Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #301: Thomas Jay Oord (Author of God Can't)

Have you ever thought to yourself, man, I'd like to host my own podcast? Well, guess what? You can go to podbean.com/voices and get everything you need to create, manage, and promote your podcast. I use Podbean every week for Voices in My Head. There's easy uploading and publishing tools, stunning templates, custom domains, social and promotional tools, an embeddable podcast player, monetization tools, and more. It is your all-in-one podcasting solution. With Podbean, you can create professional podcasts in minutes without any programming knowledge. Best of all, everything is mobile ready right from the start. So go to podbean.com/voices, and when you sign up, use the code "voices" and you'll get a sizable discount. Podbean, for your home podcasting. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer-songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices voices in your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host Rick Lee James, and I'm glad that you can be here with us today. My guest today on Voices in My Head is Thomas J. Ord. Thomas is a theologian, philosopher, and a scholar of multidisciplinary studies. He is an award-winning author, and he is written or edited more than 20 books. Ort has won the Outstanding Faculty Award several times as a professor at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho. Ort is also known for his contributions to research on love, relational theology, science and religion, and Wesleyan Holiness Church of the Nazarene thought. Ort is an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene. He serves in various consulting and administrative roles for academic institutions, scholarly projects, and research teams. His newest book, God Can't: How to Believe in God and Love After Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils, will be released in January. Visit Thomas J. Ord on his website at thomasjord.com. Thomas J. Ord, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Hey, great, it's good to be talking with you.

Well, I'm glad to be talking with you today too, and thank you for sending your book over. It was a very good read, and I appreciate you sending it so we could discuss it today. And I just want to start right at the beginning where your book starts today. And I'm going to read just a little excerpt from it to begin our conversation. You start the book— you start the book with the story of the Las Vegas shooting that just happened very recently in our history, and you ask these questions about that. You say, if God stands against evil and violence, why doesn't God stop them? Does God's desire to be present for those who are hurting trump God's desire to protect? Does God allow death and injury because he's needy, desperate for attention, or wanting to feel useful? Where is God in the midst of tragedy and abuse and other evil? You know, this is, uh, not exactly a light subject to tackle, is it, sir?

No, sure not. It's one of those subjects just about everybody wonders about for sure.

And you, you've done a lot of, of thinking about this, I know. And the book isn't out just yet, um, but I know I know it's already started to receive some buzz online from people who have read it. I'm just curious, how have the reviews and the feedback been for you so far in this conversation?

Well, they've been very positive. You know, I wrote a book 3 years ago called The Uncontrolling Love of God, in which I lay out sort of the main idea that's in this particular book, but that one was published by an academic press and, you know, it didn't get as wide of exposure as you typically want to have for the kind of book I've just written, which is written more for the general public. It's more accessible, more readable. But because so many people liked the last book, I sent some review copies to some of those people to get their, not only feedback on how I could improve this new book, but also as a way to help them have the opportunity to put out the word, you know, write some reviews. And it's just been overwhelmingly positive. I'm really grateful.

Well, I'm curious, as you've written this book and you've really done a lot of thinking about tragedy and abuse and evil, why is it that you feel like this topic in particular is so important for you as Thomas J. Ord to address? I mean, there are many things in theology, obviously, that we could address, but it's obvious you had a burning on your heart to write an entire book about it. And I'm just wondering kind of what was going on in your heart and mind to lead you to this place to start writing.

Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about this question since I was probably in junior high and wondering how one might answer it well. It is, as polls say, the number one reason why some people say they can't believe there is a God. Because if there was a God and this God was loving and powerful, this God should prevent the horrific events in the world and in our lives. And so I actually went through a time in my own life when I was in college when I was an atheist. And it was the issues of love that brought me back to faith along with some other intellectual kinds of concerns. And so I have a heart for people who want to take this question seriously, want to be intellectually honest, and this book is an attempt to try to help people in that kind of way. It's also, I think, primarily a kind of book written for kind of the average person. I hope this is the book that people will give to their friends and family members who have been wrestling with the big questions of faith and have been dissatisfied with the typical answers you hear from Christians or other believers about, you know, "God had a purpose for this," or "God's ways are not our ways," or, you know, "You're going to learn from this," or "God's punishing you." Those kinds of things that after you think about them for a while, you start to realize that they just don't they don't make a lot of sense if that's the only answer we have.

