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Manhood often feels like navigating through uncharted territory, but you don't have to walk alone. Join us as we guide a conversation about how to live intentionally so that we can join God in reclaiming the masculine restorative presence he designed us to live out. Laugh, cry, and wonder with us as we explore the ins and outs of manhood together.
Jeremy Williamson: Wrestling With God En Español
00:00
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Restorative Man podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Jesse French, and yeah, excited to be joined by my good friend, Cody Buriff. Cody, how are you today? Hey, you're doing all right, Jesse. How are you? I'm good, man. I hate the cliche like intro of where, you know, we're excited for the conversation that we have today. That's true. It makes me think of like the pro athletes who get interviewed, right? And their responses are just so like canned and cliche, like, oh, we got to try hard.
00:29
So I feel a little bit of that of the, I'm really excited for our conversation, but it's true and so I need some fresher words. Yeah, today's conversation will be fun. I'll put it that way. How's that for super unique? Sure, that works. I definitely will be fun. I'm excited because today we're gonna be joined by Jeremy Williamson, who also works for Restoration Project. We get to work with Jeremy regularly all the time. He is in charge of all of our experiences and making sure those get architected well and.
00:56
led well and guided and all that. And so Jeremy, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thank you. Thanks both of you guys, Jesse and Cody. And I have to say too, feels like, yeah, really looking forward to this conversation. And I also feel like I'm just chatting with two of my closest friends. So this is easy. So good. Yeah, totally, totally. Well, today, this conversation and today, we were talking about a few minutes before we hit the record button. But we want to explore something kind of different. Jeremy doesn't get to talk about this a lot. But if you have ever been on a trip,
01:25
with Jeremy or had a Mexican restaurant maybe even. You maybe have noticed that he is really good at speaking Spanish. And so this summer I got to do Trek in Costa Rica with Jeremy and got to experience all of Jeremy's incredible linguistic skills as he engaged with people from Costa Rica and Cuba and all over the place. And something about him came alive. Like there's a sparkle in his eye.
01:53
that you don't normally get to see when he's in those situations talking with natives and locals and utilizing his Spanish skills. And I think he just has a super deep love for Hispanic culture, for Latino culture and for the people. And so Jeremy, I want to just kind of tee you up. I think one of the questions that we have for you today is just kind of how the heck did that happen? This little dude from Oregon and this little dude from Oregon.
02:22
Yes, I heard it. All right. I'm picturing young Jeremy is like, I'm right. That's all good. I don't know. Back later. End up becoming like super fluent in Spanish. That is a really good question. And I have to I just have to push back on one thing you said. Most of the time, if you go to a Mexican restaurant with me, you're not going to hear me speak in Spanish because I actually I never want to be that guy who's like, “hola!”
02:51
“Me gusta los tacos.”. And he doesn't even know. I just don't want everyone to be that guy. So unless I have a connection. But it does create this weird thing because, you know, every now and then I might ask like a server or there's this place here in town that I like to go. That is a great Mexican food. Where they're from. And sometimes they'll say a place in Mexico that I like super know really, really well. And I'm thinking in the back of my head, you think I'm just that.
03:19
white guy who tries to speak Spanish in the Mexican restaurant. Actually, I know so much about your town. I could tell you, like, you know, where the best taco stops are. I've been in churches. I've watched your streets. And there's a big part of that that's really close to my heart. And so, I mean, this whole thing about speaking Spanish is something that I hold. I think it means a lot to me. I don't really hold it on the outside that much because I think it's so easy for it to come across as arrogant or show off, which I totally have done that.
03:50
Totally have done that before, have been in like the, I've used it to show off, 100%. But I don't, I hate that, I hate the way that feels. And it means way more to me than just, just like a talent or something that I would show off at a talent show, it's not like that. And I think, you know, to start to answer your question, Cody, that's where this started. I think it probably actually, like the deep beginning of this in my life began my mom's foster parents. So my mom had a kind of a traumatic childhood
04:19
ended up spending the last few years of high school with the foster family. They adopted her and us not technically adopted, but they were like some of my grandparents growing up. They stayed connected. I'm still connected. I did my mom's foster dad's funeral, still connected with her foster mom. And she asked me if I would do her funeral. So very connected. Anyways, they got us, we always had a subscription to National Geographic. And so so many hours of my childhood,
04:48
because we were too poor for cable and only had like the first Nintendo. So, and I just had like the woods that I could go play in outside and I had National Geographic. And so I had the world map that comes with the subscription once a year. You get like a really cool world map. I had it thumb-tacked to my ceiling above my bed and I would just lay in bed and memorize countries and look through National Geographic. I just always kind of fascinated by people who were different than me and lived in places that were different than where I lived.
