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Your Memories Make You Who You Are (with Casey Tygrett) · The Daily Writer

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Hey friends, welcome to episode 84 of the Born to Create Podcast.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Ken Sanders, and I'm an author, professor, and creative consultant.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is the show where we explore the mindset, the habits, and the skills to help you make a bigger impact in your life and creative work.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Think about this simple yet complex question.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: What is the source of your identity as a person?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Is it your DNA, your family name, your personality, talent, titles, or achievements?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, my guest today gives us a surprising answer.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: He says that we are who we are because of our memories.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: His name is Casey Tigret, who is a writer and speaker living near Chicago, Illinois.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: He is the author of two books.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: The first one is called Becoming Curious A Spiritual Practice of Asking Questions, and his newest book is called, As I Recall, Discovering the Place of Memories in Our Spiritual Lives.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Both of those are excellent books.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Casey serves as the theologian in residence at Parkview Christian Church in Oreland Park, Illinois.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: He is also the host of the Otherwise podcast.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: He has one daughter, Bailey, and has been married to his wife Holly for 19 years.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: In our conversation, we cover a variety of fascinating topics, including Casey's role as a theologian in residence and spiritual director, why we must not neglect our spiritual lives.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: How memories write the scripts of our lives, and how we can begin rewriting our own scripts, Casey's experience of writing books and working with IVP, his publisher, and a lot more.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Whenever the show is over, be sure to check out the show notes at KentSanders.net slash podcast zero eight four.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Before we get into the conversation, though, I want to hit on a couple of quick things.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, uh I need to apologize to Casey because in the interview I actually mispronounced his name right there in the introduction, and I could not find a good way to edit that out.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just going to kind of give a blanket apology.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: I pronounced it as Casey Tigrette instead of Casey Tigret.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: So sorry about that, my friend.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Also, I want to make sure everyone knows about our Born to Create Facebook group.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: The creative journey is meant to be traveled with other people, and it's not meant to be traveled alone.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now, a Facebook group is not necessarily a substitute for relationships in your everyday life or in-person relationships, but it can be a great supplement.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, you can make great friends online.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: I have several friends in my life who I consider great friends who I've never actually met in person.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the places you can make great friends like this is through our Facebook group.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: So check it out at KentSanders.net slash Facebook Group, and that will redirect you directly to the Facebook group.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is a place where we encourage and inspire one another to do better creative work.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: So make sure and check it out.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Also, before we get into the interview, I want to go to our listener question segment.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a question submitted by my friend Stephen Below.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: He is a pastor at O'Fallon Christian Church in O'Fallon, Missouri, which is right next door to where I live in St.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: Peter's, Missouri.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Stephen is a member of my men's mojo mastermind group that meets every two weeks in person in St.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Charles, which is another city here in the area.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: So for those of you who are not familiar with the cities I'm talking about, it's totally okay.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: I know we have many listeners from other countries, and you're probably going, I have no idea where those towns are.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Totally okay, no sweat.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: But just know that Stephen is a friend online as well as in real life.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: And Stephen submitted a really insightful question.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: And his question is what's the value, if any, in a writing process?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Does it foster productivity or stifle creativity?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And man, that is a great question.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a firm believer that creativity needs boundaries and structure.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that some of the best ideas actually come from having limits.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: For example, if you remember the Apollo 13 mission from I believe it was the early 1970s.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: That was a situation where their spacecraft was damaged.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: They were going to land on the moon, but they couldn't because they had, I believe it was an oxygen leak.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: They had limited time and resources before they ran out of oxygen and basically were going to perish because they had to get all the CO2 out of the air.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: So the guys in mission control had to devise a way for them to filter that CO2 out of the air out of components that only they had on board.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, they had some pretty hard limitations in terms of how to actually make a filter.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: But they used what they had and they made it work.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the brilliant NASA engineers figured out a way to make that happen.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's one of the greatest rescue missions in history, I think.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Plus it's a really great movie.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now with this whole topic of creativity and writing, I think it's helpful to think like an engineer rather than as a free-flowing artist, at least some of the time.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's a time and a place for both things, but I have found that what works for me most of the time is thinking more like an engineer and not just as kind of a free-flowing person who just creates or writes whenever I feel like it.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: I believe that process is really important in our creative work.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: I love templates, I love outlines, and in fact what I'm using right now as I look at my notes for this podcast episode is a detailed template that I use for every podcast episode.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: When you listen to this episode, it's not an accident.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is planned out.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now I I don't just read from a strict script, I go off script sometimes and all that.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: However, I do have a plan, I have a template for how I'm going to make this podcast happen.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that writing in any creative work is very similar.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: When you use a template for writing, it makes the writing go a lot faster.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: But you can't produce creative ideas unless you're first creating something, and you probably won't create first unless you have a structure or a set time and a place to do it.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I think those limits, I think those times to create, those templates, those structures, those outlines, I think all those are a really, really critical part of writing, as well as any sort of creative process.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: For example, if you listen to popular music, almost every single pop song that you hear on the radio.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now this would include country and I don't know if it always includes hip-hop and rap necessarily, but most you know, pop and country and rock songs, they all follow a very strict formula.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: They have an intro, verse one chorus, verse two chorus, the bridge, then a couple of choruses, and maybe a key change in there somewhere.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: So they all follow a structure because the structure works.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: So let me give you some suggestions to help as you think about writing and developing a structure for your writing habit.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: I would suggest a specific time, whether it's late at night, during lunch, in the morning, whatever works for you, I think having a set time to write is really important.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Number two, having a specific place can really help because then when you sit down to write at that place, whether it's a kitchen table or a desk or a coffee shop, your mind kind of automatically goes into that creative mode.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: Number three, I think it's important to have an outline before you sit down to write.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now, there are times where free-flowing writing can be really helpful, but more often than not, I find that having some sort of structure or outline for what I'm going to write or create is really, really helpful because it helps things to go faster.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a scaffolding upon which you can hang your ideas.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: But it's hard to hang ideas anywhere where there's no scaffolding.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: So having that outline or that scaffolding or that framework really helps a lot.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, number four, I think it's important to have a goal, whether it's writing for a certain amount of time, or having some kind of specific word count.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: I find that for me, I love having a word count much better than I than I like having a time limit.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: So that word count really works for me.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Two good resources to help with developing a writing habit are uh number one is my great friend Jim Woods, is an expert on productivity and writing, and honestly, he's one of the very best writers that I know in my whole life.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's really, really gifted.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: He has a lot of great stuff.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: If you go to his website, it's Jim Woodswrites.com.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's J-I-M-W-O-O-D-S Rights.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: So W-R-I-T-E-S.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: I had to make sure I'm pronouncing I'm spelling that correctly.