Well, in the book God Can't, even the title itself I'm sure is going to draw a little bit of controversy from some people. Just having a title like that, God Can't, probably puts many of us on guard at first. I think it's important that we get in and unpack a little bit of what this means when we're talking about God can't. In the book you present 5 ideas about God, creation, and evil. And you say that together they form a solution to why evil occurs and, and why a loving God doesn't stop it. And so this is going to be a question that I don't know if it'll be easy to answer or not, but do you feel like you've solved the problem of evil in any way in the research and in your writing in this book?

Yeah, I do. I'm so bold as to stick my neck out there and say this particular set of ideas actually solves the problem of evil. At least solves it in the sense that people raise objections to why you should believe in God despite there being evil in the world. And you know, the primary objection is, if there's a loving God, why would this God not stop these things? And you know, some people say, "Well, God allowed them because they're part of some greater plan," or "God allowed them because God doesn't want to mess with your free will," or "God allows them because God wants to teach you a lesson," or whatever. And I don't find those answers satisfying. In fact, I think most Christians don't find them satisfying. And I think a far more satisfactory answer is to simply God can't stop those things from happening. And it's not because God is sort of a wimp, that God's a weakling, or God is uninvolved. It's not because God is, you know, sort of looking at us from a distance like Bette Midler's song. It's because God's love is always self-giving and others empowering, and because God always loves all creation from the the least complex to the most. And this love is giving freedom to complex creatures and, and agency and self-organization to less complex creatures, and, and just the mere power of existence to the smallest realities of, of the world. God necessarily does that, and God can't withdraw it or override it or fail to do it. And so God can't stop the evil that comes from those who use their freedom or agency wrongly.

Hmm. Well, let's get into some of those 5 ideas that I alluded to before that you talk about in this book that you help to use to explain this idea to us. And the first one, the first idea is that you say God can't prevent evil single-handedly, and you touched on that just a little bit. But I wonder if, as we go through these 5 ideas, if you could just briefly talk about them a little bit and just kind of explain your view a bit to who's some people who this idea may be new to. But the idea, first idea number 1, God can't prevent evil single-handedly.

Yeah, you know, you earlier said that the title will probably raise some eyebrows, God Can't Do Something. And okay, he chose the title, although obviously that idea is at the very heart of the book, so it's not arbitrary. But a lot of people don't realize that the Bible itself says that God can't do things. So my title is very biblical. The writer of Hebrews, for instance, says that God can't lie. So does the writer of Titus. James says God can't be tempted. The Psalmist says God can't grow tired. But the passage that I think is, that I like to use most is one in which Paul is writing to Timothy, and he says these words: When we are faithless, God remains faithful because God cannot deny himself. And that idea, I think, helps us to begin to ask questions about things God can't do, because for God to do them would have to deny his own nature. Now that gets kind of technical for some people, and that's the kind of things that I worked out in details in the previous book. But those technical sorts of things have been so helpful to so many people. I got tons of emails and Facebook notes from victims of horrific evils who said, "Finally, I read a book that helped me make sense of God." In fact, one of the emails I got from a woman I call Claire in the book, To Protect Your Identity. She has been sexually abused by family members, by boyfriends, and even a stranger. And she always wondered why God didn't step in and stop this. And she said in one of her lines something like, after reading that God can't prevent what happened to me, I no longer had to think that God was just God's standing by, allowing these horrible and painful events to happen. And so for her, it's really good news that God can't prevent evil, because God didn't prevent her suffering.

Hmm, very interesting perspective on that. Let's get into the second idea that you present here. Belief number 2: that God feels our pain. Talk about that a bit for us.

Well, this one I think is less controversial than the first one, the first chapter. I think most Christians believe this, and most Christians have thought this for centuries, because it's, I think, the way God is described in the Bible. But some who haven't been reading theology much may be surprised to discover that most systematic or formal or trained theologians have thought that God doesn't feel what we feel, that God is unaffected, that God is unmoved, that God has no emotions whatsoever. And so in this particular chapter, I wanted to talk about God feeling not only the pains that we feel with us, but also the joys, because I think, I think it's a really important feature for many people as they think about what God's up to in the midst of, you know, their own suffering. One of the illustrations I put in this chapter is a story of my own life. My wife was— went back to get her student teaching degree, and one evening she came home after a particularly difficult day. Her, you know, students didn't behave well. Her— the teacher that was supposed to be assisting her wasn't helpful. The principal came in and she interpreted what the principal did as being negative. So she came home that night just feeling so frustrated and she sat on our kitchen floor and just cried and talked about what happened. Me being a naïve young husband, I responded to her distress by starting to give her advice on what she should do to fix things. You know, how she should go back the next day and do something different.