05:17
So I think that's kind of the genesis of it, to put it really simply. But then something happened, I think my freshman year in high school. I took Spanish I, and man, I'm going to just say it felt supernatural. Both of them, like, go ahead, Jess. Let me just interrupt you. Like, just the process of learning this new language, like just the opening of that whole new world. I feel like that's pretty unique. As a freshman in Spanish, I also took Spanish as a freshman, and that was not my experience at all, right? It was just the total prereq.
05:46
And so, yeah, take us inside of that. So like that is also my my experience with my kids. So I have got a senior in high school and a freshman in high school. They both have been through Spanish this morning. Like my son, Gabriel, who's in Spanish right now, he doesn't speak a little. I mean, he's trying and like I'm driving him to school this morning, like 6:30. And he's like, what is this tenor thing? Tenace, tenor, ten tenor, tango.
06:10
And I'm just like, and this is his second time through Spanish one. And I was like, well, what does your teacher teach you? And he goes, well, last time we were in class, he was telling us about the difference between the Spanish version of Pendejo in the Spain, like the Mexican version of Pendejo and the Spain version of Pendejo. And I was like, OK, no wonder you don't know how to use the word Pendejo. You're just talking about. And he goes, my son goes, yeah, I asked him if there's a different word for puta. And I was like, stop. You can't you can't say that.
06:38
That's an actual cuss word and it hurts my soul, bro. Anyways. Yeah. So you're here. He is related to you. Anyways. Yeah. So, dude, I loved it, Jesse, to go like it clicked. And I have clear memories of sitting out on my back deck talking to my cat. I was too embarrassed to talk to anybody else, but I talked to my dog and my cat in Spanish all the time. I would just sit down and have conversations.
07:06
I talked to myself, talked to my pets and yeah, loved it. And so that, I think at the same time, my love for Latin America and people who are Latino just really started to click inside of me in a way that it felt more like a calling than something I was just kind of interested in. So where it is. So that's in high school. Yeah, so I'm assuming you just like continued to take Spanish classes. That's a weird story. So I grew up in Oregon in a tiny town.
07:33
And the Spanish one teacher also taught Spanish too. And she was just like some white lady that spent the summer in Mexico once. Like she didn't, I think there's so many Spanish teachers like that in the world. So I got the Spanish one, my sophomore year, started Spanish too. And I sit down on like the first week of school and I'm looking through the notebook that we're gonna use. And it's just like all of the curriculum for the whole year is just in this book. I skipped to the end and I'm flipping through the whole thing. And I'm like, crap, I already know this. And I...
08:02
you guys know something about me. Like I don't like to waste time. I mean, I'm kind of intense about things sometimes. So I go to my teacher and I'm like, hey, I think I already know all this stuff. And she rolls her eyes and acts like I'm just being arrogant. And so I'm kind of fighting her on it. Eventually I talked to the principal and I just go above her head, which is what I do. I just get what I mean. On brand, on brand, here we go. And so I go to the head, go to the principal and there was an agreement that was made begrudgingly that if I could, so there's a different teacher for Spanish three.
08:31
who actually was, I think she was from Spain. And the agreement was if I could pass the first semester final for the Spanish three class without studying, like if I could just walk in that day and sit down and pass their final, that they would let me switch classes. And so that went really well, ace the final and switch to Spanish three. And then that just kept going. I bought a Bible in Spanish and started reading the Bible in Spanish. Started learning songs in Spanish. I don't know, it just became kind of a thing.
