“Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much” with Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth

Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth, prolific artists, writers, and co-founders of Art House America, join Dan in this podcast episode to discuss their life, work, and recent book, “Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much.”

In their latest book, Charlie and Andi have written a collection of letters to Christians and spiritual seekers who think deeply and care acutely about the state of the world and their personal spheres of influence. Each of these letters is a gentle nudge in the direction of God’s powerfully ordinary purpose for each of us, no matter what the future holds, to participate fully in the beautiful, redemptive work of Christ.

Our conversation touches on the importance of hospitality, the need to recapture the imagination, and the shared journey of navigating a chronic illness. In the midst of facing significant challenges and the ebb and flow of busy times and moments of slowing down, this discussion highlights a steadfast commitment to living a life filled with beauty, creativity, and faith.

Be sure to check out “Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much: The Way of Love in a World of Hurt” by Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth, now available anywhere books are sold.

About Our Guests:

Andi Ashworth and Charles W. Ashworth (the musician professionally known as Charlie Peacock) are published authors and contributors to a wide range of books and periodicals. The couple co-founded Art House America in 1991, a non-profit created to inspire a seamless life of Christian discipleship and imaginative living. The Art House in Nashville, a one-hundred-year-old, renovated country church became their family home and the setting for their work of hospitality, teaching, vocational counsel and running award-winning music/film production and publishing companies. For over two decades, the Ashworths hosted artists and writers, theologians, speakers and organizations, including Bono, Andy Crouch, David Dark, Mel Gibson, Amy Grant, Patricia Heaton, Steve Turner, Blood-Water Mission, International Justice Mission, The Gathering and the ONE Campaign.

Today, Charlie and Andi function as co-founders/directors emeritus for the three Art House locations: Dallas, St. Paul and Nashville, while Nathan and Cassie Tasker now direct the work of Art House Nashville. Each location retains the Ashworths’ original vision and practice while providing events and weekly programming in support of the unique communities. The Ashworths have been married for over four decades and have two grown, married children and four grandchildren.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: When we do podcasts, there’s often the privilege of being with people that you don’t get the opportunity to be with very often. And this happens to be one of those moments where I get to be with Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth, two people who I have actually been very familiar with, given their work, given their writing, given the Art House, given Charlie’s work as a musician, as a producer, as a writer, as a professor. Again, to talk about what the two of you have brought this world. We could be spending almost the entire podcast on an introduction, but to say welcome. It is such an honor to have the two of you. Thank

Charlie: You, Dan. Yeah, it’s an equal honor on our part, that’s for sure.

Dan: Well, I will say even if it can’t happen prior to eternity, you need to make sure that I’ve got at least five, maybe 10,000 years to catch up when eternity dawns.

Charlie: I love it. That sounds good. I love it. That’s a good way to see it.

Dan: One of the things we’re talking about today, and again, because you both have been so prolific and so creative over so many decades, we’re coming to talk about a new book, Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter, Matters So Much. First of all, the title is just so brilliant in our day because there is so much truth to it on so many levels where we get caught in things that feel so crucial, and yet perhaps even a week later, it’s like, why did I get caught in this? So let me describe my experience and then just ask the two of you to engage this. These are letters, and at one level, it is so precious to have letters. This isn’t just thought. This is you reflecting on my and our behalf, offering your experience, your wisdom, your suffering, but also in that epistory form of writing to us in a way in which it does feel very Pauline, at least as I read those letters. And I found myself really having the experience of you writing to me. And the only frustration was that I can’t write back and get another letter back. But in that process, you have captured something of the immense wisdom, not just creativity, but wisdom that has come from significant suffering, and yet within that, a deep, deep sense of the goodness of God. So first of all, just talk with me about how you came to this book and what prompted it.

Charlie: Well, I was the instigator as an act of love toward Andi seeing her and knowing how much people have benefited from her writing and just love her writing voice and wanting to hear it. So that was the first thing. And then the second thing was we were starting to think more. We were in a season of life thinking about leaving some writing for the art house folks, for the various folks that had come up through the art house. And then now there’s these extended art house programs and other cities and whatnot. So we thought now would be a good time for us to do some thinking about our greatest hits and maybe create a book based on that. So those to me were the incentives. So I pitched the idea to Andi with, how did I say it? I just said, “Hey, do you have…”

Andi: Do you have the essays that you’ve written over the years printed out somewhere? And I did. So I got the box and I just gave it to him, and he started cataloging and just looking at everything. Well, one thing led to another, led to another, led to another. And three years have passed since that beginning momentum. And what we thought was just going to be a small…

Charlie: A compilation.

