Navigating Unexpected Pregnancy With Grace and Truth - Sam Wheatley

How do you extend grace to people who know their damage to they've all ensured and have tried everything they can do more religiously to correct it and can't they are hungry for relief of a savior? January loves and cares for them and who looks at them with choosing grace. My name is Sam Wheatley. I am the director of Digital Services for Avail NYC. Avail is an in-person and online platform for people facing difficult decisions specifically around pregnancy, fast abortion and relationship difficulties. And so I manage the digital department which includes marketing, content development and IT support and this is my Faithly Story. Welcome to Faithly Stories, the podcast that brings you inspiring tales from conversations with church leaders as they navigate the peaks and valleys of their faith journeys through their ministry work and everyday life. Join us as we delve into their challenges, moments of encouragement and answered prayers. Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff and volunteers. Learn more at Faithly.co. Get ready to be uplifted and inspired as we unveil the heart of faith through stories from the front lines of ministry on the Faithly Stories podcast. How did you get involved with Avail? So I've been involved with Avail since this very founding because my wife was one of the original founding board members of Avail back in the early 90s. We were here in New York at a church plant at the time that grew called Redeemer Presbyterian Tim Keller. And Tim was being pressured at that point to talk about the issue of abortion. And so instead of talking about abortion, Tim and his creative way began to talk about what he called the doctrine of carefulness. And he showed throughout scripture how life, how God treated life with care at a stage. And so whether that is life in the womb, the life of those that are disabled, the life of those at the end of life care at every point, God treats people with carefulness. And he also calls us as his church to treat people with carefulness. And so we had a situation at the church with a couple who were unexpectedly pregnant. They went ahead and had abortion without talking to anybody and they started having problems afterwards. And so they came to the deaconate and started asking questions about what do we do, where do we go. And I just asked my wife if she would research and find some answers of places we could refer these folks to. And she and a group of friends started looking and realized there was not really any resources then for somebody in that situation. And especially somebody wanting a grace filled way to process and move towards wholeness. And so, yeah, in the early 90s, about seven women founded what was then called the pregnancy, the Midtown Pregnancy Support Center, which then became a veil in the 2000s. And so, yeah, we've been involved as a family with the veil is my wife was a founder. We've been supporters the whole year. And then about two years ago, I came on to lead the development of a digital product that the veil was producing called better clarity. And better clarity was a self-guided online platform for people facing these issues, because our research had told us that people were looking online, not wanting to talk face to face to people about these sort of intimate issues. And instead wanted the anonymity of the online experience to be able to process. And so, we took our model of care, developed a strategy for how to model that on a platform. And I came on to help build that project and then launch it, which we did this past spring. And now six months in, we're seeing pretty incredible results with it. What is that digital product? And how is that different than the in person? So the in person, well actually since COVID in person means on zoom like this 90% of our appointments right now on zoom for the convenience and also the anonymity somebody can blank their screen. Because what we've seen is like the whole dealing with these kind of issues is a journey of trust and building trust. And it takes time for that trust to be developed. So our digital product recognized we needed to build trust from the get go. And so people were distrustful. Also in this space, people were feeling extremely cross pressured that a lot of folks both on both sides of the political spectrum. We're pressuring people to make hasty decisions rather than wise thoughtful decisions that were in line with people's own core values and their own future desires. And so really our whole emphasis was in creating a digital platform to build trust, help people slow down and to provide them with the tools that they needed to process and make wise decisions. And so I think your original question Danny was like, how do we do that? So we have sort of short sessions. So a session is like four or five tiles that deal with one specific issue. And so it's like a carousel. Like a carousel where you'd flip through online. These tiles are maybe a specific question or prompt or something for somebody to think through. But it's one discrete topic that somebody's processing through in that it's not the whole the whole project. It's just one little piece. So like for a decision making, one of the sessions might be something like, how do I, how do I, how do I just breathe? You