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Jim Woodswrites.com.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: He's got a lot of great resources there.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Also the book Atomic Habits by James Clear is very, very, very good.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's been one of the best books that I've read in really many years.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: So those two resources, I would definitely recommend those.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: So, Stephen, think through all this stuff, maybe pick one strategy or pick one of these resources that I've mentioned and let me know what works for you.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate you asking the question, and I'll be sending you a digital and an audio copy of my book, The Artist Suitcase.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: For everybody else listening, if you have a question about the creative life or habits, mindset, productivity, or writing, you can submit the question by going to KentSanders.net slash podcast and filling out the question form.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Or you can also hit me up on Twitter at Kent Sanders or shoot me an email at Kent at KentSanders.net.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And if I use your question here on the show, I'll send you a free ebook and an audiobook of the artist suitcase.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: All right, good stuff.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get into our conversation with my friend Casey Tigret.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm here with Casey Tigrette and I'm really excited to have you on the show.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um we talked a few weeks ago, and I was really excited whenever our mutual friend Rick Champ introduced us.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it was fun to chat and I appreciate you making time to be on the show today.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good thing.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for the invitation.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: So the first thing that I want to dive into is kind of having you explain, if you would, a little bit about what your role is.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: You are the theologian in residence at Parkview Christian Church in the Chicago area.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: I used to live in Streeter, Illinois, which is about an hour and a half drive south of Chicago, so I kind of have a soft spot for the Chicago area.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Even though I live in St.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Louis and, you know, by definition we're sort of sworn enemies with the cards and the Cubs, and and I've got my Cardinals jersey on today, so it's Yes.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm a Closet Cardinals fan, and I live on the South Side, so South Side is all White Sox.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very odd sort of conglomeration of things.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, South Southwest suburbs are mostly White Sox fans.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's Cubs fans there, but it's you you kind of go through the different levels of the city and it and it changes, though.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm all for your Cardinals chasing me.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Very cool.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, can you talk a little bit about what is a theologian in residence exactly?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure a lot of people are wondering what that is, and and how did you how did you transition into that role?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the church where I serve, Parkview Christian Church, I've been there now for almost a little over eight years, uh, with a break in the middle.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I served as the spiritual formation pastor there for seven and a half years.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And part of my job was creating content for discipleship.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh part of it was being a part of the teaching team, part of it was helping us talk through different doctrinal and theological issues.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then I left for about a year and a half and went to a different position.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And when I came back, uh there was a part of my role that was missing that the team at Parkview felt like they needed, which was this person who could field and process theological questions, but also create some of the white papers and conversation points around certain things for our elders and staff.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do we talk about the role of women in ministry?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: How do we talk about what we believe about A, B, or C?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so just having someone who did the theological legwork, so to speak.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: I know the title, it sounds like some dude in a in a mountain cake somewhere with a decent beard.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I can't grow a beard.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm guessing that was probably not on my resume or not in my job description.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: So um so it's really more of a content creation kind of spot.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I see it as both an intellectual but also a creative kind of work because you're always trying to speak God into different contexts, and our context as a church is unique.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And um I don't know if this role would look the same or even exist at any other church, but just the way that we the way that we function, it it has a space to operate.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see the the evangelical church moving more toward the direction of being open to those kinds of positions?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, I guess what I'm asking is we tend to be so pragmatic in how we approach everything, including worship, education, preaching, ministry, you know, all those things.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see more of a counterbalance to that becoming uh a thing of interest in the church where we realize the need for spiritual formation, spiritual direction to think about things theologically?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I don't know.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to say yes to that.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: I really would.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think the I think the need for theology and really thoroughgoing, thoughtful, patient dialogue and research and work is still out there, and people are still, I mean, people are doing it everywhere.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that they have uh the name or the title.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: So to that point, there there are people in church staffs that I know who don't have that title, but they're doing that kind of work.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's the it's the tension of do you have a designated person who's like that the hub or the node through which all this stuff goes?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you just teach everybody how to do it and then say this is just gonna be part of who we are?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna think pragmatically, how do we get this done?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: But also, how does this flow out of our image of God?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: How does this flow out of our belief about Jesus?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: How does this flow out of our pneumatology, our Holy Spirit understanding?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, that's the tough part.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's I love the role that I'm in, but I also part of my role is just to help people like, are we thinking about these things as we're doing?
• 13:49
  unknown: Yeah.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of that thinking and doing um tension that we hold.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now you would also describe yourself as a spiritual director or a spiritual formation pastor.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is that fairly accurate?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I did some work uh back into starting in 2015.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I finished in 2015, uh, a certificate program in spiritual direction.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I do spiritual direction, but also my spiritual formation for me is the language of it and the teaching of it and the conversation around it has always been a passion for me.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I serve in a couple different areas.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the on the board of the Apprentice Institute out of uh Friends University in Wichita.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's an in yeah, it's an institute that serves to advance uh the conversation and education of people around living deeply in the kingdom of God as apprentices of Jesus.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so for me, that's the heart of formation is how do we take the teachings of Jesus and bring them into our life and practice them and train ourselves to be more like him?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: So spiritual direction and spiritual formation both kind of feed into that at the same time.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Would you say that is an overall impulse of what you try to do through your writing, speaking, teaching, pastoral work is basically helping people to live out the priorities and the teachings of Jesus?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: I I feel like it is.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I feel like it's where I at least start most conversations.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: The conversations in spiritual direction are a lot about looking at our own life and then bringing alongside of it into the raising our kids, driving our car, dealing with our in-laws kind of situations.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: We bring in this conversation about who do I believe God is and how does this affect it?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or what has my experience in the past?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: What are my memories of God and I in journeying together?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: How does that impact this moment?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a lot of what spiritual formation is.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: We don't come to the journey with Jesus with a blank slate.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: We carry this whole archive of stories and experiences and failures.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so bringing those two things together, um, most of my conversations start with.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about what do you hear from God on this?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: What has your prayer life been like?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or not your prayer life, that sounds sort of sterile, but what have you been praying about regarding this?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what have you heard?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't heard anything, let's talk about that.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Are you is that normal for you?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a spiritual formation and spiritual direction conversation.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's laced into every layer of parenting, marriage, leadership, uh the way we the way we interact with social media.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, there should be more of that in the way we act with social media, you know?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I think that conversation is active in just about everything we do.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I like to step into it because there's constant relevance there.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned Friends University uh a second ago.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Is Richard Foster still connected with Friends University?