Andi: Simple compilation of writings that we’d already done throughout our life ended up being a completely other book with much added to and much background and layers, and a lot of it cut out a lot of new writing, all because we had a really beautiful editor who had a vision with us. And when she said, specifically in our first editorial meeting, now is your chance to pour it all out and fill in stories and write things you wish you had written but didn’t. For a writer, I mean, for me personally, that was the… let the horse out of the gate. Now I’m excited about it. And off we went.

Dan: Well, my first encounter was with Real Love for Real Life, your book back in 2001 or 2. And it was so capturing the interplay of your humility and your humanity, but again, the passion to create goodness and beauty on behalf of others, particularly through good food and hospitality. So I was very, very interested. I mean, the first chapter I read was on food. So how does food play in that letter and in your life?

Andi: Well, first of all, I came at it because food has been such a part of my vocation, so part of my serving, part of my creating, part of my own needs and the needs of those closest to me, but also part of the way that I have served and I have worked in the world, so I could not write a series of letters about the life I’ve led without writing about food. And then as I was writing, the story kept getting more deeper and wider. And it went from my grandmother’s kitchen in the sixties to the place of our just beginning to understand food and cooking when we were first married, and then going through a really hard time in our early marriage and food and cooking and that kind of beautiful creativity and togetherness just going away and then it coming back with intensity as even as we came to faith in Jesus in 1982, and both beginning to understand just my own calling to that area of life and the creativity and how I was so captured by the kitchen and by recipes and the way it could pull us together, but also take care of us in a daily way, and then how we could share with others. And then in the Art House, when we came to live in Nashville in the Art House, I was always feeding people and I really needed to know how to do it. And I was inspired to learn more and more and more. And we just had some of our best and most beautiful relational times around the table, both back throughout life, but particularly in that time. And I think we still do. Yeah, they’re my favorite times.

Dan: Well and how did you become so hospitable but also so aware that the gospel is perhaps most profoundly lived in the presence of hospitality?

Andi: Well, I’ll start and Chuck can take it from there, but it was really such a part of our coming into Christian faith that we were so thankful. We were so grateful because we had been apart in our marriage and we came back together and we were so grateful to be together. We were so grateful that we had survived. We were so grateful that both we were together and our children, we had a family. And so out that place of real gratitude for what God was beginning to do with us, we had this sense of we just have this little house we’re renting, and it’s got nothing much more than some green shag carpeting and some hand me down furniture, but we want to share it. And that’s really how it began. So it began with a place of gratitude.

Charlie: Powerful.

Andi: Yeah.

Dan: What would you add, Charlie?

Charlie: I think the power of the invitation that we received to join in this, what for us was pretty carefully articulated vision of following Jesus. But it was small. It was small in a bite size for us at the time where we were at as people. And of course, things happened pretty rapidly that expanded that view in a really glorious and beautiful, beautiful way. And so I think as you hope for what we would call evangelism or spreading the evangel is what you would hope for that is that we really did deeply want to share with others this experience that we’d had. And we were from a community of artists and had pretty close knit community. I mean, a lot of issues had a lot of lifestyle, poor choices, but we were bound together in a community, and we knew that the power of that. And we knew that even the educational aspects of our mutual storytelling as we were telling the stories of our lives as that we were imagining them and creating them artistically, we were doing a much better job of that artistically than we were in our personal lives. But nevertheless, we could see that, oh, okay, so now this takes that small thing that can be so selfish and so inward, and so self-oriented. This Jesus way expands it. It kind of flips it and turns it outward. It can still have this inward experience artistically, but now we have the following of Jesus has become this cosmic meaning maker for us, and now that’s what we want to invite people into. And so we started to see that everything was infrastructure and everything was beauty. It was an opportunity for making and for creating beauty and for using the same kinds of artistic tools or culinary tools, as you might to say, what does it mean to create an invitational mood? What does it mean to create a space where people feel freedom? Those kinds of ideas. We immediately jumped into that.