know, how do I slow down my racing thoughts? And so there might be five simple ways to begin to slow down your racing thoughts. Then the next tile that would be prompted or the next session that would be prompted would follow up on that. You know, how do I identify what I'm feeling? You know, what are the emotions that I'm having? How do I, how do I recognize those and it can be through several different ways. I always just journalings one, but there's also image selection. So there's different types of images that somebody might select. Oh, this image seems to to jive with what I'm feeling or process. And then they're able to explore that and clarify like on a emotions wheel, what that feeling exactly is. And then the next session would prompt them, okay, well, how do you process, you know, feelings of loss or feelings of anxiety? It's guided sort of the algorithm guides people through the process, but they have their autonomy and place to be able to choose how far they want to go. How long they want to go, whether they want to remain anonymous or whether they want to create an account to enhance their experience or not, it's totally private. We don't collect information other than just helping people guide through the through the platform. So it sounds like that's like a more of a self service kind of thing where I guess you're helping them to be more introspective. But when Windows, the touchpoint of like connecting them to either a counselor or someone to guide them happen. Or is that usually like you wait for them to be comfortable to like reach out? Well, one of the things is we realized the challenge of scaling. So there's about 2.6 million unexpected pregnancies in the US every year. We identified that about 87% of those people don't talk to anybody or don't want to talk to anybody. So that's really our target is the 87%. And so that's roughly, you know, a little over 2.2 to 0.4 million people out there. So in order to scale for that audience, we realized that we could never a these people who don't want to talk to anybody, be they're never going to walk into any sort of counseling center or any sort of traditional service provider. And so we wanted to create a platform that was totally self directed. And then also ultimately we know that they do need to be connected back into community, but the community that they need oftentimes they already possess. Again, about four years ago, we did a very quantitative qualitative research into the experience of abortion by people who experienced it, both male and female. And what we saw is that when people experience an unexpected pregnancy, they change their circle of trust. And so even though they have oftentimes people that could help them or that care for them, they isolate from those people. And so our ultimate goal is not for us to be the solution to their problem. Our ultimate goal is to equip them to be able to go to the resources they already have and be able to capitalize on those for their resilience and future. And yeah, I mean, that's that's ultimately the scalability is that we want people connected to their own communities. Now, we want to also develop national partnerships with other organizations who could offer and provide help and support and aid and those kind of things. And we're actively engaged in that project as well to be able to offer that service also because so many of our in person appointments here in New York City are virtual appointments or zoom appointments. You know, we have capacity eventually to link those that are most in need to somebody who could actually help them. How do people find out about guys? Marketing. That's a big part of what we're doing. It's a startup. So we have a big marketing budget in order to understand what are the what's the SEO that people are using to search for these issues. Who are those people? How do they connect with the personas that we've identified from our own research. And then so yeah, we develop ad campaigns based on what people are searching for and need. For example, we know men oftentimes search for she's pregnant. I don't want it. So that's one of our ad campaigns is around the idea of what happens when you're as a guy, you find out your girlfriend's pregnant and your initial responses, I don't want it. And so that ad campaign directs them to a landing page where they're able to go through one of these tiled sessions of identifying their own emotions. And then how do you talk to your girlfriend about your emotions? How do you both express how do you not process necessarily in the raw with her? But how do you find ways to think through this issue so that when you do speak with her, you're in a much better headspace? Is this specifically for Christians or is it just anybody? No, it's nice for everybody. Yeah, I mean, we are coming from a faith perspective. We are not a moral about the issues, but the way we think about is that we're not acting moralistically that we want to respect people's agency, but also provide appropriate tools that they willingly can actively can use to make decisions that their future selves will be happy with. Because again, we know again, we started with research, everything is driven by research. No one in our experience saw abortion as a positive thing. It was often the end result of a lot of unresolved dilemmas. And so we identified