Edward Grinnan (Editor-in-Chief of Guideposts Publications)

The episode you're about to listen to was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're still going to love these older episodes because the majority of each conversation focuses.

On how the gospel influences the work of our guests.

With that disclaimer out of the way.

Please enjoy the episode.

Foreign.

Hey everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery.

I'm Jordan Raynor.

This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week I host a conversation with a Christian who's pursuing world class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the Gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work. Today's guest is Edward Grinning, editor in chief of Guideposts magazine. Yes, that guidepost that's been producing faith based content for 75 years. They have 4.5 million readers globally. But Edward, in addition to being a great journalist and writer, is just an exceptional leader leading this organization through some crazy times over the last 20, 25 years or so. So Edward and I recently sat down. We talked about how he went from being an alcoholic living literally on the streets to miraculously landing a job at Guideposts. We talked about what he learned about God when he was dangling out of the window of a hotel 42 stories above the ground. And we talked about how big, hairy audacious goals or bhags can help you and or your teams think more long term about the work God has put you on this earth to do. Without further ado, please enjoy this episode with Edward Grinnett.

Hey Edward, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here today. I really been thinking a lot about this interview and what we might talk about and I'm very excited for prospect of talking to your audience. It sounds like you have great people on your podcast.

Yeah, we've had some amazing, amazing guests and you're just strengthening the lineup here.

Well, you flatter me.

Before we get into the substance, let's just make sure our audience understands what is Guideposts for those who aren't familiar with the brand. What is this organization?

Guideposts turned 75 years old last year. We are an inspirational media company. We were founded by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and his wife Ruth in 1945, right after World War II. A lot of you will recognize Dr. Peale's name. He was the famous author of the book the Power of Positive Thinking. But he actually founded Guideposts about seven years before he wrote that landmark book. And what he wanted to do, and Dr. Peel was a visionary, and what he wanted to do was have a medium where people, ordinary people, could tell their stories of faith in action, of how they used their faith in their daily lives. He envisioned it as sort of a Kiplinger report for the spiritually and religiously inclined. As you know, Dr. Peale was a minister of the gospel, but he was also a great, great public speaker. You know, a lot of people. He knew a lot of people in the media business. He himself had a radio show at the time, and they all thought he was a little crazy to think that there would be an audience of people who wanted to hear from people like themselves. But he used to get these tremendous letters from people who read his books and heard his radio program. And their stories were so powerful that he thought that he really wanted to share them with the world. What he was really, he kind of invented user generated content, which was a term that, you know, wouldn't come into vogue for another 50 years. But Dr. Peale thought that he wanted to give voice to the ordinary people who could tell stories of how faith made a difference in their day to day living. And we still do that. We tell tremendous inspirational stories about people who have overcome challenges large and small by using their faith, in many cases, their relationship with Christ. We're very broad based in terms of where we want to meet people on their spiritual journeys and. But the organization itself is rooted in Judeo Christian biblical principles.

Yeah, interesting. So the story of how you wound up at Guideposts is a pretty wild one.

So I want to invite you to.

Take as much time as you'd like, start as far back as you would like, and just share your story with our listeners, if you don't mind.