Dan: Well, my sense, again, you, Charlie, are just a brilliant musician, but your capacity as a producer to be able to work with such a wide, wide variety of artists means that you have an ear that receives with wisdom to offer, but a willingness to take in the glory of others. And that has always struck me to be true about both of you. You take in the glory of others without what often seems to be there in many, and that is comparison and envy. Yet in that process of taking in, you both bring such goodness. So as a brilliant writer, as a brilliant musician, you really are remarkable. Yet everyone can create a table. Everyone can create a place with good food to be able, no one has to have the great skills and talents you both have to be an artist of beauty and of creating a framework of hospitality. And I think that’s why I read that first chapter, because I wanted to see how something that is just so common and yet so unique had the potential to give a taste of really the banquet of God. But the next chapter I read, and obviously because I’m somewhat of a public figure, I read your chapter Charlie on in some sense, it was a really sweet series of concerns and warnings for those of us who speak in public, particularly in the name of Jesus. And I found myself saying, yes. I’ve also found myself going, oh, okay. Yeah, this was written to me.

Charlie: Yeah, it was written to myself.

Dan: Talk a little bit about what you said and what you wanted us to know.

Charlie: Yeah, yeah. Well, I write to find out what I know. So I’m always speaking to myself too. And I’m never writing from a pure place of like, okay, I’ve gone to the mountaintop and now let me share this with you. That’s just not the way I’m wired. I am definitely wired to go to the mountaintop, but I’d probably take the wrong route. It’s like I take the most difficult path, but I’d find it interesting because it would do the thing that my brain loves most, which is solving problems, which is so much a part of the creative life. And yeah.

Dan: Two sentences. One is that I do believe we’re in a day in which to be heard, you need to be angry. And that would be true, whether it be on Instagram or often in the context of a conference or a sermon. And in one sense, the angrier you are, the more you’re creating an us versus them. And further, you’re doing so far more with the spirit, not of righteousness, but of arrogance. So what I found was, again, a invitational humility without a loss of commitment to truth and what you were putting words to do you find…

Charlie: Yeah. In fact, that you may remember the phrase that I used that I was in search of humble explicitness.

Dan: Yes. A brilliant phrase.

Charlie: And because I had gone through a period of time where I just sort of refused to be that public person that spoke about things that in a sense intellectually demanded some level of explicitness, they couldn’t just rest in this sort of implicit space all the time. And so I had just gotten to the point where I was like, okay, now it’s on me. It’s really on me. I’ve had my rest period. Now it’s on me to show up again and try to develop the language to speak explicitly in public while taking in a pluralistic audience while living as if the whole world is watching me type or listen to me speak or whatever it might be. And so, yeah, kind of like there’s no back rooms anymore. I mean, everything’s the front room. And I had for well over a decade had decided that this was one of the big issues with the American church is that even if we could show ourselves among one another as deeply committed to Jesus, we did not have the skills sets how to demonstrate that in the world at large. And part of that was a failure of the imagination because we had not given attention to the imagination. We had not put it on the same level as we do creativity. And so part of my work was to try to rescue the word imagination and put it as a precursor to creativity so that people could see that in terms of the Imago Dei, that the imagination precedes all our creative work. You cannot fall in love without the imagination. So I just wanted to reconnect those two and then help people see that you can use the imagination and language and still be a faithful Christian, but you can literally take all of the language of your evangelical neighbor, where when you speak together, you know exactly what each other is saying. You can finish each other’s sentences, you can erase all that language and replace it with completely different metaphors, with completely different articulations. If you wanted to take the time, if you thought that was important enough in the world to be that kind of follower of Jesus that could find themselves in the multiplicity of scenarios where it did require their imagination to find new ways to speak explicitly.

Dan: Yeah. And I saw so much interplay between the chapter on food and this chapter on, in one sense, allowing a burgeoning imagination to find language that doesn’t just fix, but actually expands. And the notion that the table and that Andi, as you would prepare a dish, there might be a totally different dish the next time that it doesn’t have to be recipe bound sound and vile some structure, but actually the playfulness of both of what you’re bringing felt like it was an intersection.

Charlie: Yeah. Thank you for notice. Yeah.

Dan: Well, and what I want to move a bit toward, and obviously you’re hearing my progression through, and we’re not going to get a chance to go through every letter, which could take hours and would be worth taking hours. But what I found myself moving toward next was the suffering that the two of you have done together in your marriage and some of that prompted by the illness that you have born, Charlie. So as we step into that, just describe for folks what you’ve been through. And then I’ve just got a few questions about what it’s cost you to be together in a process in which one of you is suffering very significantly. And then the other is suffering their suffering and also suffering for oneself in the midst of that. So lead us into that, either of you.