09:00
that really, really connected with my heart. Wow, that's pretty awesome. I know, like my boys, so I've got two freshmen right now and they dread it. You know, it's like the class they like least is Spanish class. And I'm like, so I and I've got opinions about this. Like, I don't want to go into it now to be boring for people. But the way we teach language in the United States is so dumb because people don't you learn a language as a little kid by looking at an object.
09:29
and then somebody says a word associated with an actual physical thing. In the United States, we're like chair, see you like we don't we try to learn a language from a language instead of the way that like a baby would learn a language. I will go in. But I think there's a reason why everybody takes two years of Spanish and doesn't remember anything. That makes sense. Yeah. All right. So I know that there's a ton of stories from your early adult life, like post high school.
09:56
where God used your love for Spanish and kind of called you into some spaces. You want to tell us some of those? Yeah, that's so good, Cody. So by the time I get out of high school, I'm just like this ball of passion and fire and fervor. And I actually graduated high school a year early because I was just so ready to get into ministry. So I skipped my junior year, went right to my senior year and ended up moving to El Salvador when I had just turned 19, I think. And so, man, I...
10:24
went down there just really to be a part of this just incredible ministry called Castillo del Rey, really well known in El Salvador and reaching just tens and tens of thousands of kids every day. I wanted to be a part of that, so I moved down there just as if I could scrub toilets and they happen to have a thing that I could jump in on. I went down there just really believing that it was going to be kind of the best year of my life, the best season of my life. To be honest, by the time I left,
10:51
around a year later, I actually wasn't sure that God existed and wasn't sure that God even loved me, if he did exist. You know, we ended up, just some team dynamics there were really hard. I ended up living like for several of those months, like all of the American team that were down there with me kind of fell apart and went home. So there was just me and the Salvadorans. And even there, there was like some really intense stuff I can get into, which is guys accusing me of stuff.
11:21
literally telling me to my face, like, we hate you. There was one guy, Alberto, who was like, you are the ugliest guy I have ever seen in my life. I have never seen someone as ugly as you. And he was like, dead serious. And like, that was so weird, but also like, okay. And there ended up being like a 7.0 earthquake while I was there and lots of death and lots of destruction. And so we went from trying to do kids ministry to doing like disaster relief and.
11:50
long days and long nights and lots of death and lots of sadness and lots of rubble and lots of people with probably mental health issues as a result of that that didn't know what they were struggling with. And so it was crazy, dude. I literally, we took a road trip one time down in Nicaragua and I was down just by Managua. And I remember walking outside thinking, like, God, I don't, we were doing a clinic for sick kids and I was working with the doctors kind of helping translate. And I remember thinking like, God, I don't think anymore that you're real.
12:19
I think if you are, I don't think you love me because I don't see you healing people. I don't see you moving. I don't see you using me for anything worthwhile. I was so passionate about these people and it seems like they actually hate me. And so I don't, I don't know. This isn't anything like what I thought it was going to be. Jeremy, what was it like to be in a different country and to actually experience a different culture? So obviously the language side of things had been years of learning that and growing that competency, but to actually move from Oregon down to El Salvador.
12:48
and to experience a piece of Latin American culture. What was that side of it like for you to be able to add that piece of stuff to the language side of things? I really love that question. And I think this is actually, there's something in this that I think is important for all of us. And even as a culture as Americans, as we think about things that are going on around the world. I had no idea, Jesse. I thought that these are basically like people generally like me who just use different words to describe things. I could
13:18
life, different like customs and use different money and different economic situation. But actually, everything is different. The way that you see the world, the way that you think about people, the way that you think about the roles of men and women and friends and love and God and everything is different, it is a completely different lens. And so I went down with so much hubris and pride just thinking like, oh, I've got the language, I've got this and I didn't.
13:47
did not even a little bit. And I would say even after a year of living there, not even a little bit. And I spent 10 years living around and working in and around Mexico. And I would say as much as I feel really comfortable with Mexican culture and Salvadorian culture now, Central American culture, there's so much, I don't know. And I'll never know. I can't know. And so I think it felt really helpless to be honest, because that's not something you can learn. I think it's something you can live for a long time.