that if we could help people in the process to resolve those dilemmas to figure out pathways through them, they inevitably ended up making choices, you know, that we're healthier, that we're better, that we're more wholesome and life giving for everybody involved. Could you give me some examples of what those dilemmas would be and how it shapes their decisions? Sure, someone's in college and they think they can't graduate if they have a child. So we provide ways of thinking through that. Like here's how you could talk, you know, this is sort of more in person at the moment, but we're actually developing on our online platform, a partnership with an organization that works with women in college. And so one of the things is like how do you talk to your student affairs office about special cases for being pregnant in school? How do you work with your professors to solve maybe your due date and your finals are the same week? There are a lot of those kind of practical ways. The other thing is like, well, how do I apply for childcare support? How do I find resources? A lot of those questions are out there, but buried in a lot of other information. So we became sort of a one-stop shop for somebody facing that particular dilemma. Another dilemma is oftentimes interestingly faith communities. Faith communities can actually force people to feel a lot more shame about being pregnant. And so it actually isolates people from the people who could actually provide support. And so one of the things is how do I talk to maybe my parents or my faith community about being pregnant? You know, what can I expect? How do I identify safe people to be my advocates? How do I navigate this process of dealing with shame and guilt and coming to a place of forgiveness and acceptance? Do you guys reach out to churches to try to partner with them as part of your marketing campaign? Or is it always just... Again, our audience... I mean, we're not opposed to that, but it's not our primary strategy. Our primary strategy is the people facing these issues. And so we just haven't, you know, there's a partner organization we do work with called Pro Grace. And their whole mission is equipping churches, how to welcome and understand the issues of pregnancy and abortion for folks in the church. And so that's their lane, and we love them, and we think what they do is great, but we just have a slightly different lane. So you've been a pastor for a really long time too, and I saw you in the Westman. You're like my alumni, and you mentioned like with church, it's tricky because there is a moral aspect to it, and the Bible's really clear about life. However, you were talking about not being moralistic about this issue. So what do you think churches and better approach this sensitive topic with people to create that space for grace where they don't... The people going through it, they don't feel more shameful than they do. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting, Danny, is that oftentimes the church camps out on the issues that people already know. You know, like I'm pregnant, you know, hey, yeah, I knew that probably wasn't wise decisions that I was making. And they're already self-judging, you know, what they need is help and support and encouragement, you know, and they feel like the church is not going to give it to them. And so that's one of the reasons they isolate from the church. I'm just going to hear more of that internal critic from people around me. The other thing is like people know this is a child, you know, like there's no questions. And yet a lot of the pro-life movement has spent a lot of money and effort ink on this is a baby. Well, everybody knows it's a baby. It's not a... nobody gives birth to a lawn chair, you know, they know what it is. They know where it came from. They know how it got there. And so the question is oftentimes deeper than that issue, you know, like, okay, what was, you know, what they need is the support of like, yeah, okay, this is life, life is complex. You made a mistake. You probably already know you made a mistake. How do we move forward from here? What's the pathway? How do we... how does the gospel equip us to deal with our own self-shame over sin? I mean, we're all in the same boat. We confess our sin every week. So how do I process, you know, this, you know, that's a more public thing than you or the rest of the church who's dealing with similar issues that just are able to be more hidden easily. And so how do we recognize we're a community of people who step out of line and yet God is still gracious and kind to us. He doesn't give us what we deserve. Instead, he gives us grace and empowers us by the spirit to make better decisions for our future. But the pushback is how much grace is too much grace, you know, it's always that in the back of people's minds. Theologically, the question is how gracious is God? Is he gracious 80% or is he gracious all the way through? I mean, I'm actually like recently switched camps on this issue of being gracious because I've already seen it like in real life in my relationship with other people where I've given them way more grace than I would in the past. And it's a funny thing where a suffered touch over the course of like decades, it compounds to a better relationship. And yeah, people still make the same mistakes. But