Well, all right. It's a story that it seems sometimes like it's almost a different part of my life, or a different life altogether. I have to say, when I came to Guideposts, I had never really heard of Guideposts. I assumed it was a travel magazine, and I thought, oh, great, I'm in desperate need of a job at Travel Magazine. Maybe I'll get some trips out of this. If you were to exchange the word journey for travel, I think that would be far more accurate. But I'll tell you a little bit about myself at the time. I'll be open about this. I was an alcoholic. I had gone to college and gone to graduate school. And after graduate school, my life fell apart. I was living on the streets. I was panhandling change in lower Manhattan. I would pick up cigarette butts off the street to smoke what was left of the tobacco that was in them. Because I didn't have any money for cigarettes. I only had money to drink. I ended up eventually in a rehab. After going through a number of detoxes and emergency rooms and everything else, and sleeping outdoors and sleeping in flop houses, I ended up in a rehab. My real resistance and sobriety was a resistance to God. I remember once when I was trying to stop drinking on my own, I remember calling up AA Intergroup and asking them, can you find me a meeting where they don't talk about God? And they put me on hold. And they never came back because I don't think they could find such a meeting. I stumbled and staggered my way through rehabs and all sorts of programs to no avail. But then I just got it. I got sober. And it was the most amazing thing in my life. And I decided to open myself up to at least the concept of a loving God who cared about me. Now, a lot of that was act as if. That's a phrase that comes that's used a lot in 12 step programs, particularly for beginners like I was, who aren't really. The depth of their spiritual or religious commitment is very tenuous, as mine was. But I acted as if. And I got sober. And it was a miracle that someone like me, who had fallen as far as I had fallen, was able to drag himself up a bit. And I did. I stayed sober for a couple of years. And then I guess I forgot I was an alcoholic. You know, I decided, well, maybe I can try to drink normally again. Like, I've got this behind me. I, you know, taking care of this problem. And I kind of know how to pray now and ask for help when I need it. And I got a job, and it was as a writer. And I was over in Europe working on a book for a corporation I was writing the history of a Danish corporation. And I took a drink. I know exactly the time of day and where it was. It was in the spring in Copenhagen, down by the docks. If you've been to Copenhagen, there's some beautiful restaurants dockside. And I started to drink and I went. I thought I could control it and I couldn't. And my life fell completely apart. I got lost in Europe for about a month. They had Interpol looking for me. I came very, very close to suicide. I talk about that in my first book, the Promise of Hope. How I sat on the ledge of a hotel about the 42nd floor. I sat on the windowsill, actually, with one foot dangling over the precipice and the other one back inside the room. And I was drinking. And I thought, well, whatever happens, I'm going to fall one way or the other, and it doesn't really matter which way I fall. And it was at that point that I had a lot of alcoholics and what Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics, called the white light experience, where I felt almost a painful, overwhelming presence overtake me. It was frightening and it was liberating all at the same time. And I came back to the United States somehow sick, penniless, virtually homeless, because the roommate that I was sharing an apartment with back in New York was in the AA program, and he was not going to tolerate me drinking. I started to climb that big uphill slog back to sobriety again, going back to aa, getting a sponsor who could really kind of direct me spiritually. And in the first few weeks of that period, I got a call from a recruiter who said, there's an opening in a magazine called Guidepost. Would you be interested in interviewing with them? Well, I was interested in anything that would give me a paycheck at that point. But as I said, I had never heard a Guidepost. But the strange thing is, Jordan, is I had never heard of this recruiter either. I had no idea. She said, I have your resume in front of me. And I thought, I never sent you a resume. I don't know who you are. Is this some sort of scam or a joke? But my sponsors in the program at the time were telling me to say yes. Say yes. Don't say no. Say yes to everything. So I said, yes, I'll go in for this interview at Guidepost magazine and thinking it was a travel magazine. And I got there, and I realized, you know, it wasn't a travel magazine, but it was really interesting. The people were interesting. It was a very creative atmosphere. They were working on these great stories of ordinary people and celebrities. You know, Guy Push usually puts a celebrity on the COVID And I met the editor in chief at the time, Van Varner, and I don't know why he hired me. I wouldn't have hired me. I certainly wouldn't have hired me. I said, okay. You know, my sponsors in the program said, you need to take a job for a year. Just take. Commit to something for a year while you work on yourself and your relationship with God. So I said, okay, I'm going to stay at Guy Post for a year. And I'LL work on my resume. That's what I'll work on. And then I'll go out and get a job at Conde Nast or Vanity Fair, maybe the New York Times. You know, it'll be real hot stuff. With a year of sobriety under my belt, and in my mind, I was thinking it was going to be more like six months that I would work on my resume and use the postage meter and see what I can do with my life. That was in 1986. A year went by, and I said, I'll give it a little more time, and then I'll find my big job in publishing. But you know something? I was being spiritually nourished by the work I was doing, which is something I never expected, never, ever dreamed that would happen to me.

Tell me about that. This is super interesting. What do you mean by that?

You know, I was talking to people who were making me think about my own faith. More and more every day. I would talk to these people who had incredible stories of how their faith helped them and even saved them in life. And again, year after year, every year for a while, I said, I'm going to give it another year of Guidepost and see what I can do. And I found myself growing spiritually through my work, something I had never connected in my head. I never connected my work with my faith. And that's what Guidepost gave me.

Go back to the windowsill on the 42nd floor of this hotel in Copenhagen for a minute. That white flash, this moment. What did you learn about God and your relationship to God in that moment?

