“On Holy Ground” with Dr. Keith Anderson

“What if the sacred is not somewhere else? What if it’s right here and right now?”

In this rich and reflective episode of the Allender Center Podcast, Dan and Rachael welcome theologian, author, and beloved mentor Dr. Keith Anderson.

Drawing from his book, “On Holy Ground: Your Story of Identity, Belonging, and Sacred Purpose,” Keith invites us to reconsider vocation not as a role, title, or single decision made when you’re young, but as a lifelong relationship with Jesus. It’s one shaped by seasons, suffering, questions, and ordinary faithfulness. 

Together, they explore how calling is formed not in abstraction, but in the particularity of our stories: our bodies, our sufferings, our relationships, and our hope.

If you are asking questions about purpose, identity, belonging, or how to remain open-hearted amid suffering and uncertainty, this episode is a gift. It’s a reminder that vocation is not about getting it right once, but about learning, again and again, how to live your life with God.

*This episode contains discussions of addiction and includes a quoted derogatory term. Listener discretion is advised.

About Our Guest:

After a decade in inner-city parish ministry, Keith R. Anderson transitioned into a long season in Christian higher education, serving campuses in South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Washington State. As Dean of Campus Ministry, he preached and developed ministries focused on urban engagement, outreach programs, spiritual formation, and mentoring. As a professor of spiritual formation, he taught courses in Scripture studies—including the Gospels, Old and New Testaments, the Life and Teaching of Jesus, Pauline Epistles, Christian Thought, Introduction to the Bible—as well as spirituality, spiritual formation, and spiritual mentoring.

Keith’s writing focuses primarily on spirituality and spiritual mentoring. He earned his doctorate in Spirituality and Leadership from George Fox Seminary. As President of The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, he provided executive leadership to a young seminary committed to being robustly Christian, deeply questioning, and profoundly human (Dr. Chelle Stearns).

His academic background includes history and political science, hermeneutics, and spirituality and leadership. He is a student of many influential writers in spirituality, including Brennan Manning, Henri Nouwen, Annie Dillard, Barbara Brown Taylor, Frederick Buechner, and Joan Chittister. One of his favorite quotes comes from Benedict, who described Christian faith as having two foci: a love of learning and a desire for God—to know and to do. Keith’s books have been published in Korean, Spanish, Chinese, German, and Arabic.

Be sure to add this book to your reading list this year: On Holy Ground: Finding Your Story of Identity, Belonging, and Sacred Purpose by Keith R. Anderson.

About the Allender Center Podcast:

Episode Transcript:

Dan: Rachael, I’m going to read a part of an endorsement of the next guest that we have. I’m not going to say who wrote this, but I’ll say it in a moment. I’m going to say, over a long lifetime, I have known no one wiser than Keith Anderson. And we’re going to be talking about his new book On Holy Ground, but I want to come to the last sentence of this endorser whom I know moderately well, meaning it’s me.

Rachael: It’s one way of saying it. Yeah.

Dan: Yes. This profound and beautiful book will do far more than transform your life. It will set a course for a kinder world. Keith Anderson, let me introduce you a bit more. Keith Anderson was my boss for, I don’t know, many years and was the most delightful boss, mentor, wise presence I’ve ever encountered in my rather long life. So Keith Anderson, you were the second president of the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. We can say you were indeed the first wise and true president at that institution. And if anyone thinks I’m being critical of the first president, I am. And if it sounds judgmental, it is, but it’s also true. You followed the beginning of the school and my presidency. And again, to be able to say that you’ve had a long, lustrious academic career, there are major books. People need to know that you really are one of the wisest human beings I’ve ever met in my life. And it is just such a sweet gift to have you on this podcast.

Keith: Well, it is my pleasure, my privilege to be able to spend this time with two of my favorite people. Dan, you know that one of the great honors of my life was to join you, Becky and Cathy, in the beginning moments of creating this center and imagining what it might become over these years and now to know that God has anointed this work so beautifully. And Rachael, what a role you have played as a public theologian, a pastor, podcaster. Is there anything you haven’t done with the Allender Center? I begin to wonder, but-

Rachael: I have worn many hats.

Keith:  You have. I had a glimpse into this gifted sacred work that you do way back years ago in a class or two, and I could see then the gift for wise and thoughtful teaching that you did then. All I can say to you is well done. Well done. Well done.