sometimes and looking at my own life, I can't even stop myself sometimes, you know, when you're in the moment. But yeah, when God finally changes your mind and your heart, you realize the people who are the most gracious to you. Those are the people that I tend to run back toward, you know, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I think it's a fundamentally a view of what produces change. You know, are people changed by sort of finger pointing and I don't think so. I think people are changed by like what you're talking about. The people who've shown me grace, who have been kind, who I need my screwed up and yet they need my screwed up and yet they still treated me with compassion. Even when they had to say challenging things to me, I mean, I think the gospel combines things that oftentimes we think are uncombinable, like truth and grace. Like we tend to pit truth against grace instead of understanding it is truth and grace welded together. They, you know, that's what produces change is like, hey, I'm not ignoring the situation. I'm not ignoring you pretending, you know, but I'm also not ever, I'm not ever going to abandon or leave you. I mean, again, you're echoes of scripture here, you know, I'm never leave you or forsake you, you know. And so that's the hard, what we would call kind of the third way approach of a lot of times sort of on any issue, we could caught up in the ditch on the right or the ditch on the left. And think the only option is switching camps from a ditch on one side to a ditch on the other side when there's like a six lane highway in between. Sometimes we just need to switch lanes, you know, we don't need to drive into a ditch. And so with people on sort of these issues of like pregnancy or abortion to realize like, okay, you know, the Bible is clear, people's conscience is clear. People know these things, I don't have to camp out on it, you know, I can say, hey, how do I help hearing in the middle? How do I help this process so that you make good decisions so that you make wiser future decisions so that this thing that happened. You're able to learn from, grow from and move into a healthier space in the future. And how do you help other people this? How do you, excuse me, how do you encourage people going through the same thing you're going through? How did you come to faith in Christ and how did you come from your pastoral experience to what you're doing now? Yeah, so I became Christian. Well, I grew up in the South in the 70s. And so there's, you know, as Flannery O'Connor says, the South is Christ haunted, you know, there's no, you can't avoid issues of faith. But, and we went to church regularly as a family and all that, but I don't think I had it sort of a turning point in my faith was in high school where I realized, hey, I, I can't shake sin, it just keeps, you know, it keeps getting at me. And no matter, no, how much self effort I put into it, it's not going to change. And so that really brought me to the place of, I need some help. And I was in a gracious relationship with a youth pastor who in a small group Bible study was just consistently pointing every issue back to the, to the person and worker Jesus and began to see, man, this is a compelling figure. You know, he is different and profoundly gracious. And so it was within the context of that small group Bible study, I became, at least my faith in Christ, began to walk as a Christian, tried to align my life to Christian values. How old were you? 16, 16. Then went to college, had great Christian community, did a couple of summer projects in different places. You know, and then after college came on staff of the Christian ministry full time, which brought me to New York City in the late 80s working in intercity ministry. And, you know, that was really eye opening to Christian ministries that what was success and what was not success. And as oftentimes, you know, not what was touted wasn't always what was actual for ministries in places of poverty and began to see there was a need for this kind of third way approach. You know, on could you give me an example? Well, there's what sort of what I used to call, you know, drive by ministries that would pop up at Christmas, give away a lot of gifts, you know, claim a lot of success. And then they're gone in February and the neighborhoods not changed at all. And yet there were also on the flip side, sort of lots of little mom and pop ministries that were faithfully present doing all kinds of stuff that was far more effective. And yet get far less praise or you know, notoriety for those things. And so began to realize like what what's really what's behind the story is most important. And so, yeah, so started we were part of redeemer as it first got started. And so that was really transformative, seeing what we felt like at the time was a church that really embodied a gospel stance of this third way. And so they were right wing or left wing, but tried to hold truth and love together in a fresh way, which then wanted to go to Westminster. They were offering extension courses at the time. And so I started, you know, taking Greek and introduction and ministry and those kind of things here in the city while we were working in Washington Heights and then end up matriculating to Westminster graduating. There was a typical church journey I went on