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh not as much as before.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: He he taught there for quite some time and was and is still instrumental in the whole spiritual formation conversation.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he's since retired from active work with a group called Renovare that he started.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but the the head of the Apprentice Institute's a guy named James Bryan Smith, and who has written several books in spiritual formation.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he and Richard Foster were very good friends.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um James was a part of the starting of Renovare.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a connection there to Foster.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's the first time I ever got to meet him was at one of the conferences in Wichita.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: So uh he's a character, man.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's one in a million for sure.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a group of writers that I think have influenced a whole generation of people like us who, you know, maybe over the past 20, 25 years have been exposed to the you know the writings of people like Richard Foster, John Ortberg.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's, you know, well, I was gonna say he's a newer voice, but he's been around for a long time, you know, and so many books, James Brian Smith, and for me, probably the most important voice in the spiritual formation or spiritual direction space was Henry Nowen, uh whose books have just been inst so instrumental in shaping my view on uh on life in general.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, such a such a vital area that we can so easily neglect in our contemporary evangelical church.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and uh part of the reason we neglect it is it's very it seems like it's very hard to talk about.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh spending some time with someone who yesterday who's uh in a spiritual formation role, and my first piece of advice was you have to figure out what you mean by this.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um what do you mean when you say that?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are plenty of really good definitions, uh, but what do you mean when you say spiritual formation?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because it's not like it is when you say uh my background is creative arts ministry.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not not the same thing as when you say worship pastor, because that's pretty clear and that's pretty cut and dried when it comes to these are the things that you do, this is your specific roles and tasks and all that in a church.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: But spiritual direction, I'm sure it can be very fluid depending on the context.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh spiritual direction ends up being more of a functional kind of conversation where we're we're we're doing things to help people discover where God is present in their life.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I've just watched that how delicious that can be to somebody to have someone else sit with them and just point.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: And in part of the role of a spiritual director is just to ask really good, open-ended questions.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: You're just walking together towards the reality that God has been doing something.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we may not like it, we may not understand it, or may not be able to see it on our own, or it might be multiple pieces that need to be tied together.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but that spiritual direction practice and art uh can help people to see that God has been active.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: So what does that mean?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's a lot of the formation discussion that follows on is what are the disciplines, practices, ideas that I need to step into as a result of what I notice God has been doing.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Something that we were talking about recently in actually one of my college classes, and I talked about this with my son as well, he's 14 and very curious, and I love the conversations that we have together.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: But we were talking about how people find their way into the faith in different ways.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Some people find it by serving, that's sort of their their language of expressing their faith.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Some people love worship services and worship music, you know, they love those group gatherings, other people love conversations, other people love study and the intellectual side and the research side.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then other people love love art.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess for myself, I've always had a soft spot for you know, I'm not Catholic, I'm not Orthodox, but I I do have a um a proclivity, maybe that's not the right word, but I've always kind of had a soft spot for those expressions of Christianity because they do involve such a large variety of history and tradition and artistic expression and mystery in the senses and and so forth.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And have you found that to be true that that in your work with people that people just find their ways into their relationship with God in different ways, or or at least they they express them in different ways?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it it has a lot to do with what they've heard in the past, how they've been exposed to religion, Christianity, God, the concept of a spiritual life.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: If a spiritual life has been presented to you as this thing that happens once you die, that changes how you step into things.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, such a great point.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: So if it's really only about what happens some other point other than right now, then we typically don't worry about because we're prioritizing kind of people, right?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if I don't have to deal with that right now, like is it tax time?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, then I don't have to deal with it, which it is right now.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna unfortunately, yes.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, yes.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that shapes it.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that will determine how a person finds their way into uh different religion, even different streams of traditions, as you pointed out.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: We find that there are a lot of people at Parkview who grew up in a Roman Catholic tradition.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh probably 70 to 80 percent of our congregation right now has some sort of connection, whether they grew up that way or whether their family was a They aren't or they they drifted from any sort of faith and then ended up coming to us.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: But then I also find people who grew up in evangelical den non-denominational megachurches gravitating towards Anglican Presbyterian, some of the more formal traditions like you are talking about that have that honor the church calendar, that have all the senses involved sight, sound, smell, touch, taste with communion.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of it's interesting how spiritual formation does not obey the boundaries of church tradition.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: It functions and flows in whatever tradition we're in.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Dallas Willard, who you and I, I we you talked about Henry now, and he's been a huge influence, but so is Dallas Willard.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he he used to always say that everyone is in the process of spiritual formation.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And some it just depends.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is it in a healthy way or is it in a destructive and malformed kind of way?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think we find our way into our relationships, into our understanding of God, and then we form ourselves or we are formed into that.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um so whatever image of God we're given, we're gonna become like that image of God.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is exactly the type of reason why I do these podcast interviews because I get to learn all this cool stuff.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I'm back in class.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like taking notes.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, man, this is really insightful, really good stuff.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now you mentioned a couple minutes ago memories uh in one of your responses to one of my questions, and I know that's a major touchstone for your next book, which I'd love to dive into for a few minutes if you're cool talking about that.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: I know that's it's been your baby for the last uh well, at least probably couple years, you know, because these books take so long to write and produce and edit and and launch and all that stuff.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: So your book is called As I Recall and it focuses on the place of memories in our spiritual lives.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Can you give us a quick a quick summary of what the book is about and why you wrote it?
