And Sons

I mean, does this really need a description? We all can worry about an anticipated season passing by without all the hoped-for pieces being realized. Sam and Blaine dive into postures that can help.

Roger W Thompson is a writer, surfer, entrepreneur and overall outdoorsman. He’s a dad, and he’s got a mobile office in a van. We reached out to Roger because his writing reveals an unusual intimacy with the American West: byways, fishing spots, bars, all that. We wanted to know: what’s it take to develop an abiding relationship with the wild? What if you don’t live near the ocean or the mountains or a river? Lucky for us, Roger has his own take on adventure. It’s not photo-worthy drama. It’s intimate attention, unto an encounter with a place and with God, and you can try that anywhere.

Well, we saw Avengers Endgame. So this podcast's got spoilers, but it gives us the opportunity to talk about heroes, heroism, and what our cultural moment is doing with the two. Buckle up for archetypes of the hero, the human heart and how to live in view of the formation of virtue. From Faulkner: "The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion."

Allen Arnold joins Sam and Blaine in the studio this week to talk about the presence of Chaos in our lives, and the ways that God approaches it.

Dr. Tremper Longman III is the man when it comes to ancient Near Eastern studies. Meaning, he’s written more than 30 books on the Old Testament and its world, he’s one of the main translators of the New Living Translation of the Bible, he’s consulted on numerous popular translations, and he’s spent a career helping folks understand what the heck is going on. As in, how do we develop hermeneutics, aka reading strategies? How do we read the Bible for genre? How do we read the Bible as a coherent narrative revealing a single good God? He’s got a new book coming out on the Old Testament (Confronting Old Testament Controversies), diving in to creation accounts, divine violence, history and conquest, and sexuality. We sat down to talk a bit about it.

It’s rankled the And Sons team a while: it seems like VR presents a real threat of escaping reality, in a negative sense, but haven’t folks found ways to escape reality anyway? Sports, books, hobbies, films, dirt bikes, all that? The question is, is there a difference between escaping from reality and escaping into reality, that is, allowing a larger reality to frame your experience? You talk about these things on a Monday morning so we sat down for a realtime conversation on the topic. We’re supposed to live in such a way that we’re not fried, not on empty, not always reaching for last-minute soul-caffeination. We’re supposed to escape. And we do. But is it working? When you ask your friends how they’re doing, do you know anybody who rarely says “Tired”? So. Let’s evaluate practices of medication and soul care. In brief: we’ve got to return to human nature, to fortifying out understanding of what people are for, generally, and how they thrive, usually. And we have to have a good understanding of our season. And we’ve got to ask God - What practice, rhythm, routine would you like me to take up? This isn’t a buzz kill. You’ll like what God’s calling you to. Pardon the obvious but really. You’ll like the life God is leading you into. Because we’re already escaping. But are we escaping in the right way, at the right times, often enough, getting the results we need? Are we experiencing goodness in our lives more often? Also in this conversation: the staging of the Old Testament, the reader’s imagination, uncovering addiction, and some thoughts on the fact everybody medicates. It’s the soul, so it’s a wandering conversation.

Dr. Charles Stone has been a student of the brain for a dog’s age and written on neuroscience across fields. It turns out, understanding human nature, physiology included, outlines a path into practices that promote make your life better. We know: not exactly a surprise but it got us thinking. Anyway, it turns out mindfulness, or being present to God in your moment, is a Christian discipline with roots reaching back millennia. In our conversation, Dr. Stone outlined a mindfulness practice that produces practical relief like happiness, gratitude, an experience of the presence of God, empathy, etc, as well as complex stuff like cognitive reserve, new neurological defaults, and a diminished fear response. One more thing. Get this: in a brain study on nuns, researchers found that nuns experienced Alzheimers and dementia about as often as other people. Surprise surprise. BUT: you wouldn’t know. The nuns didn’t show symptom of either. That’s because they had healthy brains, cultivated through practices like mindfulness and contemplative prayer and statio. When parts of their brains stopped working, other parts took over. It’s called having strong cognitive reserve, and the point is, take care of your brain now, and you’ll thank us later.

For our 100th episode and Sam's 30th birthday, we reflect back on what small, daily, choices made in the days can look like over time. And the reverse: to not look at a single moment and miss all the choices that led to it.