staff at a church for three years in Atlanta and then moved to Salt Lake City and planted a church there for 16 years and then came back here to New York in 2016 to help on the executive team at Redeemer as Tim was Tim Keller was stepping down and helped sort of re manage how we were going to divvy up the congregations and ministries and ways that made sense. And I went to Dallas for a few years in pastoral ministry, but was really thinking through like what's next felt like I'd kind of come to the end of my pastoral phase of ministry. And then that's when a veil reached out to me to come on to help with building this platform. And so, yeah, I've enjoyed that work. A lot of it is, you know, I wasn't necessarily a marketing expert or IT expert, but I've learned a lot in the last two years. And what I feel like I do do well is manage people and sort of keep the user journey at the center of what we're doing, which is I think helped guide me through this transition. What was your time at Westminster like because I think you are like maybe the last class with Pete ends and the whole turnover, right? Yeah, I mean, I was there what I would call kind of the golden age of Westminster. You know, I again, it kind of keeps going back to the same thing I keep talking about this. Claire Davis was a professor of Westminster and Claire used to say all of church history is really a pendulum swing between extremes. And it's these kind of truth and grace. You kind of swing from one extreme to the other. And you sort of have truth driven phases of church history where it's very dogmatic and very doctrinal. And they have very grace driven periods of time where it's very everything's okay and it's all flowers and butterflies. That's Claire's really the source of this idea of like the third way for me like how do you. But the power of the church is always when those two are combined when there's truth and love. When the church is clear about its moral direction and its moral convictions, but it's also incredibly gracious and outwardly facing at the same time. And so, you know, I'd say I feel like I was at a time at Westminster that was like that pendulum in the middle where I saw the truth in the doctrinal side. But I also saw a lot of grace and outreach and mercy and mission vision at the same time. And, you know, a lot of ways it helped make sense of my redeemer experience in the early 90s of like, okay. Tim's great, but he's just borrowing from, you know, Kuiper here or he's just, you know, stealing from, you know, Lloyd Jones or, you know, like. Oh, in fact, Lloyd Jones actually preached the sermon. I just started to talk about last week, you know, those kind of things. It was helpful to sort of see the redeemer experience wasn't a one off. It was really connected to a thread line through the church's history of times when the church, regardless of its tradition, had really embraced both truthfulness and love as it's dual calling. Oh, where in Atlanta were you? Because I was there for two years actually. I just came in. Yeah, I was at a church called Christ church in Buckhead for three years. Okay. Were you the senior pastor there or? No, I was right as seminary and needing a job. So I was just their first assistant pastor. Nice. Okay. And then you're in Utah for Salt Lake for 16 years. Yeah, I moved to Salt Lake in 2000 and we left in 2016. So I. I say church planning was really a replant. The church has started the original plan to have a moral failure. The church was really in disarray about to close. And so I moved the hair, you know, green and unwiseness, you know, at the time. But nonetheless moved there in 2000 and yeah, so I turned around and a church that moved to healthiness. And so we left in 2016. We were our wife and I were both 50 and felt like it was at the end of one chapter. I have two questions about that one. What was it like turning around a church? And I guess how big was it? And then two, what is church like in Salt Lake when Mormons are very prominent? Yeah, I mean a church turnaround is the worst of all possible worlds. There's no money and all problems. And so it's really only by God's grace that it happened. But it's replanting a church is like performing a wedding in a funeral at the same time. Because there's people are coming and they're like, hey, it's a wedding. It's a party. Let's get excited and move on. And there are other people who are like, no, we've got this dead body in the back. We've got a grieve. And so there's always these two groups of people in the first three to five years of that project. And the funeral always wins. Unless you really do a good job of laying to rest the old, you can't move forward to the future. And so I didn't know that at the time. So it probably took a lot longer. But it took having to sort of honor the past and recognize what God had done in the past. And not just pretend it hadn't happened, even the bad parts. And be able to grieve it before we can move on. But I think in the early days, I tried to move on too quickly. I tried to let's just talk about the party and it made people who needed to grieve mad. So yeah, that was the first three to five years was a lot of wedding funeral stuff. And then after that period of time, it was like, okay, this is who we are. How do we, how do we live missionally in a, in a context that is, you