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I believe the best way to talk about it is to say that memories make us who we are.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So everything that's true of you sitting in the chair you're in, everything that's true of me, where I am, is because it's there because of something we've experienced in the past.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so if that's the case, if everyone we meet is who they are and are the way they are because of their memories, because of the things that are stored in their brains, then obviously for God to transform us, there has to be a place for dealing with, processing through, engaging with our memories in the life of spiritual formation.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started to dig into a little bit about how things are, how memories are made.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the interesting part for me is there's this beautiful intersection between when you when we get out of sort of the Gnostic headspace that says body bad, spirit good, right, and we start talking about the fact that God created our bodies and they engage, there's a participation and a partnership between body, soul, mind, and spirit.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: I started to dig into how do how do our brains create memories?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: And what's fascinating is every memory really starts as a sense.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: Smell, sight, taste, down, sound, touch.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, I could say that fast, I guess.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so you start collecting all of these things.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so the image for me is like collecting shells on a beach.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd think about vacations when my family we went and we would walk the beach at night and we'd pick up shells.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes you would pick up one that was beautiful, perfectly round, all the little ridges, and it had that sort of beautiful pink hue on the outside.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: You turned it over, and that was that smooth surface.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then some of them you would find that the top would be covered in like calcified seaweed, but then you turn it over, and inside it was that beautiful dark purple kind of color, that iridescent purple color.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought about it and I thought that's exactly like the way that we collect our memories.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: We have a memory of abuse, or we have a memory of success, we have a memory of being excluded, or we have a memory of being invited, we have a memory of failure, our own failure, or the memory of someone else failing us, and we collect them.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens is those things get stored.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: And once they're stored, they begin to create stories.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: So the way we see the world starts to flow out of those memories.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then once we see the world that way, we start living in reaction to it.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we create scripts.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: There are scripts we live by that are really based on the memories that we have.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if you grew up in a family where dad was cruel to mom and uh never really honored her as a human being, then it's very hard to get married and not think that's how you're supposed to do it.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: And begin to live out that script.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's the story of racism in our country.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's so deeply ingrained, passed down from generation to generation, that we can say things like, Well, racism isn't a problem because I don't hate people of a different race, not even knowing how deep that story is or that script is in us.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so the book is about how Jesus guides us through the different characters and stories in the scriptures to engage with our own memories and begin the process of redemption when it comes to our memories.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell I cannot wait to read this book.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is absolutely fascinating.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I I never really thought about it in those terms because everything that we see is really a script that is played out.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even you know, we're both Americans, we live in the U.S.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the story of America and sort of the the story that we tell ourselves, and this comes around, of course, every time we have a major election.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the this idea of you have these sort of battling concepts of what is the script of America?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: What is America?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: What are we going to make it?
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: What is it going to be?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: But just like we write those scripts and they've been written down through history, we can unwrite those scripts and we can create a new script.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I love that I just love that idea.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure if that's what you intended to kind of say in the book, but this sounds really fascinating and I can't wait to read it.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I had an experience actually, you mentioned being in America.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: I was in Australia last September, uh, just this crazy thing where I got invited to teach at a seminary down there.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I had one day to walk around Sydney just by myself and kind of explore.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they had a free modern art museum in Sydney right off the harbor.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so I went in and I was walking around, and what I noticed on one of the one of the columns, right as soon as you come in, is a plaque.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, not a not like we printed this off of Microsoft Word and slid it into a little sleeve and taped it on the like it's a plaque carved and buried into the rock of the of the pillar.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it talks about how the museum sits on ground that originally belonged to Aboriginal Australians, and that was taken by force at some point in history.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, oh my goodness, what an amazing way to rewrite the script of the history of this place.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so you sat there and you had sort of this like, this museum is beautiful, but then you also had this reverence for there was a lot of hurt and a lot of pain from colonization that took this, and so much of that is sometimes that's the way that our memories help us, you know, redemption of our memories helps us to engage with our own spiritual histories.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: If we were taught an image of God by a pastor in our youth that we've come to find out is just so not true, then we can acknowledge that because you've got to embrace it, it's part of you.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is in there, it's going to be there.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: God, what are we going to do with that?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so then the process of redemption can begin.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: I am uh involved in several Facebook groups, as many people are, and in one of the groups, somebody a couple days ago put up this very interesting post.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: He was basically saying, I'm 45 years old, I'm struggling with a lot of anger, resentment, and stress in my life, and I don't know how to deal with it.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, the more that I and I'm not talking about myself, you know, sometimes we talk about ourselves in a fictitious third person.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: I've got this friend.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've got this, a friend, quote unquote.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: But this is an actual, not even really a friend, it's just somebody else in this group.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: But he said, the more that I dug into why I'm so angry, it all stems back to junior high, whenever I was teased, I was made fun of, and basically I've lived out this script my whole life, and I'm wondering how I can break it.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't frame it in those words, but that's really what he was saying.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think what you're talking about in your book how does that play into this idea of many times the script that we're living out or established as kids?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we're you know, we find ourselves in midlife decades later, going, wow, I'm this person because I have sort of lived out this script that I thought was written in stone.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a way that that we can begin to unwrite those scripts?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: And how how can memories help us with that?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's it's a terribly complicated thing, uh, especially because identifying where he's at, identifying the fact that that's where all of this is coming from, where this anger and anxiety is coming from is really far, it's way down the road.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because most of us don't even know the source of all that.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so it takes some significant digging to find our way into the memories.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I give some practices in the book, some journaling practices, some things that can help people to dig a little deeper and get below the surface and really engage Jesus in this concept of a memory.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the biggest the biggest thing we can do, and the biggest thing that I I feel like the book helps us to do is to learn that even as painful as that memory is for him, it actually belongs.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's part of his story.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so if we can acknowledge that it belongs, then we can embrace it.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because as long as we keep it at arm's length and pretend that it isn't a problem, then we'll just play cat and mouse for the rest of our life with this thing.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of just saying, this is the reality, I was teased and made fun of and put down, and it created this thing in me, uh, anger.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Some people it's insecurity and they can't make decisions, they can't move forward.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm just gonna embrace that that's part of my story, and then say, all right, Jesus, what are we gonna do with this?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's always a we.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's the greatest misconception sometimes about spiritual formation, because people get hung up in the practices and say, all right, well, spiritual formation is reading, celebration of discipline, and fasting.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um it is that, but it's also why.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also never something we do by ourselves.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of the practices are helping people to engage with Jesus in a conversation about that memory, saying, this is there, it belongs.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's painful or poetic, it's part of my, it's part of my story.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so what are we going to do with that?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where you get such beautiful redemptive work where people will take their past pain and begin to tell a story about it to people who have gone through the same thing.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, my parents went through a divorce, my parents got divorced when I was in high school.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've found that conversation has been so that experience has been so helpful in conversations going forward with people, kids of divorce or couples who are thinking about it and you know, wondering what the impact will be on their children.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so the question is, you know, would you, if you could go back and change it, would you?
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we'd all say yes, but then who I would be, who I am now would change.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you go back and you edit that memory out, then something changes about you, and the person you are now wouldn't be the same.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: So really it's about redeeming our memories in some way, whether that's the memories of I mean, it could be abuse or divorce or failure or addiction or uh you know, just whatever it is, on recognizing that's who we are and then coming face face to face and coming to grips with those painful things and somehow finding redemption in those within community.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think so.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I I feel like that's the hard the hardest part again is just coming to terms with it from an emotional standpoint, because we don't I I get it.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: None of us want to say, okay, this is there and it's not going anywhere.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's part of who I am.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, even brain science, when we form a memory, it actually changes the shape of our brains.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Our brains are are like hot plastic, they call it neuroplasticity.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like your brain can actually change shape.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so the more a memory travels and is encoded in our neurons, it changes the shape of our brain.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so to say that it's in us is like, oh, it's it's in my heart or it's in my spirit.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's literally in the gray matter between your ears.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's lodged in there.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh embracing it is really embracing both a mental and emotional and spiritual kind of reality.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it also involves the hope that we can change and that we can become someone different and we can live at a different script, which is so that's so hard to embrace that, especially as we get older because we just sort of think, well, this is who I am.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: I have these problems, I have these habits, I'm not gonna be successful, I am whatever I think that I am.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: But it's the idea that we we can change, we can grow, we can develop.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's the question of this is there, what do I do with it?
