"To Unclench"
EPISODE 198
Look Forward with Hope & Courage
Ever wanted a straightforward process for learning from your past and planning some growth and goals for the future? Well, “take a look! It’s in a book!” The Bible Geeks Book Club is back with part 2 of our discussion of Michael Hyatt’s Your Best Year Ever. This week we share a few of our Favorite Things, highlighting Scriptural principles like grace, clarity, and order — as they relate to this goal-setting process. We also share some themes that have begun to show up in our own planning for 2024. We hope this conversation blesses you, as you prayerfully set out to make 2024 a fruitful year!
Takeaways
The Big Idea: There’s wisdom in ordering our lives with purpose and planning.
This Week's Challenge: Spend time in prayer, dedicating all your work to God, and let him establish your plans for 2024 (cf. Prov. 16:3).
Episode Transcription
It takes like maybe two and a half days to fully settle in and slow down and. To unclench. Yeah. You totally, you switch into this different gear because there's nothing to worry about. There's nothing to do. There's no show to turn on. Well, hello everyone. And welcome to the Bible Geeks podcast. This is episode 198. I'm Bryan Schiele. I'm Ryan Joy. And thanks so much everyone for tuning in 198. You know what's coming up. It's just like two episodes away and I'm getting excited about it. But before we get into episode 200 or even 199, let's wrap up our Bible Geeks book club with a conversation about this book, your best year ever, a five step plan for achieving your most important goals by Michael Hyde. Take a look. It's in a book. A reading rainbow. I mean, two episodes back to back where we get to use that theme music is a good day for me. So let's kick this conversation off with really the meat of the conversation, which is finding Jesus in all of this stuff. Yeah. So this, as you said, is not really a religious book at all, but we are religious people, we are followers of Jesus. So as you brought these ideas to bear on your life, where did you find Jesus in all of this? Yeah, I was thinking from that last little bit of the conversation we had on the last episode about scarcity and abundance thinking and how, remember when Jesus said in John chapter 10, that the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. But I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. I think you alluded to the number of times throughout the Bible that we read about abundant life or abundant blessings in our life. And I know he's really talking about eternal life with him in the future. And that's the focus at some point. Like we are headed toward a journey home that's not here on this earth, but I really do believe that we get to experience that abundance right now. And there's another verse that kind of comes to mind thinking about that in 1 Corinthians 14, where he says all things should be done decently and in order. And I'm totally pulling that out of context, obviously, but God is not the God of confusion or chaos. God is not the God who wants us to run around like chickens with our heads cut off or feeling like we don't have enough or feeling like we're just always chasing something. He wants us to live intentional lives. He wants us to make good decisions that align with our values. And he wants us to enjoy a peace that passes all understanding. So I feel like when I see Jesus telling us here that he wants us to have an abundant life, he wants us to see the possibilities of what he's given to us rather than feeling crushed under the weight of regret and drudgery or just the monotony of life. And that is like, you talked about intentionality in the last episode. I really do think living our lives intentionally, living our lives in order and with a sense of decency about us, it really helps us have a purpose and a goal in mind as we take those little steps every day to be a more well rounded and wholesome person. And I also love the way you brought order into that conversation. It's not something we always think about order. God as a God of order is about more than how he organizes the world and it's about more than how we organize a Sunday morning assembly. It's about an opposition to the chaos that darkness wants to pull us into. And an ordered life is a beautiful life and it is an intentional purposeful life. It doesn't mean everything is under our control, but we are under the ordered rule of God and that's a beautiful idea. And that really, I think goes well with the kind of purposeful approach we're talking about here. You talked about John 10, 10. I was thinking of another passage in John 15 and verse five, and this is that wonderful passage about Jesus as the vine and us as the branches. And when you think about accomplishment, it's easy to start thinking of what you're going to do and all that, you know, like it's a, and I will build my barns and yes, or you think tower of Babel, right? Look what, just that, that look what I have done, look what we have made. And that is not at all the approach that a disciple takes. Jesus says in John 15 five, whoever abides in me and I in him, whoever's living dwelling in me and I'm dwelling in him, he, it is that bears much fruit for apart from me, you can do nothing. Nothing is just lingers there. It's and that idea of nothing just sits with you a little bit. You can do nothing. You are completely ineffective without me, but with me, I am a source of life and productivity and energy and making a difference in the world for me. And that is what we want. And so it just, as a Christian, when you design your ideal life and you aspire for outcomes, it's all