Dan: Yeah. Beautiful. So again, I hope people understand that having you on is… We love our guests. We love the privilege of talking with people, but we really are on holy ground when we have the privilege. I do need to address one moment of consternation with you. And it occurs every time I write an email. You are the reason that the email, usually for most faculty or staff is first initial name, and then we have to write out theseattleschool.edu. Every time I have to write that out, I bless your name because you were the one who chose to say-

Rachael: That doesn’t sound like blessing.

Dan: You’re the one who had to say, “We’re not going to do tss.edu. We’re going to say the whole name.

Rachael: As someone who did enrollment for a long time, it was actually very beneficial. Just going to put that out there.

Dan: All right. All right. I’m done. I’m done with that level of, again, blessing your name. I bless your name most times, but I bless your name in that context.

Keith: As I do yours, except that what I want all of the listeners to know is that I didn’t know until I met Dan Allender that I am a curmudgeon.

Dan: Oh, baby. Sweet curmudgeon you are. And there are very few curmudgeons who hold the complexity of the gospel of ferocity, intensity, but kindness in the way that you do. So let’s just jump in to vocation. This is what the book begins with. And probably for most of the people I interact with when I talk about your book with them, it’s like, “Oh yeah, vocation, some young folks need that. ” And I’m like, “Are you out of your mind?” If you’re old like me, more than anything you need is the opportunity to rethink, to reengage. If you’ve done it at all, you need to do it seasonally, maybe not every fall, winter, spring, summer, but seasonally you’ve got to step back into the question of what are you called uniquely to bring to this earth? So one of the things you say is questions are so much the core company we are to have on this journey. And I just want you to think out loud with us as to some of the core questions that most of us, especially older ones, fail to ask.

Keith: Well, thank you for that. It’s a compelling place to begin because questions, whether we recognize it or not, questions have a long and honored place in spirituality and spiritual formation. As I think about it, wise or deep questions can be expressions of longing and curiosity, but also of hunger. And for me, the image that comes to mind is that they declare that the inner doorway is open, or perhaps they can awaken us and thus reopen the doorway of attention. And I think that happens because well-phrased questions are most often grounded in our stories instead of in abstractions. And abstractions for me are honestly the greatest peril that I know of to spiritual growth. We become enamored with abstractions. We become enamored with principles, gaining more and more information than we probably need. And all the while our hearts are hungry for that formation and transformation. Questions insist on engagement even more deeply into our story. I had a faculty member that I worked with at one time who first day of his PhD program, he is an Econ professor, goes into the classroom with whatever, 10 or 12 future professors and sits down. And the professor came in, a world-renowned economist, sat down, put his books, set up on front of the room, looked at the classroom and said, “Are there any questions?” First day.

Dan: Glorious.

Keith: Nobody raised their hand. Nobody said anything. And so he said, “Class dismissed.” Day two comes into the classroom, sets up. Are there any questions? No questions. Class dismissed.

Dan: Brilliant.

Keith: It was a true story. Third day, deja vu, are there any questions? This time they came prepared. And those questions, and this is what is so important to me as it relates to the book. So those questions become the curriculum. That professor understood that. I actually created a list of 21 questions after I received the email from you, but we won’t go through all of those. Here’s some that I want to start with though. What if the sacred is not somewhere else? What if it’s right here and right now? What if the rawness and the ordinariness of our stories are precisely where God shows up in the midst of? What if we came to believe that God placed us here in our own life at our own altar in the world, that we have an altar in the world? I think we all understand mostly well what priests, pastors, or clergy do at their altars. They serve God. They pray, they offer us bread and wine. They teach us, they serve us, they guide us into a deeper life of relationship with God, and then they send us out into the world. They tell us about Jesus. They serve in a particular way, as do we, each of us. So what if paying attention to where we are at this moment in our life, at this season in our life? What if that is the very posture that draws us deep into apprenticeship with Jesus? What if our spirituality is lived actually where we stand and where we walk, maybe at least as much as, if not more than just what we think about? I’m drawn again and again to that definition that Dallas Williard used for spirituality. It’s so profound and simple. He said, “Spirituality is learning from Jesus how he would live your life if he were you.” Jesus was Jesus and his particularity, the Messiah. Even on my good days, I am not the Messiah. So what if the spiritual life is not about trying to escape the ordinary, but to find where God is at work in it?

Dan: It’s beautifully said.