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I love going back to Paul and saying, be transformed by the renewing of your mind in Romans 12.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder, does he it Paul didn't have any neuroscience in his in his mind at that point, but that's an important thing.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: The way you think about everything changes the way that you do everything, worldview, lenses, images of God, the way we conceive of things, it changes how we handle things.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so if we conceive of a memory as forever dooming us to bitterness, anger, despair, then we'll live that script out.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: But if someone else can step in and say, actually, this thing that is there is there, but it can become something different.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: The story of Moses is a great example of that.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: You have you have him sort of in between identities.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: He's a Hebrew raised by Egyptians, right?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: Who goes out and kills an Egyptian and then becomes the stench in the nostril of the Egyptians, and then goes out to talk to his Hebrew brothers the next day and they say, Who do you think you are?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're not one of us.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: You've never been a slave.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have this story.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: You ate at the best table and went to the finest school.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: So who do you really think you are?
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that moment is such a key moment for him because it's an identity crisis.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: I can't identify with the slaves that are my legitimate brothers and sisters, and I can't identify with the Egyptians who are my adopted family.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so when he goes out into the wilderness, he doesn't, he's got this whole host of memories like, what do I do with my past?
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: And who am I?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: And who have I been told that I am?
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then the murder hangs on his shoulders like this thing happened.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: And God steps in and says, That memory that you have, I'm gonna tell you who you are.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're a liberator.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is what you're going to become.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna take this fire that's in you that caused you to do this thing, and you're gonna step in a new direction with that.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so that that whole idea of something, you know, God stepping into the middle of our thoughts about who we are, in the middle of our memories, and saying, This is what you think this is.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: I have something different in mind, is the key to the whole thing.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, I love it.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: Can't wait to read the book.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now I know this is your second book, so you know you've been around the block a couple times with this, having gone through the process of birthing this book.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: Was the process writing the second book different than your first book?
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the first book I had no idea what to expect or what I was doing.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: And and writing a book is one of the strangest things.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, it's interesting because it's very much like podcasting.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Writing a book is one of the strangest things because you just go into your room and you pound away for hours and hours, and then you send this document, and then at some point, you know, there are various back and forths, it becomes a thing.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and people buy it and people read it and people talk about it, and you go, wait a minute, this is I was sitting in my, you know, I hadn't even showered yet when I wrote that chapter.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And now the whole, you know, this this group of people now has access to reading it.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so the first book, I didn't really know what to expect at all.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so everything was a surprise.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I still I feel like that was such a gift to be able to even do it.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I I've stayed in that, I really feel like I've stayed, hopefully I have, stayed in that mindset for the second book as well to say there are so many people who want to write and don't have the opportunity.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: I have this opportunity, and I'm going to do, I'm going to do with it what is in front of me to do with it.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: So uh it was different for another reason, too, because during this writing of this second book, uh, we moved uh twice, actually.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I wrote it over the period of about two years, but the initial writing and then the really hard, dedicated, under contract kind of writing happened in two different houses, three different houses over the course of about a year.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: So there, you know, writers are we're we're creatures of habit and we like holy spaces.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: And give me my favorite desk and my pen and my chair and my tea and the things that I need.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I was I had a big box with all my books and notes in it, and I just took it from place to place.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: So writing is a vagrant.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um I don't think I'm gonna do that again.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: So makes sense.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't ex- Yeah, it wasn't exactly the best creative space, but yeah, it was it was different uh because I I kind of knew what to expect from the process, too.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think that's one of the most surprising things for new writers is the process of publishing is nothing like I thought it was gonna be.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, can you dive into that a little bit more?
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: One of the conversations that tends to pop up on this podcast, I I tend to interview people that are into writing, podcasting and creativity, that kind of thing.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the conversations that comes up is self-publishing versus traditional publishing.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: Not really in a sense of one is better than the other, but just exploring why people went certain routes and what are the advantages and disadvantages.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm trying to help uh particularly people who have not written a book before to know that there are options and maybe giving them um some thoughts and some information as to what might be the best option for them when not if they write their first book, but when they write their first book.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I I want to plant that idea very firmly in people's minds that it's not a matter of if, it's I want you to do it and plan it out and you know take the dive.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: So what was your experience like working with and your publisher is IVP for both of your books, correct?
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: What was that experience like for you uh first as a first-time author and then going through it the second round?
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was I and I loved the process.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's good to have, I would say the first thing that helped me most was to have a community of people who published before, not necessarily people who had published with the same publisher, but people who had done this journey before.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had a couple of uh a couple of friends who had done this before, who had published before, or were in their own process, and we we compared notes, and that helped to keep things it helped to keep things in perspective.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so the community aspect, even though creativity, creative work, especially writing, is a really solitary practice, uh, it's good to have a community of people that you can say, hey, I got this email from my editor.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: What is what do you think this is about?
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then they can speak to it um with some gravity because they've had that same experience.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: For me, I knew writing was always going to be something that was kind of a bonus.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: So to write and publish a book, the at least when I started the first one, uh, I never considered it something that would become a major piece of my income or my life.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I at the time when the first book was being written and came out, I didn't have any intentions to make that, you know, I'm a writer.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was a pastor and I wrote a book.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of where I was in the first uh when I was writing the first book.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that that openness, if you're going to publish with a traditional publisher, I think there's a level of openness you have to have to the process.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there were stages of which I felt myself fighting back.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know how much Enneagram experience your listeners would have, if at all.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we've I did an episode uh a couple months ago.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: I had Teresa McCloy, who's a friend of mine.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: She's an Enneagram actually expert in consultants and so forth.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we've talked about it on the show before.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think probably a decent chunk of my listeners are at least familiar with the Enneagram.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I I identify as an Enneagram 4, which is a lot of times is a creative, is one of the creative numbers.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: But there's this need to be original in us.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so there were parts in the process where I really had to, I really had to be aware of where my resistance was coming from.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of the things that you have to prepare for is that editors, a good editor has the spiritual gift of being vicious.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so they have a really and and in the most helpful, compassionate way, uh, a good editor will cut stuff that just isn't supposed to be there.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I either could have rebelled and said, that's the best stuff.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: How dare you cut that?