Charlie: Yeah. Seven years ago, I was in the best shape of my life. I was teaching at a university running the school of music, and I was under tremendous stress. And part of the fact that I was spending so much time working out and staying in shape and eating well, and all of that was to try to be able to get through the amount of stress and work that I had in front of me. And I just woke up one morning and I had a headache, and I didn’t get, during that period of time, I didn’t get headaches very often, so I thought it’s like two Advil and we will move on. I’ll go work out. Kind of like, well, yeah. So that morning I woke up with that headache and I’ve had it ever since. And so I ended up going to a number of different doctors and institutions and finally ended up at Mayo Clinic out in the Phoenix area of Arizona, and finally got a diagnosis of central sensitization, which is a pain management disorder. And at the time too, I had a lot of dysautonomia symptoms and hyper occlusive and sort of complete meltdown, central nervous system, and to which today I manage those symptoms, but they do go in and out. In fact, even in the last 72 hours, I’ve had a really bad bout of, so you can sort of imagine all my muscles start twitching, and I have an inner trembling where I’m just sort of vibrating. I remember years ago telling my family doctor that I vibrate, and he said, I wouldn’t tell people that. And so it was kind of, yeah, my doctor is, I don’t know. Do you know Larry Bergstrom? Dr. Bergstrom?

Dan: I don’t. Okay. Well, no, but it actually is a familiar name.

Charlie: Yeah, I think we have some mutual friends that know him, but he took it seriously. He said, oh, you’ve probably been vibrating for a long time. I was like, yeah, I have. He says, yeah, this is just the mother of all meltdowns. It’s like you’ve been here before. And so he was incredibly helpful to put a name on it, and then I could start to really see these patterns that I’ve been dealing with for a long time. And also, we both have abuse backgrounds, and so there was PTSD issues, there was the ACEs high tests and all of that. I know you’re familiar with all of that stuff, so quite high on that. But for me, the reason why I didn’t go down until I was 60 years old is that if I’m a six, but my resilience is a 10.

Dan: Well, yourstress bio-chemicals are ramped up in a constant flow. And so you’ve gone from some degree of balance to a kind of new balance, but so ramped up that in terms of dysautonomia, it’s like you are on a 10 running from the proverbial tiger all the time.

Charlie: All the time.

Dan: And again, it’s not a particularly scientific way of putting it, but it’s as if your body melts down. And it comes to that point where using an old phrase, it’s like you’re on speed all the time and you’re literally unable to regulate to come down to exactly the autonomic system of rest. And so again, history of abuse, a drivenness, a passion to create beauty and goodness can even become an addictive process. In and of itself.

Charlie: Absolutely. Well, it was my fix. Yeah. The imagination was the only place that I could feel safe.

Dan: So how did you live Andi with this vibrating machine?

Andi: Oh, boy. Well, let’s see. As you can imagine I mean there is all of a sudden the emergency of having a migraine level headache turn on one day and never turn off. It is. But there is a ramp up to all of that and there was and we had been living more with a lot of these just with ourselves already for a long time in a very public place as well. And so we had left that place. We had left the Art House. But I think a lot of just the pain of our communications that needed to change the pains that we, even though we had been working for many, many years in addressing various parts of our stories and in terms of therapy, yeah, therapy and the different kinds of abuses and just even the hurts that we had had given to each other early on and as we went along and just all of that. And then when Chuck began to just have this really serious physical, mental, everything just is breaking down, he also kind of shut down communicating wise. And I think that was hardest for me of all, because you’re in this mystery, you’re in it together, but I don’t know what’s going on. I know a little bit, but I don’t know fully. And when you’re the person next to the person who’s in so much pain and who’s going through so much emotionally and real realizations and all these kinds of things, you need to be talking. But we weren’t really not enough anyway. So I think in the beginning stages, that was probably the hardest because I just needed somebody to tell me, this is what’s going on, and this is how you can be with him and how you can care for yourself in the midst of it and how you can care for him. But there was so much mystery going on and yet to be answered and revealed. And so I think that was a lot of the hard part. And then to watch the person that you love suffer and you are helpless against it Now, I mean this many years later, I know that sometimes it’s the smallest comfort that I can offer, but I can’t offer big things. I write about it in the book that even sometimes when I see him in having really an uptick of terrible pain, sometimes I’ll just say, should I make some tapioca pudding for tonight? And there’s this small comfort. But yeah, in the midst of that, Dan also, I was learning about probably for the first time in my life that I had legitimate needs also that were very human and that I had had all along, but we were just in a, I don’t know. I had never learned to express them or just say to myself, you have needs. They’re human. They’re God-given, they’re right, and they’re good. And a therapist walked me through that, and those words came to me at a time when we were in a terrible place together at the beginning of all of this illness. And I thought, is this really a time that I can consider that? And then I realized, yeah, it actually is. Yeah. So I gave a lot of thought to what those things mean for me at the time.