So that's a great question, Jordan. And here's what I learned at that moment, what I finally learned about myself and my soul and my alcoholism at the time. That light made me completely aware of my powerlessness. Not just my powerlessness, but over my alcoholism, which I had never admitted. Even in those few years when I was sober and I was going to 12 step meetings, you know, I had never truly accepted my powerlessness over myself. And it became that a moment of surrender to that sense of powerlessness that only God, only God could take away my drinking and only God could direct my life, not me. I thought I was always in charge and I was always in control. And even when I flirted with the idea of believing in God at that time, God was just sort of an advisor. You know, he was a consultant that I was going to use when I needed Him. He wasn't the divine force that I would give over my life to. And it was at that moment Sitting on that windowsill, not caring if I lived or died, and probably hoping, at least subconsciously, that I died because I wanted the pain to be over. You know, I want to say I gave my life to God, but I feel as he almost wrested it from me and said, look, you can't do this on your own. You can't do this halfway.

I think there's a lot of wisdom in how you worded that. Right. Paul tells us nobody seeks him.

Right.

He seeks us and pretty clearly grabbed you off of that window. So you already touched on this a little bit. But I'm curious how your perspective on work, your vocation, you were already working as a journalist, as a writer. How did your perspective on work change pre post that experience?

Well, it changed because the writing that I'd done up to that point was about me. I wanted to write about myself. I really. Journalism was only a way to earn a living. What I wanted to write was I had. I have an MFA in playwriting, and I also wrote fiction and short stories and novels, and I wanted to write about myself. You know, I wanted to be one of those authors who used his own life and his own perceptions to create fictional worlds for readers to enter. But it was very ego based in my case. It was very much about. It was very internalized with my work. What I was led to do in my work, what I think God led me to do, is to take whatever talents that he blessed me with, stop misusing them in the way that I was, because it wasn't getting me anywhere and I wasn't writing anything significant, and use those talents to tell stories that glorify Him. And that's what Guideposts gave me the opportunity to do. I could never have imagined. I mean, this is the amazing thing about God, I think, is that he imagines things and has things for us that we could never imagine on our own. And I could never have imagined when I wanted to become a writer that I would be writing for his glory. Other people's stories. And in those other people's stories, I mean stories, our stories are the roadmap through our lives. Our stories is who we are. Everybody has, I think everybody has a guidepost story, but everybody has stories in their lives that show how they move down the road of faith and ultimately towards God. And to be able to articulate, help other people articulate that was the gift of my sobriety and my coming to Guideposts, in addition to the fact I don't think I ever would have found my faith or deepened My faith if I hadn't come to Guideposts. It's funny you referenced Paul earlier and how God finds us, but I feel that in my drinking years leading up to Guideposts, I was running away from God. I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know how much God was a part of my life. I grew up in a very religious home, you know, and I was an altar boy, and I wanted to be a priest at one point. And I think a lot of my alcoholism and drug use was an attempt to run away from God because I feared giving my life to him. I didn't want to give up what I thought was my will and my ego. That was my struggle, I think.

Yeah, it's good. It's easy to see how your faith influences what you do at Guideposts. I'm curious to know how you see your faith shaping how you do the work, how you approach the work that you and your team do.

Guideposts. So it's magazines, story based magazines, it's devotional based magazines. And through its website and social media, our mission is to really make people believe that hope, faith and prayer makes a difference in the world and in their lives. And those are the three things. It's almost like a checklist, you know, every day when we go to work as a staff, we think, you know, is the work that we're doing is the thing that I'm doing now. And this isn't just the editors and the writers, this is everybody throughout the organization is the work that I'm doing today bringing hope, faith and prayer into the world more than yesterday. And so in that respect, that's our core fundamental reason for being. If you're not thinking about that throughout your workday and connecting the activities that you do with the mission that you serve, then you need to work on that. Guidepost has tremendous employee retention through the years. Like, for example, during the pandemic and in this post pandemic time of people leaving their jobs. Guidepost really hasn't lost anybody, I believe, because it's a mission based company. And I think mission based companies are the ones who are suffering the least right now from the Great Resignation, as it's being called. And I think that's because of the mission based work that we do.

Yeah, that's interesting.

So seeing that reality, does that shape how you guys approach hiring? Like I've heard people argue before, I'll take a B player who's an A mission fit over an A player who's a B mission Fit because I know the person. That's a mission that's going to stay forever. Would you agree to that approach?