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: How dare you insult my creativity?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh instead, I said, How do I learn to be a better writer through this level of accountability?
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so the process of writing and then giving this giving stuff to the editors and watching them, you know, trim things.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: And Stephen King in his great book on writing says you have to learn how to kill your darlings.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: And there are some phrases that you just are like, oh, don't take that.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: That was that was like moment I was staring at the sunset and that line came to me and I think it was divine.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: And oh, and then it's then it's gone.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then you read the paragraph and you're like, oh, wow, that's so much better.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I think I think the biggest thing about publishing in a traditional publisher is just being open to the process.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: And um it's really important to develop a level of trust with your editor, uh, which is something that I feel like I was able to do.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I don't know that everybody has had that same experience.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: So some of this is me speaking from a this is what happened to me.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: It may be different for other people.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I think I'm I feel like I've grown as a writer from having to go through some of the hoops and hurdles.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the challenge is, as you mentioned earlier, it takes a long time.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: A long time to get a book into the world.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas self-publishing, you know, you you find somebody who's a great copy editor and let them help you cultivate things, and then you then you're free to run.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't see any problem with that either.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it just depends on what you're looking for out of the process, I think.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think that is a big problem that I see with self-publishing is that you know, if you have a very entrepreneurial spirit, you can very easily avoid all those quote unquote hoops that uh you have to jump through when you have a traditional publishing deal.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: But those hoops are there for a reason.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you shouldn't avoid those hoops of editing and good cover design and being accountable.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: You should you know, if you're gonna self-publish, you should still have those hoops, if you will.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: You just have to arrange for them yourself versus having the publisher arrange for them.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, man, there's so many self-published books out there that are horrible and they're bad covers and they're not well written, and nobody has thought about their target audience and so many problems.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not a matter of, oh, I can self-publish and avoid all that stuff that the publisher is going to make me do.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's a matter of, hey, let's let's make a good book, and there's different routes to do that.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing that's challenging is when you get down to, and this is the thing that was most surprising to me, is uh we as authors are not always great at marketing.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: So true.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so having someone else from a traditional publisher who, you know, you've got a marketing person, whether that's a a PR person or uh, you know, a marketing specialist or whatever, who's gonna help you say, okay, we're gonna field, you know, if there are requests for you to do podcast interviews or radio interviews, we're gonna field that.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get those to you.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: We have feelers and connections that we can connect people.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so, especially as a Christian author, there's a moment where you have to figure out that I wrote this book so people would read it.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: The only way people will read it is if they know about it.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the only way they'll know about it, and the only way they'll know about what I, you know, for most of us who write in spiritual formation or any of the any Christian genres, uh, God has given us this stuff, this experience, this gift.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so we want to, we wrote this for a purpose.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: The only way that's going to happen is if people know that it's there.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so some level of marketing has to be there.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so there, I think there's a level of self-leadership where you can learn how to market in a way that you don't feel slimy at the end.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and there's also a trust people who that's their job.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if they are like, yeah, I don't think doing that this time with the second book, I decided on doing multiple video trailers instead of one long one, which I mean everybody has a different approach to that, that you share a long-form interview kind of commentary about the book, or you share a short one.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: I decided to do five really short ones, minute and 30-second clips to sort of spur interest in the book.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a suggestion from the publishers.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: They said, you know, we've not finding the long ones to be that successful anymore.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but even there, you have another thing.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just about writing a book.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now you're on video doing a QA, and now you're doing Facebook Live with the launch team, and now you're so there's there's all kinds of stuff that goes into it, but trusting the process and trusting the people who are good at it in the publishing end is really, really important.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now, with the book trailers, was that something that you produced or that the publisher helped you with, or how did those come about specifically?
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the first book, I had a longer trailer, and the publishers, they had a videographer and editor, and they they did that.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: For this one, I actually um brought on a friend of mine who writes his own music, and he created some uh he had been working with me for the podcast, creating some music for it.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so I borrowed some of his music, or I he he loaned me some of his music, and then I used a friend of mine who's a videographer to shoot it.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I did that on my own.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um that all that just depends on the publisher.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if you get into a higher-tier publisher, some of them have a plan for your book before you ever really talk about it.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you just sit down and sort of hash out the details.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, not that they force it on you, but they say, look, here's some options that we have, some things we know have worked in the past to promote books.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so that's also a different thing.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you go with a mid-level publisher or an upper tier publisher, that that changes things a little bit.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I I do want to dive into your podcast for just a minute, but before I do that, can you talk briefly about how you actually got a book deal with IVP?
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people are obsessed with how do I get a book deal?
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: How does it happen?
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: How did for you, how did that specifically come about?
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was a big accident.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um which is not going to be any comfort to a lot of listeners.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's an accident.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's an accident with sort of an underlying moral.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like a fairy tale.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like the moral to the story here is uh I had a friend who had come into town.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: We had not we'd not become friends yet.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this was the first time I met him.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was speaking at our church, and uh we always try and have someone take care of one of the guest speakers when they come and go to dinner and hang out.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had not met this guy before, and we went to dinner and talked for a while.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: And afterwards, we started talking about writing, and he said, let's keep talking about this.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is a good conversation.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so over probably the next four months or so, uh, I talked with him about writing, how his writing was going.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: In the meantime, uh, there's one of the resources I found really helpful is a writing coach and podcaster named Jeff Goins.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's extremely helpful.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's it's just short and it's concise and it's really good stuff.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: But he offered a challenge.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he said, if you write for if you write a certain amount of words a day for this many days, at the end of that, you'll have enough rough content for a book.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so I thought, I I've been thinking about writing.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe this is the thing I need.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I took the challenge and started writing a certain amount of words a day for about 30 days.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of it, I ended up with some rough content for the book, which side note, that would have been for the Becoming Curious book, the first book that I wrote.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, 98% of that stuff I didn't use.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: So just you know, moderating our expectations here.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I had this thing now.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: I had this content, this piece, this really rough manuscript.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I ended up in a phone conversation with my friend from before, and I said, Hey, I've got this thing now.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: I I just don't know what to do.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, You should meet my agent.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so he connected me with his literary agent and a guy named Don Gates, who's been just fantastic.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where it all started.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Don helped me craft a proposal and helped me to contact, you know, get it to the hands of different publishers.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: And from then on, it just that was that was the route I went to get a book deal.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um behind that is a bunch of other stuff.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I had been blogging for quite some time.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I had written articles for anybody who I could, uh, just because it was at the time, it was just fun.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it was an exercise of this other creative outlet that I had.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's a whole the moral to the story is networking is really important.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Writing in whatever format you can get it out into the universe, whether it's medium or your own blog or for your local paper, just having some sort of body of writing work that you can point to is really important.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then just writing, just nailing down some time and uh putting some energy towards it and creating a habit of writing every day.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, that's that's really I mean, those things are the keys to moving towards a book deal.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't think there's a magic way to get a book deal.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um some people it's because they have a story that's so incredibly compelling that it's just irresistible.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I didn't have that.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: I had an idea that was somewhat unique.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's important to ask that question is where why does this idea matter?