14:15
and eventually assimilate into it, but it's not something that you can learn. It's something I think to just know about and respect and honor and try to learn. Yeah. Well, especially I'd imagine too, is an 18, 19 year old, right? That comes with so much in your words, right? Like passion and excitement around this and to step into a place that is like so much disorientation on a lot of levels, right? I mean, yeah. You know, culturally, spiritually, like all of those pieces. That's a big old hand. That's a massive shock, I'm sure.
14:45
to the system. Dude, it scraped me down to just like my bones. I have this memory that I talk about, I think, I don't know, I don't actually talk about it. I don't know, maybe you guys have heard me say this before, but there's this one after the earthquake, I lived on the side of a volcano, a San Salvador volcano. And during all the aftershocks, the volcano started to become active and just smoke. And I didn't know anything about it. I just was sure I was going to die. And so my, the guy that I lived with had gone home to Ohio and I'm sitting there alone.
15:14
19 years old, earthquakes, volcanoes smoking right behind me. I'm just, my head tells me I'm going to die. And I remember thinking like, and there's no one that cares. Like, and I am literally utterly alone. I think I ended up calling my grandma for some reason. Didn't think to call my parents. Didn't think to talk to a friend. Didn't have a friend to talk to. Just, I did use that experience to take all of my fire and passion and youth.
15:42
And for whatever reason, just, I'll just say that again, like scrape everything off down in my bones to where I just, I had a lot of pain and a lot of questions. I'm curious, Jeremy. So I'm hearing bits and pieces of your story. It sounds like, you know, 19 years old going somewhere where he doesn't know anybody, doesn't really understand anything, thinks he might, but doesn't really, doesn't necessarily have a ton of friends to call when he's in a crisis. And so in, in so many ways, kind of like, I mean, an outsider.
16:13
Really? Yeah. And then stepping into that space and having everything stripped away. I mean as a 19 year old, 20 year old, like that's most 19, 20 year olds are like either like partying at college or screwing around or dating some girls or what, you know, whatever. How do you think that impacted you? I mean in hindsight looking back, whatever, 20 something years ago, like how did that shift the trajectory of your life?
16:39
I wish that I could say that I had this really positive epiphany and my life changed for the better. I actually responded pretty predictably for people who know me. I had the guy that the missionary's name is Don Triplett. He's a freaking hero. He's amazing. He's not a perfect man, but he's amazing. He's still down there. In fact, my middle child, my son Gabriel wants to go do what I did and live with Don Triplett in El Salvador. I would let him. I love the Triplett's. I heard Don saying, Don, who's like a Vietnam vet, like
17:09
friggin amazing missionary, grew up in Central America. Don said he was starting a ministry called La Ultima Cosecha, which means the last harvest. And this group of people had to be ready to be martyred. And they, I'm right, and they were going to go to every country in the Western hemisphere, well at least like North America, Central America, South America, and bring the gospel. And they had to be ready to like sleep in tents, go without food, just like live this life and preach the gospel to people who needed to hear it.
17:39
So the politics of the organization and the fact that I was a gringo, I wasn't really allowed to do it. I wrote letters to people who needed to get letters to the denomination, the national, actually the global leadership of the denomination. I said, Hey, this is why you're going to let me do this. And he did. And then I got, I figured it out, but I kind of forced my way into this thing that was really intense. And so we came to the United States and we traveled all around the United States preaching. And then we went into Mexico and then we went, we drove from South Texas all the way back to El Salvador.
18:08
So we went through Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. And eventually the team fell apart, got really bad. It was pretty ugly. We didn't make it into South America. But I just basically responded to answer your question. I responded to my loneliness by saying, watch me. I'll just do something more incensed. I'll just go ahead and be lonely, be the only white guy on a team of like 13 and I'll just embrace martyrdom and a life of intensity and loneliness. Watch me, I'll be fine kind of thing.