Having been hiring people for a long time now, my first belief is that God brings us the people who we need. I do believe that people are God directed to work for Guidepost. So. And that may sound like a little bit of a cop out, but I truly believe that because it happened with me and it happened with so many people who have come to Guidepost, many of whom were like me and were only going to stay for a year or two. They saw it as a stopping off point, a nice place to get to know the work. Your question is really interesting because I faced it a lot with writers and editors who have great skills, but they may not seem to have a strong faith underpinning. When I was hired, you know, my faith was very shaky. And the editor in chief at the time told me, look, what we ask of you is no matter what you believe personally, you respect the beliefs of our audience and our readers. We won't ask you, you know, what you believe in. There's no religious test to come work for Guideposts. But it's hard to believe that anyone would stay at Guideposts without having a faith foundation, even if they come there without a strong one. So I would say we do hire for skills, and we assume that the mission of the company will become infused in that employee, but they won't stay. You know, I can't imagine anyone who, who would be at odds with what we do, wanting to work for us. Everybody I know in this organization wants to be here for the mission.

Yeah. So you guys have been executing this mission for 75 years, and the core products for most of that time has been print. You know, we've been saying, people have been saying for decades, print is dying out. Obviously, it hasn't happened yet.

And what I find interesting, this past.

Summer, you guys announced a really big, big investment into that core print product, the magazine. You guys are doubling down. You redesigned it. You added something like 30 pages.

I'm curious, did you have a lot.

Of people telling you and the board that you guys are crazy for doubling down on print at this time?

Well, a couple of things about that. We have a very, very supportive board. And fortunately, I've never known them to call us crazy, at least not to our faces. And there are several experienced publishing people on that board. You're right. We made a huge investment in the magazine. We bumped it up to 100 pages. We added features, particularly more of the third person features to balance out some of the first person stories that we do. We reduced frequency from we had been publishing 10 times a year and we reduced frequency to six times a year bimonthly. All of our other magazines are bimonthly, so it wasn't that odd. Some of the money we saved, say, in postage and paper and ink and production. In eliminating those four issues, we plowed back into the making the magazine bigger, brighter, more durable, more shareable, more giftable. We wanted to get the magazine on a stable financial basis. And print is very, very tough now. But Guidepost magazine is the core. It's the flagship product for the company. And we felt that we hadn't as such, we felt like we really needed to invest in it and we would get a payoff in that, particularly in our conversion numbers. And conversions are the people who take a couple of free issues and try it out and then convert as subscribers. And we felt that those numbers were in jeopardy somewhat because we'd done what everybody else did in the publishing business. We'd reduced the number of pages. We had used less expensive paper. We had done a lot of things to improve the margin short term. We believe that this strategy is something that will stabilize our margin long term. It remains to be seen, but the response we've gotten so far has been very, very good. I mean, the one obstacle was really reducing it to six times a year. Guidepost readers usually tell us we should be publishing it every week. So that is a hurdle for us. But I think we're going to be really happy we did this. We worried that we were crazy. You're right. But we think we actually made a very sane decision and we're getting to see the fruits of that decision already. The magazine is big and beautiful. If you'd like to try out the magazine, just go to guidepost.org and you can order a free issue.

Yeah, you've said before that to make bets like this one, you've got to create space for long term thinking. And that's just very contrary to the reactionary, constantly putting out fire mode of a lot of leaders. So I'm curious, how do you make the space to think and plan for long term bets like expanding a print magazine?

That's another great question. I think it's something that a lot of organizational leaders struggle with. Guidepost is a not for profit company. So. Which doesn't mean we don't. I mean, we run our business on the principles of a for profit company in the sense that how we manage our budgets and we manage our Bottom line is something that is a responsible stewardship to the money that our subscribers and our donors give us. But I think, you know, a lot of profit companies are so are think in terms of quarters and reporting their profits. And I think that really stymies long term strategic thinking. You know what we do, I think at Guidepost is we try to make space for two things. One, for the leaders of the company to have the space and the time to think strategically and to imagine where we will be in five or ten years. For instance, currently we've looked at a ten year projection of how many people, how many lives we're going to touch. And we set that number at 17 million in 10 years. And that's, you know, easily tripling of the number of lives we're touching now. And we know to get there we're going to have to expand digitally, we're going to have to make create new digital products as well as keeping our print products alive and well. And they are doing well. Our print products do well. It's not like print is dead for us. But for us to reach that goal of 17 million lives touched and for us to bring spiritual well being to 17 million people, we're gonna have to do a lot of thinking. And we try to give ourselves time for that type of thinking. And we often. The second part of the which I think is very important about thinking long term, you listen to the rest of the employees, you give your mid level employees and even your entry level employees, you give them a very voice in those decisions, you bring them into that thinking because they're your greatest resource. Your people, they're thinking about the future too. And so it's not just a little knot of senior level strategic thinkers conceptualizing what the future of the company and the world will be in five or 10 years. It's the whole company thinking that way.