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: Why is this idea unique?
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: I know it matters, I know it matters to me, but why would it matter to other people?
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what would I want them to walk away with?
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: What would I want the impact of this book to be?
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and of course that's different.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you're writing a novel, I think that's a whole different discussion.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: But have you found that having you know, having a published book out for the last couple years, but also now, you know, in the next few weeks, you're gonna have your second book coming out.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: Has that fact that you have books out there, is that opening doors for you that would not otherwise have been opened?
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think so.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's definitely conversations that I wouldn't normally have been in.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I ended up with some speaking things that happened because of it.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up being at a couple conferences because of it.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, there were some doors that opened.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's also there's also an interesting thing about writing communities and recognition of each other that happens where you know you may know a book and you might even know a book cover, but you don't know the author.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: But then you end up meeting them and you're like, oh, you're the guy that wrote the book about the questions.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so it creates a it creates a starting point for building new relationships.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm an extrovert and I love people, and I've never probably never met a stranger.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so these conversations that come from the book are really encouraging and exciting.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I try to embrace all of them that I can.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but they do, it does, it does give you some, it does give you a place from which to start relationships in a very different way, too.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: So as we start to wind this down, I've I've got a couple more quick questions, and then I want to do a lightning round, if that's okay, where I ask you about some of your favorite things.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: And some people have thought about this ahead of time, some people haven't.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: You probably have not, since I just shot you these last night, which is actually it's better because I love the off-the-cuff thing.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll uh we'll go with this and see where it goes.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: But one thing that I want to definitely ask about, and I asked this of all my guests, is what would you say is one habit or practice that has contributed the most to your success?
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh gosh.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: One um I think that just the commitment to the process, uh commitment to whether it's you know, the podcast process has to be what it is.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: I I have to spend some time with the person if it's a writer, spend some time with their book.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: I have to spend the time crafting a couple of questions, thinking about what I would want to know from them, what kind of posture.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: So much of that is what kind of posture do I want to bring to the conversation?
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because I've been in, the interesting thing about being a writer is being on the other side of the mic and being interviewed.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um I know that sometimes a podcaster will come or a radio interviewer will come with a certain posture, and it changes my whole yeah, it changes the whole way that I handle things.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the process of podcasting, staying in the process, the process of writing, knowing that the first draft will not be the best, it will probably be the worst.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully it improves.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, hopefully it does improve.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's about you know editing again, but the first draft will never be the best.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: It you won't submit the whole manuscript and have it accepted as is.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: And also, you know, there there will be some rejection, but that's part of the process.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and it's just finding the time that's best, the lightning hour.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't remember who said this, but somebody said it's amazing how creativity strikes at the same time every morning, every day.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh just it's the commitment to that process.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say that's probably the thing that's helped the most.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then just trying to trying to be open to the just generous surprise of all of it.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: That the whole thing is just being able to publish, being able to podcast.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: If it becomes work, if it becomes entitlement, if it becomes a task, then I think it loses its value.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_00: But if I can stay in the place where this is a just just the gratuity of being able to do some of these things, then I feel like that's been really helpful.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: Man, that's great advice.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you ready to do a super quick lightning round?
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: No, but let's do it anyway.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, this feels like a lame game show from the 1970s, but I'm gonna go with it.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I was actually I was at the hospital with my dad yesterday, he was having a minor surgery, and in the waiting area, the price is right was on.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like they haven't changed that music in decades.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's insane, you know.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, I think that would be really fun to host a show like that.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: Just silliness, you know.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it'd be great to be on that show.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: Spin the big wheel, and oh man.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to play Plenko one time before I die.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_00: Plenko! Ah, yes.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so here's our lightning round.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: What is your favorite movie?
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, favorite movie.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, right now it's midnight in Paris.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, great one.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: Great one.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, favorite music group or solo artist?
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh probably Bruce Springsteen.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Love Springsteen.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: Very cool.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: What is your favorite book?
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh novel would be Catcher in the Rye, nonfiction would be in the uh Life of the Beloved by Henry Nowen.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh, great, great.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: As you know, I love Nowen, so he he has a soft spot in my heart.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: Or I have a soft spot in my heart for him.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know the best way to say that.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what is a creative failure that you've experienced sometime in your life and what did you learn from it?
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: Creative failure.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh boy.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorting through them.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, that's like me.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: Which which one do I pick?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think the first yeah, the first blog I ever did was just kind of a mess.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: The first two blogs I ever started were were kind of a mess.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't have much of a purpose, and I didn't have much focus to them.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I just sort of thought it was a moment where I was not operating with that gratuity.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: I just thought, well, people are going to want to hear this.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's just turned out to be a waste of time and it wasn't really helpful content.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that's probably one that sticks out to me the most.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, final question in the lightning round is what project are you most excited about working on right now?
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm always I always have this little cave of next book ideas that are sitting out there.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've got I have three right now in the hopper that are really exciting.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one is an idea about restlessness, how restlessness involves in our spiritual life.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one about the three spirits of creativity.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I love that.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit, the spirit of the age, and the spirit within us.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then another book about uh something I'm calling the soul cycle, about how do we find ourselves in the cycle of development, the plus minus, the step forward, step back kind of thing that happens constantly throughout our life.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's cool.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how you typically work out your book ideas.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, whether you you know some people want to write the book first and then they want to talk about it and sort of develop courses or speaking or whatever.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: Other people like to do all that stuff first and then you know, collate all that into a book.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: But if you ever want to chat, chat about the um spirits of creativity, you know, on a future episode, that sounds really fascinating.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's something that came up as I was preparing for a retreat and it just started riffing on a little bit.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: So all my stuff starts out in a notebook somewhere.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's somewhere out there, or the other two ideas are out there somewhere too.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: So well, Casey, thank you so much for taking the time to do this uh interview.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't intend for this to go this long, but you know, it's just so much fun talking to you.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: I can't help but indulge my t myself a little bit.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I appreciate the work that you're doing.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um love your books.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, I haven't haven't read the second one, um, but really look forward to that and just appreciate all the all the value that you're adding into the world through your content and um just through being an awesome guy.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure, man, and thank you for being a great host and asking great questions.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_01: How can our listeners connect with you and your work?