What better way to explore the mother heart of God than through the eyes and experience of a mother? Whether you are a mother, had a great mother of your own, or missed everything that was intended, there is mercy for you. And not the "you are excused, we can move on now" mercy that gets slapped around. But deep, affirming, loving mercy from the heart of God.

Our lives are more than just the moment we are living in. They are the accumulation of billions of small moments, they are filled with weeks, months, years, decades. When we live in "the now" and forget about the trajectory of our lives we begin to make random and unhelpful decisions, but if we could see the small choices we make each day as fitting into the trajectory of our year or our decade we might make them differently. Throw in the momentum and direction and story of your community, your town, your country, and most importantly of all... the story of Jesus, then we might make very different decisions day to day. This is an area of maturity and balance. It takes maturity to not get lost in the now and lose the forest for the trees. But it also takes balance to not get swept up into the momentum of the culture all around you and forget that you might be called to live in a different direction.

We've been reading "Beautiful Outlaw" again and it's been surfacing some wonderful things. What is Jesus' personality like? Yes, he is kind and merciful and all those other over-used but totally true things. Is Jesus playful though? And if he is, how does that play out on a personal, relational level? Might we learn something of him that draws us closer in and allows us to see his hand in our daily lives more often?

Aside from the intro, of course. So we’re not going to do a series on drinking, swearing and smoking, but we are interested in talking about right action—how do we decide what to do? The word profanity comes from pro-fanum, Latin, literally meaning “before the temple.” The implications are not sacred, outside the sacred, etc. It’s interesting though that God doesn’t identify as sacred. God is holy. That’s a whole different animal. In this episode, we explore a set of related concepts. First, we talk about the human inclination to destruction as revealed in three Old Testament words: khata, pesha, and avon (not English words, btw). Khata is sin, i.e. moral failure, self deception and the devouring self. Pesha is broken trust. Avon is iniquity, or crookedness, and the consequences of human failure everybody’d live with if Jesus hadn’t come. Then we talk about transformation. Jesus is all about the restoration of the human heart. It’s what Moses predicts in Deuteronomy (30, we need a circumcision of heart), what the Psalms ask for (Psalm 51, for example), the Proverbs enjoin (4:23), and the prophets Ezekiel (36) and Jeremiah (31) and Isaiah (61) and yup, others anticipate God doing. In fact, in one of the passages folks reference in regard to profanity (Eph 4:29), Paul instructs the church not to let any unwholesome/corrupt/useless/un-life-giving talk come out of your mouth. The word is sapros, and it’s the same word Jesus uses when he says that you’ll know a tree by its fruit. “Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad (sapron) tree bears bad fruit” (Matt 7:17). What you produce comes out of who you are. This is the ultimate lesson of right action: become a transformed person (by receiving what Jesus has done and becoming his disciple) and the fruit of your life with change.

This podcast episode began percolating when we received several emails from different listeners, all of whom were asking the same question: how do you create a family culture that loves reading? Our love begins with enjoyment of story. To be able to enjoy the Gospel, theology, the sciences, the classics... it all begins with our love of story. Our very lives are a story, and we will not see the story unfolding all around us if we have missed learning to love the most simple of stories. Fairy tales may have more to teach us about ourselves and reality than you may have guessed.

We want more of God. More intimacy. More miracles. More clarity. More play. More joy. It turns out Jesus has outlined disciplines as avenues into the life we want. Generosity—regular, radical giving—is one such discipline. In this episode we explore what it takes to become generous. It starts, like so many things, with knowing God as Mother and Father. The Father who tells you your crisis in not a problem. The Mother who tells you your needs are seen, and you will be satisfied. We are made to resource our life in God. When we don’t, generosity is a rough target. From there we move on to the nature of the discipline: the way God intervenes to rescue a person from isolation. That’s what giving is, after all: separating ourselves from our stuff in favor of satisfaction. It includes money, and it’s more than money. Whether your tight fisted, like we’ve been, or the world’s champion tither, there is a path forward into joy, and it’s rich and storied and, it must be said, more than a little nerve-wracking.

Many of our conversations with friends have been around the subject of the cost of "really" following God. There is a sort of understanding that we are not completely there yet, and to take the leap to full-fledged followers would usher in a high cost. Yet, as Peter said, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."