Yeah. So I'm hearing three things, this is super helpful. Number one, you gotta be setting big hairy audacious goals, like 17 million people in 10 years that are gonna force your team to think bigger and more long term. Number two, you open up to the whole team for feedback on how to go about reaching those goals. And then number three, you make space on the leader's calendars to actually go do the hard work of thinking strategically about how to do it and planning for that long term. One other thing I read from you in preparation for this is talking about how to deliver feedback. Well, we talk a lot in podcast that to master anything vocationally, we gotta be great at receiving and Implementing feedback. But you've talked about how to deliver feedback in a way that balances encouragement with constructive criticism. What advice do you have for our listeners who want to get better at delivering feedback that improves performance?

It's funny, that word, feedback, because really the most important part of feedback is listening. To listen to your employees, to listen to the people who report to you. Communication has to be two ways in a successful corporation of any size. And I think that's something that larger organizations suffer from greatly. Guidepost is a relatively small company on the scale of things. So to be able to. We survey our staff a lot. We ask them a lot of tough questions about how they feel about their job, about the mission of the company, about where we're going, about the decisions that senior management makes. We want to know what they think because it matters in the decisions that we make. I think the most important thing about communicating, even with an individual employee is to really listen and open your ears. Listen with your heart and to some extent, with your soul, and find out. You hire people because you see potential in them. How do you help them realize that potential? You're there to help them. When I became editor in chief in the last year of the last century, I had all sorts of plans, and they were all editorial plans. How the magazine was going to look, the stories we were going to tell, all this great editorial stuff. We were going to do what? I found out that what would consume most of my time for the duration was managing people, managing staffs as teams, and then managing the individuals within those teams. And those chess pieces are always moving. And as a manager, you need to be aware of that movement. People change and their lives and their situations change. And you need to stay focused on that to keep them on a track for growth and improvement. But I go back to saying the most important thing about feedback is listening.

Yeah, that's a good word. We got to get good at delivering it and receiving it. Edward, other than what we've already talked about, what do you think world class leaders leaders do that their less masterful counterparts don't do? What's the delta between good and great?

Well, I certainly don't consider myself a great leader. I'm a flawed leader and I try to stay abreast of my flaws. You know, I think really good leaders are careful about the assumptions they make about their business and about their employees. And I think a strong leader questions his or her assumptions all the time, almost on a daily basis. I assumed this yesterday.

I want to go deep here because this is interesting to Me. How do you identify assumptions? Because the nature of assumptions is they're just there. They're hanging around. You take them for granted. How do you spot the assumptions that you're making and isolate them and really rigorously test them?

I think the best test is to question the assumptions that you're most confident in. If you really believe something to be true, I think you have to go back again and again and challenge yourself on that assumption. If you assume a certain project is going to be done at a certain time and have a certain result, that assumption is great because it sets a goal, and setting goals is essential. But you have to step back and look at that project at various points of its development and say, well, is my assumption being proven out, or is there something here that I can change about that assumption? That assumption needs to be elastic, and it needs to grow with whatever that project is. Now, it may be that the project is A, B and C, and it comes off perfectly. But as a leader, you have to be able to change your assumptions as you move forward about any specific thing that you truly believe in. And that can be painful. You know, that can be very painful to realize that what you assume to be the goal is either not attainable or is, in fact, a different goal and a better goal. Divorcing yourself from your most confident assumptions is very hard, but it can certainly make a huge difference in what you achieve.

That's a good word, Edward. I'm curious. What does your typical day look like from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed? What does it look like these days?