Been there.

Yeah, you've been there too. Yeah. Instead of empathizing with her, instead of trying to feel how she feels. And finally, at one point in the conversation, she said, I don't want you to fix this. I'm just trying to process my feelings here. And, um, I think that's an important thing. I'm not saying that, you know, the fixing the problem has no place here. But I think many of us, we want a fellow sufferer who understands our pain, our emotions, and I think God is that kind of perfect fellow sufferer.

Well, well put. I like how you said that. Let's look at belief number 3 that you talk about in the book, that God works to heal. And I want to ask this question as you talk about this: do you believe that God can heal even if God can't stop harm?

Yes, I do. This is the chapter that most of my more liberal friends are surprised that I wrote. This is the chapter that many people are saying, okay, hold on a second, God can't prevent evil but God can heal? How does that work? Well, what I say in this chapter is that God is always working at all times to heal to the greatest extent possible, but God can't heal single-handedly. God requires cooperation on our part or on our cells or organs' part or on creation's part or, or the conditions of creation being right if those conditions don't have, you know, the capacity to have to respond. And so here I talk about some people who don't believe in God's miraculous healing and say You know, I can understand why they go that route because they're probably like me, they've prayed for a lot of people and those people haven't been healed and they've grown tired for the excuses for what, you know, people give for why God didn't heal. But then there's also some actual healings in the world. Sometimes those are, you know, fairly normal kinds of healings we expect when we go to hospitals, but other times they're dramatic and unexpected and we call them miracles.. And even though they're not common, we have to account for them, I think, if we're going to make sense of the world and God. And so this idea that God is always working to heal all the time, everywhere, but can't heal single-handedly, can both account for the healings that we do see in the world and also not blame the victim for why, you know, they aren't healed, or not say that their lack of healing is some sort of, you know, some master mysterious divine plan that God has, or that God is mad at them and punishing them, or even worse, you know, you just didn't have enough faith, you got to pray harder, as if God is sort of sitting back saying, you know, I could just heal you single-handedly, but you're just not working hard enough. I'm just not going to respond respond until you really show me you love me. That kind of thinking paints God as unloving. So my view, I think, has a picture of God that is perfectly loving but not able to heal single-handedly.

Well, let's get on to belief number 4. You say this, and I think this is an important one that we don't maybe deal with enough. You say that God squeezes good from bad. Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, I think some of your listeners will recognize the story of the person that I used to kind of— that kind of weaves through this chapter, the story of Joni Eareckson Tada. If you don't know the story, her story is that as a teenager she was with her family in the Chesapeake Bay and she was swimming. She dove out of the boat and there was a rock just below the surface of the water, and she broke her neck and was paralyzed from the neck down. She went on after a period of recovery, she never recovered fully, she was in a wheelchair and was paralyzed the rest of her life, but she went on to begin talking about what she had suffered. She wrote books, she was a best-selling author, She was on many videos. She recorded albums. She would— actually, I saw her as a younger person on the speaking tour. She did a lot of conferences, and she ended up learning to paint with her mouth. She could paint far better with her mouth than I can with my hand. Yeah, and it was amazing. It's just been an inspiration to tons and tons of people, but Joni Eareckson believed that God was punishing her when she was paralyzed. And in the book, I quote her direct words from a recent podcast, actually not podcast, blog, in which she's kind of looking back 50 years after her accident. And she thinks that this was all either caused or allowed by God. For some great purpose. And it's no wonder, you know, that people like her who see all kinds of really positive things that come out of a horrific situation will then sort of infer or use the logic to think that, well, God must have then wanted this bad thing to happen because if it hadn't happened, all these good things couldn't have happened. And what I do in this chapter is say, no, there's another way to look at it. And that way is to say God didn't cause or even allow the horrible things that happen in our lives, but God works with whatever happens and tries to squeeze something good out of the bad God didn't want in the first place. And God's working to squeeze good from bad is a working that includes our contributions, our cooperation, in order to find fruition. So I think, I'm hoping that readers when they get to this chapter, they'll begin to see that there's a better way to talk about the good that really does sometimes come from the bad without blaming God or saying God allowed the bad in the first place.

