369 - From Isolation To Collaboration w/ Nate Larkin

Foreign.

Welcome to the Pure Desire Podcast, your biblically based and clinically informed approach to healing from betrayal and breaking free from porn. Happy day to you, good listener. I'm your host, Trevor Windsor, and you're listening to episode 369 of the Pure Desire Podcast. Here, joining me as always, my co host, Nick Stumbo.

ARR. Shiver me timbers.

I cannot believe that's the angle you're.

Taking.

Because I know exactly where you're going. So let's just.

Hello, mighty. There you go, walk the plank. National talk like a Pirate Day is a real thing. And I'm really wondering if at Pure Desire we need to dive in on that.

What day do you think that would be? I'd like to spend my resignation.

I didn't do quite enough research for that, but hopefully it lands on a Saturday.

Cool. Great. Perfect. I don't know if you've seen it recently. My family just watched the Lego Movie again recently and there is a pirate played by Nick Offerman. And that's exactly what he sounds like in the entire one. Okay, let's get into it. So today's episode and next week's episode are a little unique and we'll talk about this in just a second. But today we are going to feature a session from last year's Pure Desire Summit event where we had Nate Larkin on and. Yeah, connect the dots on your intro and who Nate is.

Nate is a fantastic guy. Nate Larkin oversees the Samson Society, which I always try to say Samson with a P. It doesn't have a P in it. It's Samson, like from the Bible. And the Samson Society is really unique, kind of 12 step model, but very unique in that he designed it kind of his own way. Groups for men and then they have the Seraph Society for women. And I encountered Nate early in my own recovery through his book. And the Pirate Monks. Yeah, so pirate. They're connected to that title. And you'll have to read the book to understand why they're called Pirate Monks. And I don't want to try to dive into all that in the intro, but I would just say about this session with Nate and as he talks about the Pirate Monks and what they meant in his life, that session was powerful. And the number of people that just commented that, man, Nate had so many of these like one line zingers that just stick with you and you're like, I needed to hear that for my recovery, or I needed that for my marriage, for my next step. And it was powerful. And I'm excited that we're giving People another chance to be exposed to it that might not have been at last year's summit. And I would just add, last thing it underscores, don't miss being at this year's summit because there's going to be those moments where it's like, man, that was so powerful and we really want you to be in the room or joining us online.

Yeah. Nate was and is a really raw and honest individual and I think that that transparency and vulnerability he shares is so inviting for so many people. So we know the session is going to be, even if it is your second time, it's going to be very powerful to hear and again to just kind of lean in more to what you're saying. Nick, this is just a taste of what the summit really has to offer, that we are getting first class speakers, authors, thought leaders around this area of sexuality, betrayal, trauma, addiction and recovery. And we really do hope that you do pursue attending either in person, online or through a watch party. Come to the Pure Desire Summit and you can go to PureDesureSummit.com and do that. And so, yeah, let Nate Larkin convince you that the summit is your right next step. So let's get into it. Here's Nate Larkin's session from last year's Pure Desire Summit titled From Isolation to Collaboration.

