Speaker 2
That's so true. I thought about that. Yeah, that's praying for the spouse thing. That was the environment I grew up in. Like that was the number one thing a parent, he makes you pray for your kid's spouse. And now it's like, yeah, if, if there is a spouse prepared by a kid to be this kind of spouse to that person, but maybe they're not called to that. But they, you know, most likely they will, but maybe not. And either way, they can faithfully follow Jesus a little bit flourishing life, whatever calling they have. Well, Brenda, we've gone up to about an hour and, uh, yeah, I just, I want to say again, this book is super, super helpful and engaging and especially somebody that just doesn't, or maybe tired of kind of Christianese kind of memoir type books. I mean, yours is very raw and honest and fascinated that you said you left a lot of other extra raw stuff out because it's, it's raw. It's a, yeah. What kind of person would you say you're writing this book to and who would be the kind of person that would, I mean, I'm sure everybody listening to you'd want to say, yeah, go, go buy it. But yeah, who's that particular kind of person that you really hope ends up reading this book?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I wrote it with two people in mind. The first is those who are disillusioned with Christianity, whether they've been inside of it or they've just been watching from the fringes and are like this is stupid. This is not good news whatsoever. I wanted to talk to those people in the reality of like what they've witnessed and say this fake shiny god is not real and also your issues. I've just seen, like, there's legalism, which is saying like, your humanity is, is, it's not worthy to be here, right? And then there's progressivism, which says like, we just, the holiness of God doesn't exist. And what, what happen if we were met by the God who cares about our humanity, but who is also holy? Like what is that reality with? And so I want to talk to that person. And then the other people is just leaders who desire to be faithful to Jesus who are recognizing that these legalistic conversations aren't doing anything. If you're not being honest, my small group kids, they are having conversations about abortion and smoking weed. And it's not enough to say, you can't smoke weed, or you shouldn't smoke weed, or smoking weed isn't okay. Like, we actually have to have educated conversations about the nuance of that. And if we're not having them within side the church, they're going to go have them elsewhere. That's where they're going to be educated. And so we have to be willing to step into some really gnarly conversations because they're real. It is what exists in our brains and specifically young people's brains all of the time. It is not, they're not just sitting there staring at walls wondering like, Oh, I wonder what Bible verse I can read tomorrow morning. Like, no, they're going, my best friend just texted me she's getting an abortion tomorrow because that's real. Like, that's what's going on. And so I just, I just want to equip leaders to have difficult conversations and to be able to say from an authentic, honest place that Jesus actually cares about those conversations. Because when we look in the new Testament, those are the kinds of conversations he was having. So, well, I highly
Speaker 2
encourage people to pick it up again in the book is can I say that? So Brenda, thanks so much for being on the Algira yet again. Yeah.
Speaker 1
Thanks for having me Preston.
Speaker 2
This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.