Right, and I do appreciate what you wrote in this chapter because I do feel like for too often, and I still hear it all the time from people in the church, It's like we do blame God for these calamities, and he's punishing us, and it's just sort of, you know, often based off of mistranslation of scripture at times too, and reading it wrong in the English. And I think it's so helpful to realize that God is— I like how you put it— he is squeezing the good out, you know, in the midst of those things, that God will somehow ultimately make these things right and will bring good from it. And the God that suffers along with us. Well, let's look at your last belief in the book you talk about, and then I have another couple of questions that I'd love to get to. Belief number 5 that I'd love for you to talk about, you say that God needs our cooperation. And that word need, I think, would also be another thing for a lot of people to maybe struggle with as they talk about. So talk with us a little bit about what you mean when you say God needs our cooperation.

Yeah, I think it will be a chapter that will kind of shock people initially until they start thinking really carefully about it. You know, in the tradition that you and I are part of that believes that we have free will, it's not really weird to say something like, you know, God's not going to force Uncle Tony to become a Christian. God needs Uncle Tony to accept his love. You know, no one really Bats and I, when we were used the word need in that context. And what I'm doing in this chapter is just taking that general idea and generalizing it to all creation, to all elements of society, and saying that, you know, when God acts in a loving way, God asks for and seeks our response. It's just that I'm making the next move and saying, and God can't complete or can't determine and can't control can't bring an outcome unless we or other creatures cooperate in some way. I think that's not illogical, it's just not everyone has taken that next step. And part of the reason I do that is that when it comes to the problem of evil, some people will say, look, what really matters here is just loving and and acting and trying to prevent evil in the world. We shouldn't try to answer the question why God doesn't stop suffering and pain and evil. Instead, we should just, you know, roll up our sleeves and get out there and be loving people and try to overcome evil and make the world a better place. And I'm all in favor of rolling up our sleeves and trying to make the world a better place. That's at the heart of my answer. But I think that we also need to ask the question, why didn't God just do it all alone? You know, if we think that we need to step into some situation and try to make something good that God allowed to be bad in the first place, so maybe we're actually working against God's very purposes. Maybe God wanted it to be a rotten situation, and our efforts to make it better is going against God's will. That's if God allows these things to happen. So I think you need to have a view that God really can't do it single-handedly in order to have a real grounding and rationale for why we ought to join in the work that God is calling us to do to make our lives and the lives of our civilization, the lives of our of those creatures in our world better.

Hmm. Well, thank you for taking time to discuss those views, and I would encourage our listeners to read the book when it comes out because there's just so much more that Thomas goes into than what we have time to kind of hit upon in a podcast setting like this. But your book raises some questions for me, and so I'm delighted to just have a chance to kind of pick your brain a little bit today after reading it. And just kind of see where our conversation goes in the time that we have today. I have been a bit theologically all over the board on open theism personally, myself. I read Clark Pinnock's book, The Openness of God, when I was at Trevecca as a student many years ago and just loved it and kind of dove in headfirst and was like, "Yeah, that's me. I believe this way." And through the years, I've wavered a bit from that. I've become less of an open theologian. I've leaned on different— at different times with different friends, as I've done a lot of interdenominational work, traveling as a musician. I find myself a lot more open to many different views from our denominational brothers and stuff. So what I find myself constantly doing is as I have fellowship with people, I'm always presented with ideas that I want to wrestle with, and I want to struggle with and find more. And I think that, that your book, while a reader may not read it and come away thinking, I 100% agree with everything you said here, what they can't deny is that you've, you've made them think. You make me think. You make me wrestle with things throughout this. And one thing that I have wrestled a little bit with, and I'd love for you to address it, today in what I read is you talk about why we should believe that God is a bodiless spirit who can't prevent evil. And you talk about it even in the discussion questions. And my question, it probably hits me at this time of year more than any other because we're in Advent, a time when we celebrate the Incarnation, that, that God took the form of a body, that God is fully God, fully man. And I'd love for you to address what you're talking about when you say that God is a bodiless spirit who can't prevent evil. Does that feel like it is opposed in some way? Maybe opposed is not the right word, but does it in some ways struggle with the idea of God with us coming to earth as a man as well, who I fully believe that Jesus does have a body? And I just, I'd love to get kind of your thoughts and your insights thoughts on that?

Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, you know, my saying that God is a bodiless spirit or a universal spirit without a localized body is a very traditional view. The classic theologians used the word incorporeal or immaterial, and they thought God doesn't essentially have any kind of body. Now, our Mormon friends think differently on this. They think that God really does have a localized body somewhere in the galaxies, but the Christian theologians said, "Nope, God is incorporeal. God is bodiless. God is a universal spirit." And they've used all kinds of other language to talk about this spirit. They've also said that God was specially incarnate in Jesus Christ. But, and this is, I think, an important thing to think about this time of year, and those of you who are listening who are in sort of positions of authority, pastors or Sunday school teachers or whatever, I think it's important not to say Jesus is the incarnation of God because that makes it sound like God wasn't present in the world prior to Jesus showing up. I think God is incarnate in all creation at all times, has always been. But there is something special about Jesus. Now the specialness about Jesus theologians have argued about from the very beginning.

Sure, yeah.

And there's not one particular view that everyone agrees on. The view that I find myself most compelled by is called by scholars a Spirit Christology. And it says that what makes Jesus divine is Jesus responding to God's call, or the Holy Spirit in his life. That Jesus really has free will, that he really is a human. In fact, he really could have sinned because he was really tempted. And yet he chose to cooperate with God, to obey. He chose to respond to the Spirit's call moment by moment in his life. So I think there's a very strong strand of the tradition that says Jesus of Nazareth does not have the usual attributes we say God has. For instance, Jesus was not omnipresent, or Jesus was not omniscient, he didn't know some things, etc., etc. So when we talk about Jesus, at least for me, I want to say Jesus reveals God's character as love, and that is what's so crucial about him being divine, without saying Jesus has all the other kinds of attributes we want to say God essentially has. So I don't see a conflict there because I have a particular way of thinking about Jesus that is, you know, it's orthodox, or at least we would say it's one of the orthodox options. I don't think— I don't usually call Jesus God as if Jesus has all the divine attributes. I usually say Jesus is divine and he responds through the Spirit perfectly and gives us the best picture we can of a God who has attributes that Jesus doesn't exemplify as a human.

And I like how you say in your book, and you're quoting your friend Tripp, when you say, "God is at least as nice as Jesus." And I was wondering, was that possibly Tripp Fuller you were talking about?

Yeah, I think it is.

I thought it was. I just had Tripp on a few weeks ago.

Yeah, he's a good guy.

That sounds like something he would say for sure. Well, thank you for addressing that as I, and I'm sure many others, I'm going to keep struggling through on that one. But I love that. That's one thing I love about the way you write is we need that struggle. That's how we grow and continue. And I had just one other question that comes to my mind that's something that I grasp with. I'm kind of of the mindset of, I think it was probably William Willimon who I first heard say something like this. That, you know, you know, Jesus, when you start following him, he gives you a whole new set of problems you wouldn't have had if you didn't, you know, if you didn't start in the first place. And so as I've been thinking through a little bit more about the idea of God squeezing the good out of the situations, I've been, um, I don't know if I say struggling with this, but I guess just been thinking on it a bit. Do you think that if a person has consecrated themselves completely over the Lord. Let's do, you know, using Nazarene language, I'm saved, I've sanctified, I've given myself over completely. I'm utterly surrendered, and because of that I've said to God, I'll go wherever you want me to go. I'll be who you want me to be. If it means taking the difficult road, I will take that road, and so when I think about things like that, if we say to God, say, Lord, even if it means my suffering or even my death, I will follow you, and I will be on that journey. And when I think about that with the life of Jesus as well, as you've talked about him listening and being guided in his own life by the Holy Spirit, ultimately leading to a cross. And, and we could say there's different reasons why Jesus died, whether probably, you know, whether it was man that killed him or whether it was God's will. Lots of different theologies about those things. This very long setup to this question is, um, do you think that in those moments of consecration that we've said, 'Not my will but thine,' do you think that God will lead us into places of suffering?