know, says a lot of Christian things, but may not be quite as Christians that seems to be on the surface. And so this got into like, how do we talk about our faith in ways that connect to the heart and don't get sidelined by grammatical issues. And so it was very much a missional experience of like, how do we, how do we affirm good things that are part of this culture and how do we, you know, take a different point of view without becoming just finger pointy and angry. Again, kind of going back to similar things of like, how do people change, you know, people change when you recognize there is a problem and you provide an alternative solution that actually works. And so yeah, we, we began to see, I began to see my, my, my role as a pastor in that context was just helping my church act like good missionaries like they were the ones that had name, we all did neighbors, friends, coworkers, family who believe things very differently. So how do we act as Christians, not just argue as Christians in those contexts, how do we recognize people's bruises and tend to them because a very moralistic culture like Salt Lake has a lot of people who fall off the back of the turn up truck, you know, they make a sharp turn. There's a lot of fruit that rolls off the back of the truck and so our job was just kind of going around picking up bruised fruit. You know, you know, people who were going through divorces, people who for one reason or the other fell off the progression bandwagon of Mormonism. You know, people who, these kids weren't doing well, people who were facing same sex attraction, people who, you know, we're not doing well economically, you know, because Mormonism has a very clear progress track. And if you fall off that, then you're somehow spiritually damaged goods. And so again, this issue of grace, how do you extend grace to people who know they're damaged, know they've fallen short and have tried everything they can do morally, religiously to correct it and can't. And so they are hungry for relief of a savior who really genuinely loves and cares for them and who looks at them with shoes and grace. And so you ask how big we weren't huge. I mean, we were when I left the churches, maybe 150-ish people, which, you know, Salt Lake was a pretty good sized congregation. Actually, that's a good question for you because you've been to, I mean, you were pastoring the church of 150 and you were at Redeemer, which I'm guessing isn't like maybe the thousands. Well, yeah, when I was there, 2016 was sort of the peak was maybe six thousandish people between all the congregations. So I've actually read Tim Keller's article on like church dynamics and he goes through progression to church sizes. But more and more I think about it, I personally don't think I think there's far less benefit for me to make a church than the positives. And I don't know what your views are on that. I sort of see it as an ecosystem, you know, like in a healthy ecosystem, there's a variety of different life forms, you know, that exhibit and they work together in a positive way. And so like in Salt Lake, there were some very large churches that grew there while we were there and there were some medium sized and a lot of small. Now, I think that small searches struggle, you know, they're always struggling financially. The model is difficult to replicate in this modern era where people don't automatically give or tithe like they used to. And so it's hard to sustain a full-time pastorate in a smaller church model. So I think, and then in large churches, there's lots of obvious problems, anonymity, people feeling lost, not connected. And on the flip side, you know, like in a healthy ecosystem, those can work together, you know, where like in Salt Lake, I felt was the most healthy church ecosystem I'd ever been a part of. And the churches knew each other because we were all kind of small, I mean relatively to the larger culture. And so people were much more able to say, well, if we're not looking for what, if we're not what you're looking for, try my friend over here or try this church. And there are periods of time where people kind of rotate because they had different needs at the time like, hey, my kids, my high schoolers going through a lot of stuff and I need some specialty help with that area. Well, we don't have that, but this church does. And I think when there was more of an open handedness about the people who the Lord's, the people are ours, then those churches can work well together. I totally agree. Maybe it's not much of church size, but just a mentality of the churches. Yeah, attitude is, yeah, definitely. The attitude is everything, you know, you know, and there's a lot of places where every church is trying to be a cathedral, you know, it just doesn't work, you know, there's a need for parishes and there's a need for cathedrals. You know, 150 size congregation can't put on an orchestra and a Christmas pageant that, you know, at the same way a 3000 member congregation can, you know, there's no shame in that. It just is the fact. And they different, different strokes for different folks, different congregations attract different kinds of people. Yeah, but my mentality is more like a Uno reverse because if someone says, oh, yeah, they have an orchestra. It's like, but why did why do we need it? I mean, once in