speaking in church because it could always be better. For me, as a perfectionist, I've had to know that it'll rarely be perfect, but if I've made it better, that's enough. For the rest of it, I just look like I know what I'm doing. I'm kidding a little bit. But you always knew.
That whether Dad was teaching or printing, you were receiving the fruit of this philosophy. Don't just do it good if you can do it better. Now, eight years away from that day, I've had to do some real work on this one over the years because I inherited both the philosophy and the perfectionism. And those two things together can be a genuinely exhausting combination to live with.
Here's the distinction I've had to learn, and I mean really learn, not just kind of like intellectually agree with. Excellence and perfectionism look really similar from the outside, but they come from completely different places inside. Excellence asks, is this the best I can offer the people in this room? Perfectionism asks, is this good enough to protect me from criticism?
So one is outward facing for the good of other people. The other, frankly, is just fear with better posture. What I watched my dad model was excellence, pure and simple. Hours of preparation for a Sunday school class that nobody was grading. A print job in the trash over a margin error that most people would never have noticed, not because he was afraid of being judged, but because the work mattered and the people receiving it mattered.
That's a completely different thing. And I've carried it into every manuscript, every message, every episode of this podcast. So not all of it lands perfectly. It never will, but I can always make it better. And better, not perfect, is a standard worth holding. The fifth thing I learned from dad, cultivate relational equity and use nicknames.
Dad nicknamed those closest to him, unless he knew that they were too stuffy to receive it, of course. I think of my friend Catherine Fidelli, who was always and forever Katie Fiddledidi, and Linda Clover, who was always Lindy, so he in return was Kenty. He nicknamed all the grandchildren and most often called my mom Rita Sue. Ryan and I, my brother, have picked up this trait from him without even realizing it.
We have nicknames for one another, our spouses and children, as well as everyone in our circle of friends. As my children were being born, Dad informed me that it was fine for mom to be called Grandma, but he would prefer to be called O Great Wise One. Dad's nickname for me was Shinny. Mine for him was Diddy. He thought my little southern accent as a child made Daddy sound like Diddy, so he called me Shinny in return.
When I went to sit with him in hospice and he'd long since lost the ability to speak, he was still able to communicate in whispers. On the long drive from Nashville, I had prayed he'd greet me that way in hospice when I came in. So I came in, got right in his face, and said, Hey Diddy. And he whispered, Hey Shinny. And all was right with the world.
The nicknames of dad meant that you had relational equity with him. And relational equity with Kent Richards was of high value indeed. Nowadays, I still call my kids by names he never knew he'd passed down. I didn't even realize I'd inherited his entire system until a few years ago when I looked around at the people closest to me, and every single one of them had an alternate name from me.
You can ask almost everyone who's ever worked with me or been on a team of mine, and at some point I likely had nicknames for them. Ryan and I still do it. Our kids do it now, and it just keeps going. And I didn't fully have language for this when I was younger, but what dad was actually doing with the nicknames was making people feel specifically seen.
Not just like gen generally appreciated, specifically seen. There's a profound difference between those two things. A nickname says, I know you. You are not interchangeable to me with someone else. You are a particular person, and I have a particular name for you that belongs only to you in my world. That's relational equity that gets made really tangible.
And I've watched this principle prove itself out over and over again in ministry and in life. The people whose hard words actually landed for me, the feedback that genuinely changed something, every single one of them was someone who had already made significant deposits in the relational account before they ever tried to make a withdrawal, you know? You can't skip that step. You can try, but you'll just be a person with opinions that nobody asked for.
Relational equity isn't a strategy, it's love made specific and practiced consistently over a long period of time. And Dad was the best at it that I've ever seen. Point number six that I learned from Kent Richards: shared experiences matter more than fancy possessions.
Now, I didn't grow up in a house that was overwhelmed by stress or strung out from constant work with no rest. There was always a vacation we had just come back from and one we were looking forward to. Our family bonded over shared experiences and plenty of travel. Now, don't get me wrong, Dad did like the finer things. Therefore, there were timeshares everywhere and never a cramped hotel stay.