Thanks, Florence. And oh, such a joy. I almost didn't make it. I was going for donuts. I was talking to a guy out in the foyer yesterday. He asked whether I've been to Portland before. Yeah, what did I want? I told him I was looking forward to going to Voodoo Donut. And he smiled and he went, yeah, they're, they're good. They got a great reputation, the tourists love them. But the best donuts are Joe's Donuts and Sandy. So this morning, a little before 8 o', clock, I checked to see how far it was to Joe's Donuts. And I drove out there and I had enough time, but there was a line. And so now, at any rate, I got the donuts. I don't know why I bought a dozen donuts. I'm going home this afternoon. I bought a dozen donuts. But I would tell you this on the way here, I ate a cronut and it was so good, it felt wrong. I feel like I have to confess. Speaking of confession, tomorrow's my birthday. I turn 67 tomorrow. Allie and I are going to celebrate by going to hear Garrison Keillor in a cave. He's, he's performing at a place called the Caverns in the Mountains. Of East Tennessee. But I'm more excited. Tomorrow is tomorrow I will be five months sober from alcohol. Now, if you read Pirate Samson and the Pirate Monks, you know that. That I offer a defense in that book for the moderate consumption of alcohol. I. I want to tell you, I have had great conversations in pubs and taverns with my wife, with guys. I had great. Maybe during those first, very difficult couple of years, alcohol might have helped to save our marriage. I don't know. When we couldn't do anything else, Allie and I could go to the pub and play cards and have a couple of beers, and then we'd get what we called the. The second beer, Love Waves. And we could say some affectionate things. And it. She was my best drinking buddy for a long time. Now. She decided a couple years ago that. That she was getting too old for this and she needed to stop, but she did, and I told her I would too. And that's when the trouble started. It started to really bother me that I couldn't seem to stop this thing. I'd never. I wasn't doing what I would ever classify as alcoholic behavior. Looking back, it probably was alcoholic behavior, but. But if you were a listener to the Pirate Monk podcast, you know, I've talked about it for a couple of years, and, and, and I talked with my guys. Hey, do you know this? If you got three close friends and you tell each of them a third of the truth, you can convince yourself that you're being completely honest. You know what turned it around for me? I got some help from people. It was five months ago. I went to a weekend. It wasn't a Samson weekend. There were some Samson guys there, some pirate monks who came because they heard I was coming, but I wasn't in charge. I didn't have to talk. I could just be me. And I got a chance to kind of sit in the truth, in a safe environment, completely safe environment, and really get honest. It was just so good. Haven't had a drink since. It's a thrill for me to be here. It's such an honor to. To be at a Pure Desire weekend. It's inspiring for me to be here and to be honest, a little bit intimidating because everything is done so well. It's so well organized. A little over a year ago, Nick asked me if I would speak at this event. And my first thought was, that's not until 2023. And then he said I could speak. He told me what the theme was, which, again, I thought, wow, they know they have a theme. And he could Say I could speak as long as it fit within the theme. I could speak on anything I wanted to speak on, which is good because I have a limited repertoire. I'm really a one trick pony. When we talk about recovery, I play on one string. I talk over and over again about how we recover only in community. That's all part of this grand redemptive plan. Jesus came to reconcile us to God and to each other. He came to reconstitute the family of God. I am today grateful to be a recovering, not a recovered, a recovering sex addict. I have a wonderful freedom today. I am so grateful for my freedom, but I'm well aware that it's a fragile freedom. No matter how far down the road of recovery I go, I'm always the same distance from the ditch, right? So this is a fragile freedom. I protect it with boundaries and brothers. I keep it by giving it away. But I'm so grateful that to this day I am vulnerable to lust. I'm so grateful that God did not answer that desperate plea of mine for years and years that he would give me the magical private release he would. He gave me essentially the same answer he gave the Apostle Paul when Paul begged on multiple occasions to be freed, released, healed from that thorn in the flesh of his whatever it was. And God said, now I know it hurts and I didn't give it to you, but I love you too much to take it away. Because with it you're weak. And you know you're weak. And when you know you're weak, I can be strong. I believe God's allowed me to keep my vulnerability to lust to this day because it's the only lever in my life big enough to force me out of isolation and into honest relationship with other members. The body of Christ. I have friends today, not because I wanted them, but because God knew I needed them. Right? So that is what I'm going to be talking about today. But I'm going to get there in a roundabout fashion. I'm going to start by talking about something else. And we're going to come back, back around. Okay, I want to talk about. Let's start by talking about relapse. And we'll take as our inspiration a little bit of scripture from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 4. Beginning in verse 9, two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up again. If two lie down Together they'll keep warm. But how can one be warm alone? Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken. You know, we've learned a lot in the last 25 years. I've been in recovery now for 25 years. We've learned a lot about addiction, how it happens and how to treat it. We have learned that it begins with a wound. We know that trauma lies at the heart of addiction. Something that never should have happened, happen, or something that should have happened, didn't. And in our pain, we sought some way to recover our emotional balance. And so we found something, some mood altering, mind altering substance or activity that made it possible for us to compensate. It might have been drugs or alcohol, but it could very well also have been a behavior. It's strange how cutting yourself can make it possible for you at least to control when you hurt. And that in itself can be a measure of comfort. Eating can be a comfort. Sugar works powerfully. But restricted eating can also bring comfort, an illusory sense of control, especially if it's driven by shame. And of course, as most of us in this room know, sex. Sex can change the game. I've heard, I've heard guys talk about their first orgasm or their first time acting out. The first time they crossed a certain line. And they sound a lot like the heroin addict describing the first hit. It's like, wow. And your first thought is, there's going to be more of this. There's going to be more of this. But God has designed us in such a way, he's designed us for balance, to maintain. Yeah, homeostasis. The first time you cross that line and you get that big hit of pleasure, your brain is taken by surprise. But it acts quickly because you cannot stay in that euphoric state for long. You've pegged the meter, you're going to do damage. You can't stay there. And so the brain will administer some counter chemicals that will dampen the effect and bring you down. That's why the high never lasts. Right? We know this now. You can never recapture the first high. The drug addicts call that chasing the dragon. Trying to get the first. Because your brain is not going to be taken by surprise again. The only way you can get back to the first high is to increase the dose, increase the frequency. Find something a little bit different, a little bit stronger, and your brain will try to keep up. You're always fight because it's, it's trying to keep you in balance. That's how dependency grows, right? And of course, our brain is always. We're going to talk a little bit more about this. We're going to talk about learning. Your brain is always. It's looking for patterns. You're always learning on some level. Did you know that your brain can process 70 million bits of information per second, but you can only hold about 40 bits consciously? So most of that work is being done below the level of consciousness, but you're learning all the time. So in order not to be caught by surprise, your brain is going to try now to detect when it is and under what circumstances physical and emotional, you tend to use so that it can administer the counter chemical proactively to protect you. When that happens, that's when now craving sets in because you get the antidote before you've taken the drug. Now you've got to use to get up to normal in order to function. And that's a desperate situation. Now the idea is, if I don't use, I'll die. I actually believed for a long time that sex was as vital to me as air and water. What began as a distress management technique became my way to get through life. And I didn't know how I would ever get through life alone. And the truth was, I never could get through life alone. And it wasn't until I made my way into the basement of a church in the middle of the week that I found people who would walk with me and be with me, wouldn't send me out. God. All right, so we're wounded. We need healing. Recovery is very much a healing process. God can heal instantaneously and occasionally does. When I was a kid, very often. Well, no. From time to time, our church would invite in a former drug addict or a former alcoholic, would give his testimony, her testimony, and they would describe their miraculous encounter with Jesus and boom, they got hit and everything changed, which always pissed me off because God wouldn't do that. But I only had one model for healing. Healing has to be instantaneous in order to be miraculous. Well, that's crazy. The way a broken bone mends, is that miraculous or what? But it's progressive. The way a cut closes, the way the body defeats an infection with a fever that spikes and sucks. So those are true miracles. And God has designed a similar. A similar healing process into the body of Christ described for us most succinctly in James, chapter 5, verse 16. Confess your sins to one another, not for forgiveness. This is not a matter of forgiveness. You don't need to restore your relationship with God. He hasn't turned away. Christ has paid for it. It's done. His death is a propitiation for our sin, and not for our sin only, but also for the sin of the whole world. Guilt is not the issue. This is for healing. This is for healing. And until we can find a place where we can bring ourselves and say the real truth, that healing can never happen. So anyway, but about a year ago, I think maybe it was a little longer, I encountered a book that got me thinking some more about recovery. Recovery begins with repentance. As I was growing up, recovery was just repent. That's all it was. Addiction was sin. Addicts were people who need to get saved, get saved. Now that's recovery. Then I learned recovery is healing. That is a huge part of the story. But I've come to believe that recovery is also about learning, that addiction is to some degree a learned behavior, and that recovery requires some new learning. Read a remarkable book a couple years ago by a former crystal meth addict, now researcher, writer, essayist named Maya Salowitz. Not a Christian. The book is called Unbroken Brain. Her argument is, and I think she makes it convincingly, that we become addicts because our brain is doing what it's designed to do. It's doing what it takes to keep us alive. It's learning. And once it has found something that will keep us alive and we begin to do it in a repetitive fashion, it then, to save energy and to improve efficiency, automates that sequence. So now what we may have started to do volitionally, we do automatically. We do it without thinking. We're making decisions before we're even aware that the decision has been made. But it has been