It's strange. I still kind of inhabit two worlds now. When the pandemic hit, my wife Julie and I, you know, we were fortunate enough to have this little vacation cabin up in the hills that we would go to on the weekends. And my wife sometimes spent more time up here because she has the type of profession where she can work independently. In March of 2020, I packed up and fled New York, thinking that the pandemic would be over in a few weeks or maybe a month. And frankly, it's still with us. So my typical day when I'm up here is I wake up and I try to meditate just on what lies ahead and ask God for the strength to face whatever it is I'm going to face that day. You know, when I'm up here, I get out in the hills. My little place is right on the edge of the Appalachian Trail, and I have a very energetic golden retriever, which you may have been hearing barking. In the background. And she needs her exercise and I need my headspace. And that's where I get it. We drive to one of the most any of the amazing trails up here in the Berkshires and we go out for an hour or so and we just hike into the silence of the woods by ourselves, my dog Gracie and I. And that's where I do a lot of thinking and I try to get that done as early as possible every single day to get away from everything. I'm off there in the woods where I can feel God's presence, but where I can also just clear my head, clear my mind from what's ahead. And what's ahead are meetings, editing, writing. I'm working on a new book. It'll be my third book for guideposts, and it's on my family's history of Alzheimer's and, and particularly my mother's journey through Alzheimer's. And also that book includes a lot of the stories that have been told in guideposts through the years of people struggling with Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is a huge problem in this country. Or age related dementia is just. It's going to overwhelm the healthcare system in a matter of a decade or so. There's a very strong prevalence of Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's in my family, very strong. So I'm exploring that and I'm exploring my own susceptibility to the possibilities of getting Alzheimer's. So I'm doing testing, genetic testing and neurology and finding out as much as I can about this and how. Faith. One of my premises of the book is that Alzheimer's can take an awful lot away from you. It takes everything in the end, but it can't take away faith. It can't take away God. God is outside of Alzheimer's. I hope to prove that out in the book. So these days I'm spending a lot of time writing and trying not to go to too many meetings or have too many other things on my plate until I finish this book. And, you know, I think about all that. I spend more time thinking about the book than actually writing it.

Oh, no, that's really wise. C.S. lewis famously walked like, I don't know, two hours a day as he was writing. He would walk a little, write a little, walk a little, write a little. So much of the work of great writers is thinking. So that's interesting. So, Edward, we gotta wrap up. I got three questions I'd love to ask every guest. Number one, which books do you find yourself recommending or Giving away to others most frequently.

Okay, well, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that. The Power of Positive Thinking, written by Norman Vincent Peale in 1953. It's a self help book, but it's also a not by yourself help book in the sense that it always comes back to faith and that the belief that God wants you to have a good and fulfilling life that is full of his grace. So that's a book that I would give to anyone of any faith or even of no faith. And I have, I've given it to atheists who loved it. They just, even if they have trouble accepting the faith content in the book, it's practical advice and it's, you know, it's the most encouraging piece of literature besides the Bible that I've ever read. That would be one. I'm a huge fan of Scott Peck's the Road Less Traveled that helped me so much in my early days of finding my faith. And I recommend that book to everyone to read those two. For people who are struggling with addiction, I recommend the Big Book of aa, which is a beautiful spiritual roadmap for people who are trying to find faith in their lives.

Let me ask you this. Who would you like to hear on this podcast talking about how their faith influences the work they do in the world?

Have you had Bono on?

No. That's a great answer.

Well, get Bono. I've been trying to get him in the magazine. You know, we know that Bono's faith is strong and he uses it to direct his artistic work and his philanthropic work.

That's a really good name. I don't think I've heard that name on the podcast before. It's good. Hey, what's one thing from our conversation today that you just want to reiterate to our listeners before we sign off?

You know, the one thing that we didn't get to, and I really wanted to get to, and this is a good opportunity to do it, is the concept of gratitude.

Yeah, let's go there. Yeah.

You say, what do I wake up thinking about every morning? And I have to remind myself every morning that I am going to be grateful for whatever occurs, whatever happens to me that day. I will learn to be grateful, even for the toughest moments. The gratitude is really what gets me up in the morning and it's what puts me to bed at night. Without gratitude, I could never have gotten sober. I could never have found a relationship with God, and I could never have maintained that relationship with God if it hadn't been for their sense of gratitude for it.

I love it. Edward, I just want to commend you and everybody listening for the important work you're doing in the world. Thank you for putting out content that points people to God and more specifically Jesus and for sharing your powerful testimony with us today.

Guys, you can learn more about Edward.

And Guideposts of course@guideposts.org Edward, thank you again for joining me.

Thank you, Jordan. It's been a real pleasure and I'm very grateful for this opportunity.

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