18:39
hearing just kind of the snippets that you've shared, I would guess a fair conclusion could be having gone through El Salvador like this super hard year, like this brutal year on so many levels, and you talk about your response to the intensity and the fact that that was like this positive thing, but this really, really driven, huge requirements, like you poured so much of yourself out. Even just from like those two perspectives, like it would make sense to me if you came home and were like, dude, I don't want anything to do with
19:08
Latin American culture or the Spanish language, like those experiences were really hard and negative. I could understand if that was the response of, no thanks. And yet that isn't how it's played out. And so I'd love to just hear you talk about, it's this interesting dichotomy of some of the external things that you're going through were crazy, crazy hard. You talk about being like scraped down to the bones. And yet my sense is like the attachment and the fanning of the flame of your passion for this place, for this culture, for this
19:38
like is growing. And so talk a little bit about some of that process, some of that relationship between the external circumstance and what was happening in you internally, specifically as it relates to your relationship with Latin American culture, with the Spanish language. I think Jesse, I bet that we all have, I've never thought of this before. So like bear with me, I'm just making this up. I bet that we all have an, I can't not thing that lives in us. And I think that's one of mine.
20:06
I've got, I think I have maybe just one or two of those. I can't get rid of that. It is wired into the deepest parts of who I am. And so there's not a world where that just kind of fades and I start forgetting about it over time. Like I can't not. And maybe I, that's, I think it's a double negative. Maybe you're not supposed to say talk like that, but it just feels like I can't not be there. I can't not have relationships with the people in that part of the world. I can't, I can't.
20:35
It's that's just not going to happen. And I think another, another one of those things that came together in that season for me was like, I can't not do this thing, which is something about like speaking life and something in the realm of all use the word ministry. I can't not stand before people and speak truth. I can't not do that. And I can't not be connected to Latin America. And so that never felt optional to me.
21:04
I know, yeah, when I heard you talking, you know, a few minutes ago, it seemed like there's this total tension between the reality of like what's going on inside of you motivationally in terms of like, watch me, right? And I'm just gonna- Super unhealthy, by the way. Right? Yeah. If you're listening to this, don't do that. I'll be alone by myself for the rest of my life. Watch me. So there's the tension between that and there's also like, well, there's good work happening.
21:34
both like outside of you through you and in you in the midst of that, you know, crappy attitude, right? Like how do you explain like living through that and like what God is doing in your life and you know, at that point? I think it was like it was a part of a long journey to understand that I don't want to put this kind of feisty and rebellious sometimes. I mean, starting like I tell the story of.
22:02
fighting my way into Spanish three. And I didn't tell you the stories about the times that I sat with my principal to tell her how she could do a better job. But like I just always began with a challenge. It's one day she loved me. I think that was a part of a really long journey for me that was disorienting and and really gutting for a long time. But I've come to find peace with the fact that I heard somebody say it once. Every vehicle has like if you look under the hood of any vehicle, it's dirty.
22:32
There's mess and every organization, every human has some grit and dirt under the hood. And so for me to come to grips. And so there's like this saying of whatever organization that I work with. It's true. Whoever I am. It's true. The people that I most honor and respect in the world, the people that I look up to and are my heroes, they have, like I mentioned, Don Triplett, he's a phenomenal man, like million crowns for him in heaven.
22:59
and Him just like me, there's dirt under the hood. And even my understanding and my experience with God, God is perfect, don't get me wrong. But my experience and my limited understanding of Him, there's kind of mystery and dirt under the hood. And I think it's been a long journey for me to just to find peace. And I don't, I'm not gonna kid myself. Like, I still don't have total peace with that. But I'm learning that there's dirt under the hood. And like, dude, the minute we got to the United States, and that team that was telling me about La Ultima Cosecha, we get to the United States,
23:29
The second we get there, the lady who's the leader of our team, I won't say her name, the lady who's the leader of our team announces that she's secretly dating one of the guys on the team and that they will be leaving. We were in Miami. They will be leaving tonight since they got their visas in the United States. We got them for the first time onto American soil and they left. They disappeared. Wow. And they just, they basically used that opportunity to gain access to United States and they live in Los Angeles now. So I mean, I like.
23:59
And then, you know, a couple of weeks later, one of the guys molested one of the girls at night on the bus. Like this dream that I had of being a martyr and like the next jemilia and like doing great things for God, it started falling apart right away. Wow. And so the mess, the mess has never stopped. And I've just come to understand that is life. Ecclesiastes is real. And and that's OK. It's actually OK.