Keith: Good hosts ask good questions. And I think our work as spiritual people is simply to be a good host to whatever arrives at the door of our house in our own story. It’s a posture. And this is what I think is important, especially as you talked about people of a particular age. I think it’s a perspective, a vantage point, a portal to this inner sanctuary of our soul. And I think that portal moves. It changes. It adapts because our stories change. The altars in my life included all kinds of crazy things. Early on, I worked in the stockyards. So my altar for a while was a butcher’s table in South St. Paul. It became other things through time. It became a lecturn for teaching. It certainly was the community table and the pulpit in my church life. It became meeting rooms and tables there. Now it’s a little table where I look out on the back of the yard and wonder, what are we doing with this storm coming our way right now? But those are all altars that change. The calling, and this is important, the word calling vocare or vocatio, the noun form, it’s simply too big a word to reduce to a single time in our life, to a single decision we make or to a job because it is in fact a lifelong relationship with Jesus. Here’s the way I think about it. I actually failed some classes in math and high school before I saw both the big and the small picture, the big picture in this case, we were called to know Jesus, to abide with him, to receive our identity as his gift to us. The small picture is it all happens incarnationally in our bodies, in our biography, in our stories. The Shema was a prayer prayed every day by the Jewish faithful, and it summarizes both big and small as well. The word, hear oh Isreal, the word is our God and the Lord alone. You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, and your might. This all sounds cosmic, vast, deity. But then it says, stay with this and go and make breakfast. That’s my translation of the Hebrew text. Keep these words that I’m commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you’re at home, when you’re away, when you lie down, when you rise up. Love God, before breakfast, and then be sure to make breakfast with your children or your grandchildren or whoever happens to be in your household.

Dan: Let me just ask, because I’ll give a context in a moment. You had three knee operations on the same knee.

Keith: I did.

Dan: And I watched you literally limp and suffer. And there was, we won’t go into the particularities of all that occurred, but to have to endure a knee operation a single time would be difficult, but three times. Now, the context for that question is three years ago I had shoulder surgery. Apparently it was bungled and I’m going to get the privilege of doing it again. And I have brought you back so many times, not just when I type out the Seattle School.edu, but brought you back as to this is how you handle your body’s ongoing suffering, particularly with what could be surgical or other failures that you have to endure. So in so many ways, you have become my calling, your face in how you handle the particularity. So I’d love for you to think in terms of how do you, because I know you work with countless people as a coach, as a spiritual director, you continue, shall we say, in our advanced years, actively engaged in helping people follow calling and calling not being merely task, job, but actually how we’re going to engage these moments of existency. How did you go through those three surgeries and do so as not just a wise man, but a good man?

Keith: At the risk of sounding like I’m trying to sell the book, the subtitle gives clues, I think, to all of that. The subtitle is Finding Your Story of Identity, Belonging and Sacred Purpose. And for me, it was the belonging, the realization that my life is not a solo. It’s part of a symphony that we’re not called to an aria. A lot of us practice that way. We make it about ourselves. The selfies or the screen we’re looking at, that’s what seems to matter most to us when in fact we’re part of a community. And my community, of course, included Wendy who patiently walked with me through all of that, or limped with me through all of that as the case may be. But there’s this… Well, as you know, both of you have dealt with some of the physical pains and things of our lives. Pain and suffering slows you down. And it can be this healing, certainly one hopes that’s where it’s going to go, but it can be this time of focus. And I want to jump to one of your other questions because I think it applies here. One of the questions is about the daily examine, consolation and desolation. Well, first of all, years ago, I realized that I needed to hear Christian faith spoken of in a different accent. So I started taking classes in the summer at Boston College, a Jesuit school, and I there learned a good deal about Ignatius of Loyola, who both practiced and followed his own spiritual practices. He wrote the book that really has provided an orientation for people all across the centuries. But I don’t know if you know the backstory and how that happened for him. Ignatius was a Spanish soldier who encountered a cannonball one day.

Rachael: I remember now.