Ryan and I have grown to feel exactly the same way, only the best for the Richards clan. One week before any vacation for the last 18 years, Dad would call me and proclaim, Shinny, we're going on vacation. But mom and dad also generously shared their timeshares with anyone else who wanted or needed them. He knew the value of shared experiences with family. Those memories will now carry us.
Prioritize shared experiences with your people. You will not regret it. Now, today I'm sitting in a log cabin on six acres in the Tennessee Mountains writing this episode, and I can trace a direct line from his philosophy to this exact decision. Jeffrey and I could have made different choices along the way, and we didn't, and I have zero regrets about that. But here's what I've noticed at 50, and I mean
really noticed, not just nodded along to as a concept. The things I return to when I need to remember that my life has been rich and full and good, they are never things. Not one single time have I thought, I'm so glad we bought that. What I think about is the Braves game, the around the table moments, the trips,
The running jokes that need absolutely no explanation because we were all there when they were born. Those are the things that don't depreciate, they compound. Every year they're worth more, not less. I think that we as a people are in a genuine crisis of presence. We are so busy accumulating and achieving and optimizing that we're starving to death relationally.
Right in the middle of plenty of things. But he never did that. There was always a next thing to look forward to with the people he loved most. I want to live that way. Because he was right. You will not regret it, not once, not ever. The seventh thing I learned is let your gentleness be evident to all. Now that's actually from Philippians 4 5.
But Kent Richards embodied gentleness consistently, like no one I've ever known. I wouldn't know what a voice raised in anger even sounds like from him. Now, he was human and he experienced anger and frustration like any of us, but his sanctification was evident in his gentle spirit. He wasn't a pushover by any means. His strength was evidenced in his gentleness.
May we all learn this. I want to camp here for just a minute because I think gentleness is one of the misunderstood words in the Christian vocabulary. And we've somehow collectively decided that gentleness means soft or even conflict averse. So the person who never pushes back and always goes along and smooths everything over with a smile is gentle. But that's not gentleness, at least not biblical gentleness.
It's probably either people pleasing or fear, and neither of those shows up in the fruit of the spirit list. But Galatians 5 lists gentleness as a fruit of the spirit, which means two things at the same time. First, it's available to all of us through the same source. So that has nothing to do with our personality or our temperament. If gentleness is a fruit of the spirit, we get access to it because we have the spirit.
And second, it's produced. It doesn't just show up. It's produced like fruit. It is the slow result of a life submitted to the Spirit over a long, long time. What I watched was not a man who was naturally the gentlest person in the room. What I watched was a man who'd strength whose strength had been so thoroughly submitted to Jesus that it came out gentle on the other side. And that's very different.
I don't think this will be a surprise to anyone, but I am not naturally the gentlest person in any room. I have opinions, I know how to wield them, so I can't look at this legacy and say, well, some people are just wired that way and then leave it at that. No. Gentleness is available to me through the same spirit with the same power that raised Christ from the dead.
It just requires the same submission over the same long period of time. I'm still working on this one, which will shock no one. I suspect I always will be, but I know exactly what it looks like when it's done well because I watched it every single day of my life.
The eighth thing that I learned from Dad, there's a way to say hard things well. Dad knew exactly how to balance that delicate command that says to speak the truth in love. Because he was so good at cultivating relational equity, he had a built in receptive audience when he needed to say hard, true things. He did not shy away from truth or find it to be too inconvenient or irrelevant when it needed to be spoken.
But as one commenter on Facebook noted about Dad, he tells the tough truth calmly and then loves you through the remedy. That is in fact true. More than once, Dad had to say very hard things to me and my brother, let's be honest, more so to Ryan. But we never once doubted his immense love for us, nor his willingness to love us through the remedy. This world needs more people.
Who've developed the art of saying hard things well, like Kent Richards. Now, today, this many years of ministry has taught me that most people don't avoid hard conversations because they're unkind. They avoid them because they haven't done the relational work that makes a hard conversation receivable by the person. And so instead of saying the hard thing to the person who needs to hear it, we just say it to everyone else, which is just gossip.
But Ephesians 4.15 says, speak the truth in love. In my observation, most people do one without the other. All truth and no love, and now it's a sledgehammer. It might be technically accurate, but it's relationally devastating, and it almost never produces the change it was hoping for. But all love or all grace and no truth, and it's just comfort that leaves people exactly where they are, which is not love at all.