24:26
I mean, it's not okay. All those things that happened, but we have to come to a place where we find peace with them. Jeremy, how do you think that? I think I think there's such wisdom in that. And I think that pushes against, I think it's some really helpful ways. Some of the mentality that looks at like our passion, our gift. Calling is a big old loaded word. I'll throw it out there. But even your phrase of like, I can't not. I love that articulation. I think there can be a mentality that
24:55
When we look at those spaces to say, because it's my passion, because I care about it so much, that needs to be this road that is up and to the right and smooth. And if that's really what it is, the confirmation of that means that it's going to be really smooth. And I think what you're saying, right, is no, our passions are littered with suffering and that, you know, to use other people's language, like our wounding and our genius are like inextricable. And so...
25:22
For the people that are listening today and something comes to mind of like, Hey, this is what I would say is, is my camp not like, this is this thing that I is just deeply attached to who I am. Like what words would you offer around the holding of that based out of your own life of understanding that passion, that gifting, and I think you're getting at it with some of the like a mess under the hood. I think that's so helpful. What else would you say to that? I think a couple of things come to mind. I think about how sideways life gets.
25:50
when we're not doing our can't not and how that like energy and calling is going to come out sideways. It's going to express itself in frustration and depression and anxiousness and like there are probably some can't nots that we've been ignoring for a long time that that fire will never stop burning inside of us. It can't. And so I think I would invite people to just maybe spend some time around that thinking about that.
26:18
I feel like our relationship with disappointment is so complicated. And I wish that we all had, like I mentioned, ecclesiastes, I wish we all had the wisdom and the emotional maturity to be able to find the richness of God inside disappointment. Know a few couples who, this feels really fresh, but I know a few couples who found out around 20 weeks or so that the baby that they were caring and excited about had like a genetic disorder, like Trisomy 18 kind of a thing.
26:47
And was just having a conversation around what it's like to carry a child with the expectation that one day you'll wake up and there won't be a heartbeat or the child will be born and live for a few moments. And I know that's a really extreme example, but I think, you know, if we start to ask ourselves, like how, what is it like to engage with God in my disappointment and my disappointment of what my life has become of the way I have or haven't been able to do the things that I'm passionate about.
27:17
the way that my dreams have or haven't come true, like how I've been disappointed in the way that I fathered in the way that I've been a brother in the way that I've been a husband, disappointed in the way that God has been with me. And to learn to experience the richness in the disappointment about how much grime is under the hood actually, and to take probably a ton of faith, but to be able to meet God there and experience his presence in the midst of disappointment feels like a really important human experience.
27:46
and an experience in our relationship with God that I've come to believe I don't want to miss out on. I just hope that I have the maturity to be there for it and to sit patiently with it. That makes sense. Yeah. Say some more. Because a lot of me is disappointment can be the thing that is to be eliminated. Right? Like if you're doing it right to say, let's try to minimize that as much as you can. And yet you're saying, no, actually that. You can't though, Jesse. So you can't. So what do you want to do about that?
28:15
because you can't eliminate it. I mean, so what are you supposed to do just when it happens? Yeah, I think so much it's like bury the head in the sand, cover that in activity, you know, business, whatever. And yet you're inviting us to something else to like actually engage that. So just a little more of what that engagement of that disappointment opens up. Man, I think it looks something like I'm sad and I'm here. And...
28:44
I'm hearing my sadness and I'm angry and I'm here and I'm hearing my anger and I'm confused and I'm hearing my confusion. It feels like I can't see the next step. So I'm hearing the darkness of night, but I'm here. One author said, this author, I forget her name, but I think the book she wrote is Learning to Walk in the Dark. And she said something really powerful. That was that God is no less God when the sun goes down. Like he is the God of night as much as he's the God of day. And so.
29:13
You mentioned what it's like to try to avoid disappointment, try to make it not happen. And when we live with that posture and disappointment inevitably arrives, then we try to avoid what it feels like to be disappointed and we soothe or dissociate and move on to the next thing or just bury it in town. But what if actually if God is the God of the night as much as he's the God of day, can he meet us in disappointment? And are there ways of knowing Jesus that exists there, that don't exist anywhere else?