Keith: Yeah. Oh, that’s the right response, Rachael. He ended up in convalescence for well over a year, and he only had access to two books. One was a life of Christ and another was a life of the saints with nothing else to read. He learned how to pay attention to his own story, to his own pain, to his own life, and to what was before him in his other books. And he had this profound awakening that he began to write about, which included, I think, one of the essential parts of The Allender Center, it included the daily examine. Typically, at the end of the day, one looks back on the day in Ignatian or Jesuit spirituality, and you begin to walk through and remember what happened during the day. What was that about? Where was my pain? Where was the suffering? Where did I feel God close? Where did I begin to wonder if God had left the room or left the planet altogether? But he said there are moments of both consolation, comfort, serenity, shalom, and desolation where you may feel numb or you may realize that your ego took over and your words wounded. But Ignatius insisted, and this to me is profound, Ignatius believed that God meets us in both of those places, not just in one of them, not just in consolation. Ignatius saw desolation as revelation for us. Somebody said that the daily examine and all of this forms a kind of map of the soul, which is a nice image, except that the maps that I have, the old paper maps that I still carry around in my car are a wee bit torn. They’re tattered. Some of them have smudges on them from whatever I spilled on them, so I can’t see the route anymore. I don’t know how to get there anymore. And Ignatius talked about that as the leaning of the soul. He said it’s the way that we begin to discern God’s voice. It’s a tilting of your ears, I suppose, toward it. And for me, that has never come in lightning bolts, more as a whisper, the subtle leaning of the soul for me. And I can’t say… Well, there’s a very competitive part of me. So part of the competitiveness was I’m going to be up on my feet, I’m going to get the range of motion that I need, and I’m going to move on. But I needed, Wendy, at my side, I needed physical therapy, and I needed to learn to be silent, to sit and to wait for whatever, whomever was going to knock on the door of my house.

Rachael: Well, I want to jump in here, and you’re going to have to just humor me for a minute, because I will get to more questions. I’m not going to take us off. But I met you when I was 24 years old, becoming a student at the time Mars Hill Graduate School became the Seattle School in my first year of working there. And I got to take classes with you on Biblical Spirituality and Spiritual Formation. And then I got to work for you as an employee of the Seattle School and got to have incredible conversations. I’m now 44. I met you 20 years ago, which is one of those things I think when you start hitting middle age where you go, “Wait a minute, that was 20 years ago. Are you sure it wasn’t five? Come on, it can’t be that long ago.” And I guess I just am thinking about wisdom and I’m thinking about vocation and the vocational questions I’m asking today that are very different than I was asking. They’re not entirely different, but they’re a little bit different. And part of that’s because I have a little bit more wisdom with suffering and a little bit more experience, tangible experience. Not that I didn’t at 24, I certainly did, but more tangible experiences of all the ways things can go sideways or wrong or… I’m a parent now, right? So my sense of danger is a lot more heightened and I’ve just always… It was so good to read your book. I feel like I was back in class with you or back in conversation and just felt like such a generous gift to us to give this to us. And I guess I want to hear more from you when we’re thinking about vocation, which of course I love that you’re grounding this in identity and belonging and sacred purpose. What are the markings that enable you, enable us to traverse dangerous terrain, to not kind of double down on… Not smallness is fine, but to not double down and kind of like safety first in a way that we might miss out on what we’re being invited to.