a while, great, but like every week, because the other side of it's like you mentioned, like, there's a higher operating cost for bigger churches. And when I think about like, and this isn't just churches, they're just like Ivy League schools and their endowments where they have like $60 billion just sitting, you know, on cash. It's mind boggling to me that there's just so much money stored yet not being utilized because people are like trying to preserve something in the future. And even for churches, like, I don't know what the budgets are, but like, yeah, I used to work at a big church. And we're spending a lot of money on things and a lot of times they don't even like itemize everything. It's just like a general estimate of like, this is how much we're spending. And I'm like mind boggled when, yeah, when like specific needs for like people, the budget's a lot smaller. So I don't know. That's something I still struggle with. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like the book of Proverbs, right? Like, you know, you know, don't give me too much or don't give me too little, you know, help me to have just enough. And most of my church experience has been the Lord is always faithful, but he's never early. And he's never overly, he's never overly abundant in his provision. It's always exactly what I need. So other people may have different experiences, but my joke is he always gets more than enough, but the more than enough is like a penny more. It's like, okay. So what made you kind of transition out of pastoral ministry? Because that kind of happened to me too. I think a lot of factors. One is I think, I think just personally, I was ready for a different challenge. Second of all, I think that the nature of the church currently has gotten extremely hard to manage. So the political cultural environment is putting pastors in a no-win situation that, you know, no matter what you do, no matter how much you say one thing or the other. It is hard to stay a third-way leader in a right ditch, left ditch world. And so, you know, there's certainly some of that. Third, I think just I was wanting a place where I could be a little more innovative and try some new strategies because I was seeing sort of a radical shift in the nature of people we were trying to reach. I often joke that I'm a perfectly attuned pastor for the 1990s. Like, if you could just can me up and send me back to the 1990s, I'd be awesome. You hear you. Without my childhood, so I totally get you. So I think there's, you know, I just feel like there's some age and stage issues. There was some desires to have a different challenge for the next last phase of third phase of my career. And there is, I think there is a mission challenge that drive that was behind it all that the world really is fundamentally changing. And there needs to be some creative innovation on thinking about what does it look like to reach and genuinely care for and show people a gospel approach to life that we haven't tried before. So what advice would you give to pastors who feel like, you know, I went to seminary, I went to Bible school. This is the only thing I know. And there may be like gun shy, maybe the pastor to go to another industry. Yeah, don't don't feel that you're not pigeonholed. I think people, people in the church have this strange way of shackling the pastor by saying you're doing God's will by being our pastor. And oftentimes that's a way of keeping them from actually consider the call to something else. I mean, I would have people, you know, as the pastor would come and say, we're going to another church. It would always hurt, you know, like, what do we do wrong? But over time, I didn't realize like the spirit blows where it wills. You know, I can't control people. It's not my job. I can bless them. And so the more I could bless people and help them feel like they were sent and they were encouraged. Or those relationships developed over time, the more people would come back, you know, when the thing they thought was the shiny glittering goal didn't turn out. They're like, oh, well, we should just go back to where we were loved and cared for. And they showed us we were loved and cared for by how we left. So I kind of think that with ministry, like it's none of it. It's not a life sentence. You know, it is God calls people into the pastor and he calls people out of it. That there's no shame in that. What else would I say? I think pastors are under recognized and all Christian ministry folks are under recognized and the skills that they develop that are transferable to business or all kinds of other fields. They have to deal with competing demands. They understand how to do a lot with a very little bit of budget. Generally, you know, they're often very good at communication and speaking and taking complex ideas and making them understandable to everyday folks. They're good at collaboration. They're good at creative thinking. They're good at all kinds of things that, you know, the modern marketplace demands. Like you can have any sort of degree and I can tell you in three years, it's going to be totally different field than what you started. And so you've got to be able to be swift on your feet to think about implications. And so I think ministry folks do a very good job at that and I wish more folks in the marketplace understood