Dan: I hope people hear how radical that is, because when you’re watching someone that you love suffer, the experience is such acute powerlessness and helplessness. And then knowing that at different periods with my wife, Becky’s, she has at times occipital neuralgia, which means that there’s, on a scale one to 10, about a nine level charge that goes through the back of her brain, and often 40 to 60 charges like that a minute. And when she’s in one of those seasons, I am out of my mind, and she’s at times had to say to me, go do something. Go write a book. Go do a conference because you’re driving me mad with your concern. What you think is helpful is your effort to find some degree of control on my behalf, leave me alone. And so illness not only creates that sense of helplessness, but also what you’re describing as isolation and loneliness. How do I ask her to have a conversation when she’s not doing well? And yet that on her behalf, and mine is often one of the hardest things that you could imagine. It’s also the very right thing, necessary thing for us to be connected for her to be able to return to life. So how did you come to be able to name the legitimate desires? I know it was in a therapeutic context, but there’s more than that with regard to what you had to break through to be able to ask more.

Andi: Boy, I sat and I prayed and I wrote, and I did go, I mean, at that point, I did go back to the therapist’s office sometimes every few days just to make it through that beginning part. But during that time, and that was after I had been talking to her for quite a while already, but it really was with her help, but it was with me saying, what have you always hoped for? What have you just put away because you didn’t think it was ever possible? And what are your needs? What are your needs? And they were everything from, I had always longed for rhythms and boundaries. I had always longed, as long as our lives got pretty heavily populated with people and hospitality and the demands of the music business and record productions, I had longed for rhythms and boundaries because I always felt like it is because we’re created to have limitations, that we have limitations that we would do well to live into those more consistently, I had longed for something as regular as a sabbath, as a one day and seven being something different, which when you have people coming to your house all the time, and that’s what you’re known for and that’s what your work is, that’s what your calling is, and the music business is part of that as well. But to me, it was always, can we all trust God together and take one day out of seven to have it be different? That was a longing at that point as I was thinking all these things through. And I had wanted a life that was more playful, more… Just that other, I just used so long for that. I love to do all of the things that we’re doing, but I also love to have times where we’re completely doing something other. We’re outdoors or we’re playing a game, or we’re being with friends just because we love to be with our friends. There’s no agenda. There’s no, we’re the older people and they’re the younger people, all of that. And those were some of my longings. And I wanted, although we had worked parallel, we had lived parallel lives for a long time, working in the same place, in the same proximity. We would still, we would talk about what we were doing and who was coming and what our work was. But there was an intimacy of communication that I also longed for. And many times we had it and sometimes we didn’t. But I longed for that in a more consistent way. I longed for vulnerability, I guess. And after a lot of suffering, after a lot of what we’ve gone through, we have that more than we’ve ever had. And that is a need for me, and I think it’s a need for us both. So that’s been part of a fruitfulness through suffering. Yes.

Dan: Well, let me read to you a section that I read to Becky almost within seconds of having read it. You’re right. We are incapable of giving the perfect love and understanding our partner longs for. God helping us, though we will continue to be changed, able to speak more clearly in love and hear and receive what we did not have ears to hear earlier. But there is no perfection, and you can’t go the distance without accepting that reality. That began for the two of us, a really significant conversation. Where are we requiring one another to be far more perfect than the other is? Where are we requiring of ourselves to be perfect in a way in which, especially someone like me, knows without question I can’t even get close to. So where has our marriage been boxed in by either the assumption or presumption of perfection? I mean, I cannot tell you thousands of sentences worthy of the purchase of this book, thousands. But that was one for us that just began some painful, some humbling, but also some incredible invitational engagement to be able to go, we’re in our early seventies. What does it mean to release one another from any level of assumption or presumption of perfection? So that’s what I’m hearing you capture that to own the fact that your beloved is suffering a terrible disease, but in the middle of it, knowing that you’re not going to be of help to him or to yourself if you don’t enter into your own story and enter into the desires, which really honor him. But as well honor yourself yet are disruptive that actually call forth some level of, this is not going to be an easy conversation. So the two of you will you allow me to say it. I’d love for you to respond. It may not feel this way, but you have been very heroic in engaging what you have been engaging.