made. We learned to do it. Now what? She doesn't go into great depth, but I've spent some time on this. It was astonishing to me. So. So did you know that we actually have two separate learning systems? They're called the explicit learning system and the implicit learning system. Now, the explicit learning system is the one that we're using right now. It requires the acquisition of language information. The acquisition of information, any information that can be reduced to words. It's conscious learning. I'm talking, you're listening, you're absorbing. Some of you are writing things down. This is explicit learning. But there's another learning system that is in full operation even before we're born. It's how we learn most things. It's exclusive way we learn until we acquire language, the implicit learning system. This does not require me to understand words. Just yesterday, I was listening to the Local public radio station. And they had a fascinating piece on how babies acquire language. Did you know that babies during the babbling stage, where they're making noise but they can't yet form words. Do you know that Italian babies babble differently from Chinese babies? Not from the very start, but from the time they start to listen, they're listening to everybody around them. They will start to babble in the tones and with the beginning consonants and with the rhythms of that language. During one miserable two year period of my life, I was the head of A K through 12 Christian school. I was terrible at it. And I remember at one point we admitted into the first grade a little girl freshly arrived from South America, who didn't speak a word of English. Now, we did not have an ES English as second language program. Neither of our first grade teachers spoke Spanish. But at the insistence of her adoptive parents, we admitted her into the classroom. And by the end of the first year, that girl was, for all practical purposes, fluent in English. She could argue without an accent. Now, I've been to college, I've been to seminary. I took four years of Greek. I remember almost none of it. I know just enough Greek today to know when a preacher's lying. But I was trying to learn explicitly New Testament Greek is not a spoken language. It's a dead language. I, I did endless declensions, I memorized vocabulary, but I never learned to think in Greek. Now I had some very gifted classmates who made the transition and they learned how to think in Greek. I never learned because I'm a good explicit learner unless it's Greek. That's how I came into recovery. Absorb the information, master the material, learn the vocabulary, understand it here and do it. So here's the thing. These two learning systems, the explicit learning system and the implicit learning system, are entirely separate. They can cooperate, but they can also interfere with each other. It is possible to overthink something. I remember my first sponsor saying, you know, after my, you know, one of my countless slips and early, he said, nate, you can't be too dumb to get this, but you can be too smart. You are trying to think your way to right doing, and you have to learn to do your way to right thinking. He was talking about implicit learning. Another thing that we learned to do implicitly was to learn to walk implicitly. It was a very long process because we arrived at this world completely naive. We didn't, we didn't know that we had fingers and hands or really how to operate them. And it was a couple of weeks before we would stop hitting ourselves in the face, right? But eventually, you know, there came a day when we rolled over, and then a day that was scary because now our parents couldn't leave us alone on a changing table or on a bed, right? And then eventually it was up on hands and knees, it was rocking and it was crawling, and it was pulling ourselves up on something and. And learning how to balance while hanging on to something. And then it took about a year, probably, before you took your first step and then promptly fell down, because that's part of the process. But formally, God has taken that into account, which is why as an infant, you had short legs, flexible bones, soft bottom, because you were going to fall down a lot. It's the only way to learn to walk, fall down. But eventually you learned it out and you learned to walk, and then you learned to run, learned to hop. Maybe you learned dance. I still haven't learned to dance. Dance was a sin. When I go through one of my great sadnesses, I still can't dance. But I'm capable. I'm capable of dancing. And in a way, recovery is like dancing. In a way, it's like learning to ski. So I think, at any rate, I'll tell you where this came into sharper focus for me. A little while a few months ago, I was listening to the British Broadcasting System. I love listening to the Brits. And so there was a science show where they answer questions from listeners, science questions. And the question of the week was, how do bicycles stay up? Why don't bicycles tip over? Is basically the question. How do they? What makes them work? Well, my first thought was, what keeps a bicycle upright is momentum, right? You can't balance a bike if it's not moving. You got to get going. And so the host said, well, that's the most common first question. And. But momentum in and of itself is not enough to keep a bike upright. Now, if you were a kid, if you ever did what I did, do you ever stand at the top of the hill with your bike and then give it a push, see how far will go? You ever do that? It goes for a ways, and then it turns and tip and then. And then it crashes. That kind of describes early recovery for me, because I was focused just on momentum. I got a really fast start in recovery. I experienced what the alcoholics call the pink cloud, you know, where it's just that period where the obsession is gone. And, you know, for a few weeks, it's like, I'm fixed and I got it. I understand. I got so excited and that first slip just seemed to come out of absolute nowhere. I was under instructions to call my sponsor every day, and I didn't call him for two or three days. I was so