Neither of those is what Paul was describing. When I watched my dad, I watched someone who had done the relational work so thoroughly and so consistently that when the hard word came, it had somewhere to land. It landed on good soil because the soil had already been prepared. And here's the other thing: he didn't just say the hard thing and then be like, So I hope you get it together. No.
He loved you through the remedy. He didn't walk away. That phrase has stayed with me. Saying the hard thing is actually the easier part. Staying present after you've said it, walking with people through what comes next. That's where most people quietly exit, even with the best of intentions. But Dad never did. This world is desperate for people who have developed this particular art.
And I do want to be one of them. I want to be one of them so so badly.
The ninth thing I learned is that your upstream will either inform your future or infect it. So choose to let it inform. Now, this language is something I borrowed from my husband, but this was back, you know, eight years ago when dad went to be with Jesus and Jeff had already said this to me. And so consider the upstream was something that I was already using. But I watched dad live this out correctly.
He was in full-time ministry, just shy of 50 years, like I said, and ⁓ the things he saw, heard, and experienced. There were many things that happened around him, and there were also things that happened to him. Most of it was good, some of it was not. People behaved badly, there was wounding. His evident gentleness and unimpeachable integrity were infuriating to those looking for an easy out to getting rid of Kent Richards. But as it turns out,
Having ridiculously high integrity can make the less virtuous people around you rather uncomfortable. I know just how much one can see and experience in ministry. And at the end of the day, we are all a product of all that we've experienced, both good and bad. Whatever is in the upstream will have an impact on the downstream, but we get to determine that impact.
Dad made the choice to let all he'd experienced inform and teach rather than infect and torture. He knew that Jesus Christ was so much more than the sum of the misbehavior of his followers. Which brings me to the most important thing I've learned from my dad. But before we get there, I do just want to say I've done a whole podcast episode on this concept, considering the upstream.
Because I'm still living it and still learning it. And I want to be honest with you rather than tying it up really neatly. ⁓ having been on both sides of ministry in ways I did not frankly anticipate, even when I stood up and said those words in 2018, I have experienced and seen things that have required me to make this exact choice not once, but repeatedly.
Because the thing nobody tells you about choosing to let your upstream inform rather than infect is it's not a one time decision. It's a daily one, some days it's an hourly one. But think about Genesis 50, 20, when Joseph named this as he was looking at his brothers, the ones who sold him into slavery, the ones whose betrayal launched years of suffering that he did not deserve, and he said.
What you intended for evil, God intended for good. Now that's not Joseph going, ⁓ well, it's okay, it's fine. It's not denial, it's not pretending it didn't happen or that it didn't hurt, but it is refusing to let the evil have the final word. And that's the choice. And dad made it for so many years, quietly, consistently, without making it everyone else's problem.
And he came out of the other side with his love for Jesus and his love for the church completely intact. I watched it happen. I know it's possible. So on the days when it's hard, and some days it is genuinely hard, I think about this, and I choose all over again.
The tenth thing I learned from my dad, which was by no means the last thing, but is probably the most important thing. The gospel is life. Nothing and no one meant more to my dad than Jesus. He leveraged his life for the sake of the gospel. He raised his children in the truth of the gospel and got to see both Ryan and I surrender our lives to Jesus. His marriage to mom was a model gospel marriage. Every time he taught
Counseled or conversed, his speech was flavored by the gospel. My dad's love of the gospel of Jesus Christ was infectious, and I definitely caught it from him by the grace of God. A few years ago, this would have been ⁓ a few years ago then, I found myself ⁓ moving with my very young family to California. Jeffrey had a job as a worship pastor at a large church out there, and
My kids were tiny, in fact, Allie was still in my belly when we moved. And I found myself pretty quickly surrounded by a culture of people who were not from the Bible Belt. So having only ever been in a church that had a pastor with the last name Stanley up to that point, my faith was never questioned and everyone believed. Once in California, I realized pretty quickly that I needed to know not only what I believed, but why I believed it.