Keith: I remember saying something like that in the book. There are sometimes I wish I hadn’t, but I kind of do remember it. And the question, how do we traverse dangerous terrain? Let me give you a couple of responses to that and a couple of stories. My life, I would say first of all, and Rachael, we had some moments. We had some good moments, some hard moments. You had some hard moments on the road and scary kinds of things. And I remember working through those. First of all, I would say my life, part of my answer, what are the markings? My life has been marked by meeting extraordinarily broken people. The title of the book is a little bit of the clue because I would say that the holiest moments were never under the spotlight. They came more in the sense that they were hidden in the margins. Early on, it was I didn’t feel that I was chasing a career. I don’t know in my earliest years at 23 and 24, I don’t know that I even would say that I knew how to pray, but I was aware that I was in on some kind of a conversation that started someplace else and it didn’t start with me. And I became clear to me over time that God was quietly forming me. And I want to keep using that word on a holy ground. I had been accepted, this is background, but I’d been accepted into a PhD program at the University of Minnesota. I was going to become a historian. Providentially, at the same time, I began to volunteer in a little inner city church in the shadows of the state capitol in St. Paul and I began to see life firsthand on the edges. That was one of the most powerful shaping influences and markings of my life. We had created a drop-in center on Saturday nights, and we were there till midnight at least. And I can remember driving home sometimes much later than that and seeing kids who had been in the drop-in center are now just wandering around out on the street because their parents were up the street on Rice Street at the local tavern drinking up their week’s wages. I began to see the world with different eyes because of that. You can’t unsee poverty, neglect, or abuse once it presses into your experience. You just can’t. And to my surprise, it all took me to the seminary instead of to the university. Ed Willey was a deacon in that little wood framed Grace Chapel just off Rice Street. He had lost his first family to alcoholism. And at the time of this story, he was on a fast pace to lose his precious little daughter and his wonderful second wife. She called me late, late one night and asked me to come to their apartment, and she said, “Keith, it’s bad.” So got in my car, drove into the city, trudged up the narrow stairs through an open door into a dimly lit room, and there sat Ed with this enormous bottle of Jim Beam whiskey in front of him, another chair waiting for me across from the table. His voice was thin, his hands were shaking, and his eyes were filled with a terror that sadly I had seen before. “Keith, tell me not to drink, “he said. “Tell me, and I won’t do it. ” So I said the words, “Don’t drink it, Ed.” But we both knew that moment had long passed before I started up those stairs and his eyes just filled with tears, took that bottle in hand, and I will never forget the picture of him just chugging an enormous amount of whiskey. Betty told me that he drank that bottle dry that night and then collapsed on the floor. The problem was he had been run out of every rehab center that we knew in the Twin Cities because he’d been there before and they wouldn’t bother with him anymore, but we pressed hard and finally found a way for him to enter Hazeldon. Many months later, he came out sober, determined, and just a couple of years away from dying of liver sclerosis. Before he died though, he said to me, and I don’t know if these were his words, if they were AA words or where they came from, but he said, “To call a man hopeless is to deny the existence of God.” You cannot remain untouched or unmarked by that kind of truth embodied in that kind of brokenness. A second person who had a major part in marking my life was Brennan Manning, former Catholic priest, defrocked priest, a raging alcoholic himself. Regamuffin Gospel writer, he called himself a prophet of grace. I first met him actually at a conference in Philadelphia. His voice was this rough gravelly voice that I was convinced sounded like it had traveled through both fire and mercy. His teaching moved me so deeply. I said, “I’m going to bring him to our Baptist University chapel.”

Rachael: I love this story too.

Keith: That’s a story for another time, but I was heavily criticized until he spoke in chapel that first time. And then he came back time and time and time again. That first day, well, Brennan had this goofy kind of thing that he did at the end of every… well, it wasn’t goofy, but the way he did it was a little goofy. He had about a $9 tape recorder and he would hold this tape recorder to the microphone and play this song that he thought was this wonderful background music. It just really wasn’t. It didn’t fit. But what he would do is he would say, “I want you to imagine yourself climbing into the lap of Jesus as he whispers in your ear who you are. You are the beloved of Abba, the Father.” Well, that first day in chapel, my mind was on my duties. What’s next? After chapel, I had to host him. I’m thinking about all that. And I didn’t know it until that first day, but he would never eat anything before he preached. But afterward, there were two things he wanted and only two things. Ice cream and brownies. And I would buy him half a dozen brownies and he would just consume all of them before you could blink. Well, that day I looked down and I saw that there was water on the floor and on my shoes. And I thought I must have brought a glass of water or a bottle into the chapel with me. And then I realized those were my tears. Without realizing that something deep in my spirit had responded before my mind could. I was not being asked to prove my love for God. I was being asked and invited to receive God’s love for me and it struck somewhere deep inside me. I wasn’t conscious of it. It just happened. Do I have time for one more story?

Dan: Oh, sir, you can go for the next two hours.

Keith: Well, Brennan, first of all, let me just say, Brennan and I spoke many, many times. And sometimes one of us would call late at night and we’d have these conversations. And one night, I’ll never forget this. He said, “Keith, compared to me, you’re a minor league sinner.” He said, “But the difference is you refused to let God forgive you and so denied the existence of God.” Well, Ed Willie and Brennan together marked me deeply. This other one, I was marked very much by being the second son in a family of five children, number three, in birth order, but second to an older brother who experienced brain damage caused by a seizure. My young mother waiting her first delivery of her first child. His disability would freeze his mental acuity at about the age of a six year old or less and over time, probably less. But he was mainstreamed in the 1950s in a class they called the special class, comprised variously disabled and mentally challenged children. Special was the polite word. Those kids were on the playground with the rest of us. Retard was the most frequent invective that I heard all through our childhood, not only on the playground, but very often, and this still disturbs me, very often by parents. Parents wanting to protect their children from someone they deemed dangerous. My mother was, no surprise to Dr. Allender, my mother was not someone who was very able to express her feelings in words. Interestingly though, about 20 years before her death, she wrote a song. I want to read it to you and I want you to think of it in terms of her living this life. Five children, firstborn, physically, just fine. Emotionally, not so much. Mentally, very damaged. Here are her words. “I praise you, Lord, for your loving kindness and mercy to me. I thank you, Lord, for giving me life and then the gift of eternal life. I thank you now for these years, these years in which you have graciously meted out what was best for me. Lord, you know I wouldn’t have chosen the hard things, but I thank you for being at my side every day. Great is my God and worthy to receive praise.” That’s how we prepare for dangerous terrain.