Definitely, definitely. But I don't think God forces us. It's one thing to ask someone to self-sacrifice. It's another thing to abuse them or another thing to sacrifice them against their will. I, in fact, oftentimes choose a path that involves some pain because I think doing so is what God calls me to do, to live a life of love. Maybe here's an illustration most of us who are parents can understand. When we decide we want to have children, we know it's going to be painful sometimes. My wife knew that it was going to be painful in the giving of birth, and we knew that it was likely going to bring some heartache in the midst of their growing up and trying to teach them what's right, etc. And so we freely made a decision to have children. You know, not everybody makes that decision freely, but we did.

Sure.

And we took on some of the pain that we expected to come from it. That's a whole lot different than forcing other people to endure pain. And so I don't want to give the impression that the way of love is the way of being painless, easy, warm and fuzzies all the time. I definitely don't think that. I do think that God sometimes calls upon us to do things that are going to be difficult for us, but God does so for our own good. Now unfortunately, what many people have done is they've taken that truth and then they've looked at all the suffering and horror and evil in the world and they said, well, that must be something God wanted to have happen because God's got some mysterious plan that's going to bring it all good in the end. It's just really hard to look at some things in the world—murder, torture, rape, etc.—and say, you know what, God really wanted that because it's going to make that person better. Especially people who are killed, it doesn't make them any better. So we've taken what's true in some context, we've generalized it, and then inadvertently, I think most of the time, painted God as some, either some maniacal thug or some sort of horrible person, or we've said, you know, we know God is loving and yet God is allowing or causing these bad things. Well, it's just a mystery. You know, we pull out that mystery card. Now, I don't want to say that I've got God figured out, but I think that playing the mystery card in that kind of tough situation or tough question is giving up way too easily, that we need to rethink our views of God's power and love. And in doing so, we might have a more plausible answer than God causes or allows all the horrible things in the world.

And that's what this book God Can't is all about. Well, this has certainly been a treat to get to have this conversation with you today and to sort of be one of the first ones to read God Can't. So I appreciate you sending it over and, and just giving us a chance to talk today. This has been a wonderful experience for me, Thomas. And I want to make sure and point everybody to your website so they can learn more about you. It's at thomasjord.com. And Ord is spelled with two O's, O-O-R-D. And I'm sure if you just do a search for Thomas J. O-O-R-D, Ord, you'll be able to find him as well. He's on a lot of podcasts. He's, uh, he's all over the place if you go online. He does a lot of good works. But, um, is there anything that you feel like we— we— you wish we would have talked about today that we just didn't— that I didn't think to get to? I always want to give our guests a chance to be able to share if there's anything that we haven't hit on that you feel like is important You, you asked really good questions.

Um, maybe I just would like to emphasize something I've already said. I wrote this book to help people. I wrote this book for survivors, for victims, for people who are hurting, or for their friends and family, people who ask questions about God's love and power in response to the difficult things that they endure in life. And as provocative as this title is, and the title is not just meant to be provocative, I actually believe it's true in the way that I talk about it. But as provocative as it is, my underlying motive is that I love people and I want to help them.. And I wrote this book as a way to try to help those who ask this difficult question and are unsatisfied with the usual answers they hear.

Well, Thomas, I'm grateful for the way that you love people, and I would say even in all the great amounts of work that you have written over the years, the teaching you've done, I think above all and beyond that, everyone that I know who knows you would say with all their heart that you love people and you love them. And that's probably the highest compliment that we can give to a person. And so I just want to thank you for being on the show today, and thank you for sharing with us and helping us to struggle through these ideas. And we hope to have you back here on the show again one day. Thank you for being one of the Voices in My Head this week. Hey, you're welcome.

I've enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing on my author page on Amazon. There's also the Voices in My Head Facebook community found at facebook.com/groups/VoicesInMyHead. /voicespodcast. And if you want to follow my alter ego on Twitter, follow my popular Mr. Rogers quote account found @MrRogersSay. Also, make sure to follow my appearance schedule on my website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website at rickleejames.com/bookings. And it would mean the world to me if you would write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now, the benediction. May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen you in your inner being for every good work. And may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.