29:43
that we can know him in no dimensions of him and his goodness in our disappointment in ways that we could never know in our joy. And so like, I think what it means is to be still and to sit, to be willing to be patient and sit in our disappointment the way that like Joe baby sat in his ashes, just in the ashes, just here in it. Yeah. I think Jeremy, as you're talking about it, what comes to mind is that it's a kind of a cyclical thing in our lives.
30:13
It's not like, oh, there's this one dark night of the soul necessarily. You know, often there is like a big thing or whatever, but it seems to me that, you know, so for you, you kind of hit something crazy at 19, right? Where God stripped everything away from you and he does that for all of us, but it's kind of a cyclical thing of it almost seems like God over and over again allows us to be stripped of whatever it is that we're, you know, whether it's, you know, whatever we're worshipping or we're a pride or...
30:41
whatever it is so that we can sit in the disappointment and find him there. I mean, that's kind of feel like I'm coming to understand, I would say. Yeah. So I heard a pastor preach recently. He was preaching Hebrews 11, which is one of my favorite chapters to preach on. He read I'd never seen this before. I'm just going to read really fast. So if I go to Hebrews, here we go. I feel like I have stage fright trying to look up a Bible verse in front of you guys. Here we go. So he's like this writer is talking about all these incredible people. And he says,
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toward the end and he goes, and what should I say? Like, man, what about the, I don't even have time to talk about Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah and David and Samuel and the prophets who through faith conquered kingdoms. They enforced justice, they obtained promises, they stopped the mouth of lions, they quenched the power of fire, they escaped to the edge of the sword, they were made strong out of weakness. He goes on, foreign armies were put to flight, women received their dead back to life through resurrection. And he's like all of these amazing heroes. And then the next verse, others suffered mocking.
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and flogging and chains. I don't know why I feel really emotional reading this and imprisonment and they were stoned and they were sawn in half and they were killed by the sword and they went about in the skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted and mistreated. And then in verse 38, he says, and the world was not worthy of them. And it's just like, those people were not the ones, Isaiah is the prophet who was sawn in two and Isaiah was not abandoned by God.
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ever. And there was something about his life that maybe felt really disappointing that we could say was a disappointment. And he pointed the way to the Messiah in a way that no other prophet really did. But his life ended terribly. And I just wonder how he might have experienced like the goodness and the nearness of God even in his disappointment. I don't like that. Yeah. I mean, that's simple. It was like, I don't want to experience a
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I don't want to experience the stripping away. I don't want to experience the darkness. You know, everything in me wants to run away from that. And it feels like until, I'll speak for myself, until I'm able to get to a point of being like, willing to be there and almost befriending it, there is a major, maybe the most significant piece of knowing God, you know, that there is. That's the only place it's available. And I-
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part of me, there's part of me that's like, okay, let's go. And there's a huge part of me that's like, forget that I'm out of here. And I just sense that wrestling in there, you know, really agree Cody. And yet I feel like I bet the three of us can name moments when we've been around others who are willing to be in that space and aren't fleeing. And it is, it's like, holy, it is, it is. And it feels so
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counter everything that is intuitive to living life. And yet the people that have been willing to offer that and live that, it is holy. I agree. As we kind of bring this conversation to a close, first of all, thank you for your willingness to share your own heart and your own passion, your own tears. Like thank you for the time with us today. Like to borrow a phrase from a friend of ours, like what feels important for you? Like as, yeah, as you think about the arc of this conversation, what would you want to end as we wrap up?
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I think some of Chris's words and Sage are just feeling relevant to me right now, just even as I sit with myself and all of this. And there is like a settling in I think that we're talking about right now, like a settling into who I actually am. I have no idea. I don't live in Latin America right now. I have no idea. I don't understand right now why that's so still such a fire inside of me, but I can
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the full man and little boy that God made me to be and settle into hardship and settle into disappointment. I think the season to me of trying to build and conquer and make like towers and monuments is kind of way less important. Maybe coming to a close, maybe it's already gone as I just settle into being more and more comfortable with who I am and the things that I can't not do. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for the time today and for your words, through your friendship.
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Yeah. So good to be here. Feels like a gift. Thanks, Cody. Yeah, thanks. So good to be with you guys. Thanks, man. Look forward to the next one.