ashamed because, you know, I thought I was fixed. And I'm the star pupil, and I'm the, you know, I'm the quick learner, and I've got this covered. And, you know, I'm already planning my seminars. And so I waited a few days, and then I called him. I rehearsed a call. I gave him a call. And then at the end, I casually said, and by the way, I had a slip last Tuesday, but it's fine. It's good. I learned. And then I braced for the punch, and it never came. He said, I'm sorry, that must have sucked. You know God loves you, right? You know nothing's changed, right? All right, let's go back over it. Let's. Let's see if we can figure out how this happened. Tell me about it. So momentum is not enough. It has to do with the balance of the rider. The rider. So it turns out that we have a sense of balance. We don't talk about it, but we talk about the five senses. But there's another sense, the sense of balance. And the primary sensory organ for balance is in the inner ear, this nautilus shaped little organ filled with a viscous liquid. And into it protrude these tiny filaments, the ends of neurons. They're wired directly to the brain cerebellum, very f. Instantaneous communication, so that whenever you shift and that liquid moves a little bit, it's detected by those filaments, and that's communicated instantly to the brain to help your brain figure out where you are in space and whether or not you're at risk for tipping over. Now, here's the interesting thing. Your brain is not only monitoring your movement, it is also recording your movement, and it is also thinking ahead. It's anticipating what the next movement is most likely to be. Your brain is constantly running an algorithm using past experience stored within this database, matching it with current input in order to predict what you're most likely to do next so that it can act proactively so that you can take the right step to keep from tipping over. You got it? Now, the effectiveness of the algorithm is based upon the accuracy of the database. How much information is in the database? In the beginning, there's not a lot of information. That's why, as a child trying to learn to walk, you have to fall down a lot before there's enough information in the database that your brain can reliably predict what it's going to take for you to stay upright. Got it. So you probably don't remember learning to walk. I don't remember learning to walk, but I remember learning to ride a bike. I remember my first bike, my dad bringing it home. It had 12 inch wheels. I could chrome fenders, a red bike. My dad was a busy guy. He wasn't going to spend a lot of time teaching me how to ride a bike. But it had training wheels to keep me from tipping over. And so for weeks, I don't know, probably for months, I rode up and down the driveway, occasionally taking turns from the driveway to the front sidewalk with those training wheels as my brain was building a database about riding a bike. And then came the day when dad said, you know what? You don't need those training wheels anymore. They took them off. Turns out riding a bike without training wheels is different from riding a bike with training wheels. So there were some more crashes, but it didn't take that long because I already had some information to work on before I was riding a bike. Man, I desperately wanted a cool bike. We were poor and I'm the oldest of 10 kids and dad couldn't buy cool bikes for everybody, right? So back in the 60s, now my kids had these, my friends had these cool trick bikes. They had 12 inch wheels, banana seats, high rise handlebars, they could pull wheelies, they do jumps and all kinds of stuff. Oh God, I wanted a bike. And so I could get, I could buy my own bike if I had a paper route. And I got a paper route at 12 years old. My dad said, okay, I will lend you the money to buy a bike. You pay me back from the paper route. But I didn't realize that meant that he was going to buy the bike. I didn't even go to the store. He brought it home and what he came back with was the bike he would have wanted when he was 12. 28 inch wheels. It had a center console, it had headlight, it had a bell, it had streamers on the handlebar. And so that I could carry papers, it had two big wire baskets in the back on either side. Well, a few months later, in the debt, I managed to acquire some high rise handlebars. So I put high rise handlebars on the bike. I couldn't put a banana seat on it because the baskets were in the way. But I took the fenders off, I took the center console out. It's a Wednesday. Wednesday is when the supermarkets put all their supplements in. It's the heaviest paper of the week. I've loaded up the bike. I'm headed down the biggest hill in town. The baskets are mounted slightly behind the rear axle so I have counterbalance. I can pull wheelies. I get up a tremendous amount of speed. I hit a little bump. I pull back on the handlebars. I am now cruising. I've learned. I've been riding no hands for a long time. But now I am cruising down the center of the street on one wheel, arms folded, feeling like the coolest guy in the world. And it was at about that time that the front wheel fell off. I hadn't tightened it after taking off the fender. That was the ugliest crash I was ever in. Skinned elbows, skinned knees, papers everywhere. Moral of the story, doesn't matter how long you've been riding a bike. I got friends my age who ride bikes. And if you've got any friends my age rides, like probably at least one of them's been in an accident. Because it can still happen, right? It can still happen, even to the experts. Now, here's the crazy thing about riding a bike. You think that because you know how to walk, you can ride a bike. The problem is now, for the very first time, there's a hinge between you and the ground that wasn't there before. Your instinct is going to lean in the wrong direction. You have to apply what you did know about walking. But it's different now. It's like backing up a trailer for the first time. You're turning in the wrong direction, your instincts are off, and there's probably going to be a few crashes before you learn. Your