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you can find my uh a lot of my stuff is on my website, uh www.kc-a-se-y, tigret-ty-g R E T T.com.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I also do a twice-a-week blog for pathios.com, um P-A-T-H-E-O-S.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's where most of you'll find most of the stuff.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you can find me on all the social medias.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh my handle on Twitter, Instagram is at CKTigret.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also on Facebook sometimes when I'm feeling up to it.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_01: I I under I totally understand.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: It can be a little emotionally draining on Facebook.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: No kidding.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks so much.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'll have links to all those items in the show notes.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks again for being here.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: You're welcome.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Casey Tigret.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: Here are my three biggest takeaways from our conversation.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, your spiritual life has a profound effect on your creative work.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you tend to be a task-oriented person like I am, sometimes it's really hard to slow down and pay attention to what's going on internally and to think about our spiritual lives.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you're task-oriented, if you're a very pragmatic person, sometimes you go through your day just focusing on what you're getting done and all the boxes that you're checking off your to-do list.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you're focused on you know, writing that song or getting getting that painting done or hitting your word count for writing for the day.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: But it's really important, as Casey was talking about in this conversation, to stop and pay attention to what God is doing in your life.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved what he said, and I'm I don't think I'm misquoting this, but it's pretty close, but I may be not totally correct.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: But he was talking about paying attention to the reality that God has been doing something in your life.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that to me is a really profound thought is just slowing down, pausing, whether it's through your prayer or meditation or journaling or whatever practice you have, just being aware about what is God doing in your life.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I also loved his quote where he said, your spiritual life is more than just what happens when you die.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that is so profound.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, as an evangelical Christian, I believe that our spiritual life is is, of course, more than what happens when we die.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: But boy, it's so easy to get caught up in our everyday lives and just forget that God is doing something in your life today.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right now, He's at work guiding us, leading us, speaking to us, uh working all things for our good, as the Bible tells us.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_01: So just consider how that affects your creative work.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_01: Whenever we are an integrated person, whenever we're a whole person, whenever we're paying attention to our inner life and our spiritual development and our relationship with God and what he's doing within us and around us and among us, that can have a substantial impact on our creative work, and and hopefully it does.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_01: So that's takeaway number one.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: Takeaway number two is the way you see the world flows from your memories.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I really love his newest book on memories.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_01: Again, it's called As I Recall.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope that you'll check out the book.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: The way that you see the world flows from your memories.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: This to me was a really profound insight.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_01: And Casey was talking about how the scripts that we live by are based on our memories, whether those are for good or for bad.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: For example, maybe your family script told you that you were always going to be a certain way or that you were always going to attain a limited amount of success.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe the script that was written when you were a kid, maybe you were teased, or maybe something else happened negative in your life that always said that you're going to only be this certain way your whole life.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_01: Casey also mentioned the example of racism in the United States and how that goes back to a false script that said you know a a certain race was better than another race.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that is, of course, a a false script that is totally crazy and has no basis in reality and is totally wrong and all that stuff.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: But it does go back to a script that has been written in our in our nation's past for a for a very long time.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: And we're trying to rewrite that script and tell a new story.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, in a sense, your memories create your story.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's great power to have an awareness of that and just knowing that, hey, we can we can do something different with those scripts that have been handed down to us that are not positive.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then that flows right into takeaway number three.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Which is you have the power to rewrite your own script.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: In our conversation, Casey talked about the redemption of our memories.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: And even the memories that are hard, but that are still part of our story.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there have been things that have happened in my life, things that I'm not proud of, or things that happened to me that I would rather forget.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: But they are part of my story.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe you know, I'm thinking of of some specific things right now.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe someday I'll have the courage to share those things publicly and really talk about them.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's it's not the right time now, but someday I will talk about those things and um I'm still kind of thinking through them and figuring out you know some things in my past and whatnot.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not not trying to be cryptic or anything, but all of us have those things in our life where we don't know what to do with them.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_01: We feel like they don't belong in our story, but Casey says that we need to acknowledge those memories because they are part of our story, and we need to embrace them, even though they're painful because they are part of who we are and they have made us into who we are today.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_01: But we're not determined by those scripts.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_01: Our life is not deterministic.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: We may have a script that goes back to grade school or goes back to maybe you were abused as a kid, or maybe you something happened to you that was horrible when you were younger.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: But that script in your past does not determine your script today or in the future.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: We can rewrite those scripts and begin to tell a new story.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I keep going back to this conversation with Casey.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh of course that's what this whole episode is about.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_01: But he he really talked about how we can change our story and change our scripts.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_01: And he said that it's always a we, it's not just an I or a me, it is a we where we say, Jesus, what are we going to do with this?
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_01: Where we are engaging with Jesus in a conversation about that memory.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_01: That is so profound and one of those things I'm going to be thinking about for quite a while.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: So this is kind of deep.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I'm getting into the weeds of my own psyche right here, but you know, hey, that's what the show is about.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_01: We're trying to address real life things, and I'm trying to be as totally real with you guys as I can.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want this just to be a show where I'm just sort of running through interviews and following some sort of safe script and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to be real with you because this is about our real lives.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is a show about creativity, but creativity touches every part of our lives, including bad memories, including hurtful things, whether things that we did to others that were hurtful or things that were hurtful that other people did to us.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever those scripts are, we can change them, we can rewrite them.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_01: So embrace those parts of your past and set a new course for the future.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, this is going a little deeper than I intended, but that's all good.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, friends, that wraps up this episode of the Born to Create podcast.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_01: I really want to thank Casey Tigrett for taking the time out of his busy schedule in the midst of the book launch, by the way, to share this amazing conversation.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_01: You can find the show notes at KentSanders.net slash podcast zero eight four.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_01: And to you guys who are listening, thank you so much.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of shows out there, but I do this show for you.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this show is really time consuming.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: It takes a lot of energy and effort to put together, but I love doing it because I love being able to bring this show to you.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I hope that you enjoy it, and I would love to know what I can improve.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_01: What can I do better?
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: What do you like?
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: What do you what do you not like?
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, you know, I do put a lot of time into the show, but I'm not emotionally tied to the results of the show, if that makes sense.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I just want to put it out there.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully, it blesses people and um impacts your life in some small way.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks for listening.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_01: I really do appreciate it.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_01: I also want to encourage you to subscribe to the show because that's the best way to make sure you don't miss out on future episodes.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_01: You can find lots more resources to help you unlock your creative genius at Kent Sanders.net.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, remember that you were born to create and designed to make a difference.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now go create something awesome.