Dan: I know that words are coming, but it’s one of those moments, again, to be on holy ground is to take a breath and that’s something of the fullness. She wrote that in the midst of a level of suffering and a level of doubt, but a level of trust. So you have a very lovely, rare, complex heritage. I don’t want to even come close to ending before I ask you about a book you sent me. Leonard Cohen, for many, will be an unfamiliar name, which is tragic, but a writer, singer, songwriter, sung and wrote a song called Hallelujah, which might not be what most people think of when they think of that particular phrase. And yet, as a “secular Jew” who was no more secular than any religiously questioning, open-hearted man or woman, you sent me this lovely book of poems. So your mom’s poetry compels me to ask about how you met Leonard and why you would send me that book.

Keith: Well, I met Leonard through his music, of course. And my mother wouldn’t have thought of him as an exemplar of faith, for sure. Many of his songs could lead one astray with their raw sexuality, but he somehow remained a teacher, and in some ways for me, in some of his songs at least, and reminded me that if we’re attentive, God’s voice can speak through anything and anyone.

Dan: Amen.

Keith: So a couple of things that I would say I learned from Cohen. I mean, I just loved his… I’m pretty sure that Hallelujah was the first song that I ever heard from him. And it’s that line that just made me think of David because he said, It’s a broken or a holy hallelujah. Well, then I found that he had written some things and I somehow thought that, well, that his words would resonate in you in a way that they did in me. Let me just read a couple of them. I won’t go into… But it’s a vocabulary in a way of… first of all, I would say that one of the most important things that I would… I can say that I learned at first from him, but that I was reminded of him is that prayer is a conversation about a real life. Period. It simply is. Here’s one. “All my life is broken unto you and all my glory soiled unto you. Do not let the spark of my soul go out even in sadness. Let me raise the brokenness to you, to the world where the breaking is for love. Do not let the words be mine, but change them into truth. With these lips and struck my heart and let fall into the world what is broken in the world, lift me up to the wrestling of faith. Do not leave me where the sparks go out and the jokes are told in the dark and new things are called forth and appraised in the scale of the terror. Face me to the rays of love or source of light or face me to the majesty of your darkness, but not here. Do not leave me here where death is forgotten. and the new thing grins.” Another one, he said, “I lost my way. I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world and the tears were for my lost victory, but you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveler’s heart for his turning.” And maybe just one final line. He said, “Arouse my heart again with the limitless breath you breathe into me. Arouse the secret from obscurity.” The song that I could never get out of my brain, and I know that I probably have spiritualized it when I think, in fact, it is about the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, but the phrasing is this. “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. That’s how the light gets in.”

Dan: You couldn’t actually be enunciating better what this holy book called Unholy Ground accomplishes, which in some ways, Keith, it’s a beautiful movement of your own openness to what the spirit has brought you to, and therefore an invitation to kind of name that as a minor… What was his statement about…

Keith: Minor league sinner. Minor league sinner.

Dan: Minor league sinner, who at some level has known major league grace. But in that process of the playground, which is what I felt so captured by in this book is take seriously the playground of the mundane, of the playground of the work of suffering, and the playground of what it means to be human. Even that phrase perhaps can be overstated. This book is an invitation to a level of humanity in the living out of the calling of what you know to be the goodness of God and the land of the living. And in that sense of how you have lived in your wife’s suffering and your family’s suffering and the reality of your own suffering and the people that you have generously given your heart to, my friend, this is a life-giving and a life-orienting book. And so we can say, may this be a significant purchase, not merely in terms of a few dollars spent, but far more the purchase of something of the framing of the life of what the Spirit brings. So we thank you, dear friend. Thank you for being with us. Thank you both.