instincts change. You learn implicitly that to compensate. Oh, I've got to go this way. For a few years, a woman named Constance Rhodes and I did a college tour we called the Sex and Skinny Tour. She would talk about eating and body image issues which affect most college age women and a small but growing percentage of college age men. And I would talk about porn and compulsive sexual behavior, which affects most college age men and a small but growing percentage of college age women. And we would come riding out on a tandem bike just to start this whole thing. And then I would produce a unicycle and offer 50 bucks to anybody who could. I'd get some guy from the audience and, you know, if you could ride the bike for a minute, I'd give you 50 bucks. And if you, you think about it, if, if you're good at riding a bike, the first instinct is, well, it's. It's a bike. I can ride a bike, but there's another hinge. Now. You don't have the stability of the second wheel. It's this way and it's this way. I never had to pay the 50 bucks. But then I would always have a ringer. I would have a guy in the audience. We would find out first, do you have somebody on campus? Do you have a show off who rides a unicycle? And we would find somebody who could do it, and then we'd have a guy and we'd talk about that. Okay. It sounds blasphemous to say this is something I would not have said for a very long time because it would seem like I'm giving. It's that same objection with Paul would get. When you talk about grace, people say you're talking about grace too much. People are just going to sin. Paul would say, you know, should. Should we sin the more that grace may abound? No, no, we can't stop talking about grace. You know, even for those people who have the story of the day they were delivered from whatever their compulsive behavior was, for most of those people before that day, there was a long series of failed attempts to quit. I'm convinced that for almost all of us, relapse in some form, a normal part of recovery, it doesn't have to be a full crash. You know what helps? Training wheels. From the very start, training wheels. You try to get going on a whole new way of life, coping with life stresses and disappointments and all that unresolved pain, all that unaddressed trauma. You're going to try and live a private life, and you've never done it before. You need some freaking training wheels. So, yes, you need some kind of an accountability structure. Yes, you need to lock down the phone. Yeah. You need to find a way to create firm boundaries that will keep you as much as possible from tipping over my son. I don't remember teaching my son to ride his bike. And I spent $300,000 on porn and hookers. But that's not my biggest regret. That was just money. I spent my children's childhood. I spent, in all 20 years of my wife's life and 20 years of mine, trading my birthright every day for a bowl of bees. So I don't remember teaching my son how to ride a bike. I suspect his mother did it. I owe that woman such a debt of gratitude. But I got to watch him teach his son how to ride a bike. They Live in Florida. And we're at the age where we go to Florida for two months in the winter and. And Charlie is. Charlie's like a timid, you know, timid little 8 year old, a little bit scared and. But my son's a runner. He's an ultra marathoner. Like, you know, 50, 70, 500 miles at a time, that guy. So who needs training wheels? He'll just run beside the blanket boy. And we would go out to where they were building a new housing development. Streets were in, but there were no houses yet. And put Charlie on the bike. Now, there was some explicit learning, some instruction, but when you're trying to learn a bike or trying to learn to ride a bike, it does not help to have somebody yelling at you, telling you what to do. You can't process the information fast enough. It doesn't work. But it helps to have some instruction. So he would have. There would be some explicit learning, some instruction. And then Daniel would run along beside Charlie block after block after block, day after day after day, until the day Charlie could write on his own. To me, that's a beautiful picture of recovery. I'm going to close with a story. I tell this story a lot. If you've heard it before, I apologize, but I can't think of a more fitting way to end. Some years ago now, I was at dinner with my wife and we got talking about the day she caught me. And she said, you know, if you had died that day, I would have been relieved. She said, I wasn't going to kill you, but I would not have objected if God did. She said, but if you had died that day, I would have had a real problem on my hands because I would not have been able to call six close friends to carry your casket. Because I didn't have six friends. I was well known, but nobody knew me. And she had just discovered that even she didn't know me today. Because God loves me too much to take it away today. Because he allows me to be in desperate need of him today. Because I have learned to trust not just Christ, but the body of Christ. I'll tell you, I. I always heard about the body of Christ. I didn't believe in the body of Christ before recovery. I thought that was a metaphor. I didn't believe that Jesus is physically present on this planet in the lives of broken people. But I believe it today. The greatest act of surrender I make to Christ every day is to tell the truth to another member of the body of Christ. Still amazes me that I can dial the number of a guy who I know is as messed up as I am. And Jesus answers the phone today because God loves me too much to take it away. My wife no longer has that concern. When I die, and I will die soon, my family will have no trouble finding six close friends to carry my casket. I will be carried in death by the same men who are carrying me in life. I want you to know this. We're going somewhere. Still have a long way to go. But when I turn around and see how far we come, I am astonished. So close with this. Do you know who carry your casket? If you don't have those friends, I beg you, find those friends. Thank you, Sam.