I didn't think because Dr. Stanley and Andy said so, it would take me very far. But my dad and Pastor John Krotz spent many hours on video chats with me or me and Jeffrey as we dug into the truth of the gospel for ourselves. I will always be so grateful for Dad's teaching of me well into adulthood. He was a born teacher. As my writing and speaking gifts began to be realized, dad was my biggest fan.
Fan, and he would read, listen to, or come to anywhere that I was speaking. When I would ask for feedback, he would say, I like that the gospel is central and that you're funny. Frankly, what anyone else thought didn't really matter to me at that point. God knows that I'm a words person and they mean so much to me. In saying goodbye to my dad for the last time,
I was really keenly aware of how much I would miss his words. I leaned over to him to hug him and tell him goodbye. And he whispered, stand up straight. I misunderstood and I said, You want me to sit you up straighter in the bed? And he whispered, No, I want you to stand up straight. So I did. And then he said, Preach well. I love you.
And those words will carry me the rest of my life. I will stand up straight and preach well as long as God gives me breath, because Diddy said so. Everything else on that list, one through nine, and everything that isn't there, is downstream of this one. Every single thing. The integrity, the gentleness, the joy, the relational equity, the shared experiences, the hard words said well. None of it holds its shape without a center.
And dad's was Jesus all the way down. What I didn't fully understand when I was younger was just how much I would need that foundation to be non-negotiable when the ground shifted. And the ground has shifted for me more than once. There have been seasons since then that required me to know, really know, not just assume what I actually believe and why. Not because someone told me, not because the culture around me reinforced it.
But because I had gone looking for it myself and found it to be true. Dad walked me into that patiently and thoroughly and with zero condescension and complete confidence that the gospel could hold up under my questions. And it always can. So here's what I know at just Shia 50 that I couldn't have articulated at 41. A life saturated in the good news of Jesus Christ.
Is the most contagious thing I've ever encountered. Not performative Christianity or cultural Christianity or Christianity as an identity or a tribe or an aesthetic, but the actual gospel, the death and resurrection of Jesus, the grace that is genuinely unearned, the love that will not let me go. When a person has actually been captured by that, you cannot spend time near them without catching some of it.
And that was Kent Merrill Richards, Bright Sea. I am standing up straight. I am preaching well by God's grace for as long as He gives me breath. And I want to tell you something that isn't in the eulogy as we close, something I've never said in a public way, really. But when Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2005, I was pregnant with Jack. Life felt so full of promise and new beginnings on the one hand and completely.
Blindsiding on the other. At some point early in the diagnosis, when we both knew there was no cure and we could see the road ahead, I was wrestling with God and out loud to my dad about it, demanding answers, wanting explanations that would make it make sense, asking where exactly the sovereignty of God was in a plan that would do this to a man who had given everything to the Lord.
But my dad's response stopped me cold, as it so often did. And he said, Shinny, if this is what God needs to use in my life to bring himself the most glory, why would I complain? I have never forgotten those words. Here was a man facing a progressive degenerative disease that would spend the next thirteen years slowly taking.
literally everything from him. And he was more concerned with God's glory than his own comfort. He wasn't fighting the sovereignty of God. He was resting in it. Even when it led somewhere he never would have chosen. I've been thinking about what it means to step into this next decade, carrying everything he gave me. The integrity he modeled, the joy he stewarded,
The gospel he leveraged his entire life for. The way he made every single person in his orbit feel specifically known and specifically loved. The second fence, the hard words said gently, the upstream chosen daily, faithfully, without fanfare, to inform rather than infect. And that response in that moment, resting in the sovereignty of God, when it leads you somewhere you never.
would have chosen. I am not Kent Richards. I will never be Kent Richards. But I'm Shinny. And Shinny is going to stand up straight and preach well and build the second fence and use the nicknames and laugh as much as possible and keep the gospel central for as long as God gives me breath. That's my inheritance and I plan to spend every last
bit of it. Thank you again for being here for this one, friends. It means a lot to me. And so to anyone who listens, you mean a lot to me. Thank you for letting me share my sweet dad with you. Don't forget to keep your eyes open for all the ways that God is making everything beautiful, including you. And I will see you next time.