that and we're willing to to give them offerings from ministry. Yeah, I mean, primarily me asking you is like I already have people in my mind that are pastors and you know talking to them. Like COVID has been really difficult and just transitioning out of that, but they're all feel stuck because this is all they know. And like for me, like, yeah, I've worked before seminary, I went to seminary, I worked at church, I thought I was going to develop my life. Then I got into coding and like all these steps along the way, I was always put into position to do something brand new and it was hard. But that's normal. I want people to know like when you go into anything brand new, it's normal, but the fact that like you can bank on your experiences, because at the end of the day, we're just dealing with people. There are always problems with people, so like even with you talking to you, I just get this overwhelming pastoral sense. And so even though you're trying to figure out your job, I probably no doubt people who work with you probably love you to death because you're so gracious. And you know, that's so important. Like you said, it's about establishing trust in the beginning. And then people will only give that grace back to you, you know, give you the benefit without working through and learning. Yeah, I mean, when practical thing, like you said, you sort of took a coding class, so you knew how to code. I mean, do something if you're a pastor out there and looking for ministry for folks and looking to make a transition. Go get a certification and something, you know, that interests you. Maybe you design, maybe user experience and maybe coding could be all kinds. But something that's really super practical that people are actually looking for help to do. And then parlay that into, you know, who do you know that needs this kind of thing and just start networking your experts in networking. So turn on that, turn on that skill set. Very minimum people, she just blog and write a book and then it'll help bring that exposure of what you know and then people will find you. So, yeah, I mean, again, writing or blogging or, you know, podcasting is a great way of just refining your voice. What is it that I say? What are the topics that I keep coming back to you? I have some fun questions. I'm going to ask you. What was your best childhood memory? As I had an art teacher named Lanelle Whitener, so every Friday, every Thursday afternoon, I went to group of us to her house and she taught us art and just that time of doing something with my hands creatively was best part of my childhood. How often did you go every week from about a second grade through junior high school? And what made you give a Bart? I did give it up. I just sort of sort of went underground, but that's one of those things that's come back for me. In fact, I have an Instagram account called more than cardboard that I take cardboard and I do projects on and then I release it like street art. I want to follow me on Instagram that more than cardboard. Nice. We'll put that in the description. You could be the next Banksy. Let's see. What's one prayer request you would want answered instantly instantly? Yeah. She's a nurse and she's looking for a new job and be creative. She could get a day job that is less stressful than working in the hospital. What like is her specialty or she's been labor delivery high risk of statics that kind of thing. Okay. What are you hoping for at faith? Yeah, it's interesting in this era of trying to create communities, right? Like you're building a community and then seeking then to empower those people within the community to do or to thrive or to grow. And so it's interesting. You know, I'm just curious about how this community could be used to help break down some walls between previously segregated parts of the church into maybe new avenues of collaboration and cooperation and innovation. And how could we be preparing for you and your family? Yeah, I mean, you could pray for just our health and our, you know, we're my wife and I make these kind of 15 year plans and we're at the start of this kind of probably last 15 year. You know, plan maybe maybe there's two more left, but definitely within 30 years, I'll be dead. So, you know, the next 15 years of like, how do I? How do we both sort of wrap up and empower younger leaders in the space of life is really my vision for how to how to listen to and care for and tend to and support and encourage those younger leaders are going to be taking over. I feel like I'm a generation X. So I'm between boomers and millennials, which are the two mountain peaks. And so I'm always my whole life, my whole career has been translating between these two groups of people. And now boomers are slowly exiting the stage, but I'm trying to like, what is the, what are the zees and the, you know, next generation look like and how can I be a good mentor and citizen to them and that emerging generation. All right. Well, this is great. Yeah, thanks. Encouraging talking to you. Your voice is just very pastoral. Well, thanks, Danny. Appreciate it. Well, that's a foot podcast, guys, but. Thank you for tuning in to the Faithly Stories podcast. We pray this episode gave you the encouragement you needed to continue on your journey. 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