Andi: Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Dan. Yeah, that sentence you just read, I think that was a collaboration for us, actually, that paragraph. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, boy, the grace of time, time is a gift of love and grace. That’s a lyric that Chuck wrote in a song many, many years ago, and it has proven to be a through line of truths.

Dan: Yep. Was that not written about 80/88?

Andi: Yeah it was written in 89 or 90. Yeah.

Charlie: The Secret of Time.

Dan: Yep. God, that’s a gorgeous, I mean, if you ever heard my voice, it is truly cacophonous. It’s a sign of the fallenness of all kingdoms. But I have hummed that song. Well, in my own private realm, I have put those lyrics to good use. So as I think about the level of heroism, which again, I doubt that you can quickly own other than to know that it’s true, you have been sages through literally my encounter with you from mid eighties on, writings that you did in the early two thousands. Both of you. Do you see yourselves to be sages? And what has it in some sense cost you to be?

Andi: I would say I do not see myself as a sage, but I want to really receive you saying that I want to not deflect it, which I’m trying to do a lot as we get good words coming to us through our writing. And we’ve had many good words given to us over a lot of years. But my tendency is to say, oh, I can’t. That’s not me. No, can’t possibly receive that, but I want to receive it. And I want to just say, thank you for that, and I’m grateful that that’s the case.

Dan: How about for you, Charlie?

Charlie: I think it’s a little easier for me in theory. I would say just simply because as a public person, I’ve been named in those ways before. So it’s not that it’s familiar. I mean, it still makes me laugh, but I think I do recall as a very young follower, Jesus, the two things that I prayed for more than anything were humility and wisdom.

Andi: Actually. Me too.

Charlie: Yeah. I mean, I think those were two things that we keyed into. Well, one, I really needed to be humble. I mean, well, actually, the whole process of coming to Christ was very humbling. And so I just kind of kept that up. So I think I can go back to that, and I can say that one of the things that I became very aware of early on was that humility was going to arrive via humbling circumstances.

Dan: And wisdom was often going to arrive via suffering. I could swear right now. Yep. I do not like that to be true for you all or for any of us. But when I first opened up, and I wish it were a book, I cannot wait for the book because reading initially on a computer just isn’t the same. I just don’t find words written in that form in the same way. But quickly, the gift of receiving a letter, first of all, I think there are many people who are far younger than I that don’t even have a sense of what it’s like to get a letter. That’s part of my history, is getting a letter from the woman I eventually married. And we wrote for years because we couldn’t afford long distance phone calls. So being able to take the book in as actual letters to me, and then even though  only received a few letters from my grandmother, they were, and as a young 18, 19-year-old, they were filled with levels of wisdom that I had never received from my parents or anyone else. So for me, and again, what a strange thing. I think I’m a bit older than the two of you, but I felt like I was receiving life wisdom, the suffering, humility, goodness, goodness, would be the core word. This book is filled with goodness. And I found myself a number of times just crying, just holding the computer and crying because there was something of that godness. And I think in our day, at least for me, this phrase, I would’ve despaired if I did not believe that I would see the goodness of God in the land of the living and your lives… again, broken, beautiful at times, probably stitched together by little more than the threads of prayer. Nonetheless, there’s something still in that gifting. So I hope our listeners have both that anticipation of I need goodness, I need wisdom. Yes, I need something from sages that I can metabolize as a chapter on suffering, a chapter on marriage, a chapter on friendship, a chapter on if you speak, feed others. So the richness of this book, I’ll just say, I am so grateful that you two birds are still alive. Thank you. Still flying, but as well, inviting the human heart back into the rich imagination of what redemption holds for all of us. Amen. So may this book be read well.

Andi: Thank you so much.