from Jesus and it's all for Jesus. It's all in the service of God. The new habits reflect how I believe he wants me to live the projects aim to grow the kingdom and to, to bring glory to him. And so whenever we start putting these things together, we need to start with the source, we need to start with what matters the most and everything else falls in place whenever you have that foundation, I think that's such a powerful way to put these two ideas together that Jesus came that we would have life abundantly and where does that life come from? It comes from him, right? Outside of him, not connected to him. We really can't do anything. And I think as you read a book like this, as you read your best year ever achieving your goals and, and it may, like you said, be very tempting to get this self-sufficiency idea in your mind. Like I've got it under control and I have to accomplish these things. But man, if you don't recognize that he is the one enabling you to have all of these things, you don't have anything. Like throw your plan away, throw your goals away. They're just not going to pan out for anything if he's not behind it all. So that's a really helpful thing to think about, I think, moving into this. And as we continue talking about this book, maybe it'd be helpful for us to pull out a few of our favorite things. These are a few of my favorite things. So this book was not my book by choice, and you're the one who asked us to read this book and so, you know, I definitely think this book had some things in it that I really enjoyed and I can see why you picked this book. So maybe getting into our favorite thing. Number one, mine is that regret is useful. That feels like a very strange thing to jump to right off the bat. I'm thinking about it now, man. Regret is good. Regret is something that I can learn from and not getting too heavy right off the bat here, but when I feel defined by those regrets, when I feel like those regrets are just something I'm carrying around every single day, that can be a terrible situation, but if I'm able to not feel defined by those regrets, if I'm able to know that there's a difference between I messed up and I am a mess up, those are two separate things. I messed up. I didn't do something the way that I knew I should have done it, but that doesn't define me as a big giant failure. And just reframing things in my mind, when I feel regret, it's a good opportunity for me to understand that I may very well have an opportunity to make a difference with those kinds of things. And he talks about that in this book. And I think you mentioned it on the last episode, how regret tends to mean that I'm thinking about some situation that I could have made the most progress in, or I could have done something important with that. And I feel like regret is something that I don't think enough about as I'm thinking about goal setting. And this book was helpful for me in just reframing the way that I look back on the things that I didn't do, the failures I've had in my marriage, the failures I've had as a parent in my work, in my service to the church, there's all kinds of things. I look back on them like, man, I wish I could have done all those things better, but I get the opportunity today to make a difference in those things. So I appreciated that from this book for sure. I love it. And that's so on point with the message of the gospel. I try so hard as a preacher to get this across to people that you are not worthy, but you have tremendous worth to God to get the gospel. You have to get sin and how bad it is and how bad you have screwed up and get real ownership over that. But then at the same time, you have to get grace and you get, have to get what you're saying, that that doesn't define you. God defines you. And here's how he looks at you. He gave his son to die for you, to take away that screw up, to take away that sin, to take away all of the things that we've done and make us whole again. And in the grace of Jesus, Christians have the ability to look very honestly at those failures and to own them and to find the strength to be honest about it and learn from it. So that's wonderful. I was thinking about something else that Jesus does in his work with us. There is this emphasis in the book on getting clarity. And I really appreciate that clarity can be hard won. It is not as easy as you might on the surface of it, think it's going to be to get clear on what you are here to do, what you need to do, what this year should be about, what your marriage really needs, what's missing in your relationship with your daughter, you know, but doing the work prayerfully and thoughtfully of reflecting on it makes a difference. And he brings up Jesus recurring question of people. What do you want? Jesus asked people that a lot. Yeah, one example with the blind man in Mark 10, 51, you think, well, what do you think he wants? He wants to be healed. We've brought this up before. Jesus knows what he wants. Yeah, Jesus knows what all of us need, but we need to know it. We need to ask for it. He says, if you seek, you'll find, but you can't seek until you decide what you want to pursue. And so it takes cogent thinking and broad perspective and decisiveness for us to start pursuing the right things and for us to identify those things and ask God for them and roll our work, commit our work to the Lord. As we talked about from Proverbs last time, and then we commit a commitment is this decision of our will to pursue it and to pursue it in a way that is both yielding it to God, surrendering. Hey, what I want is what you want. And I'm going to do this prayerfully and obediently, but then also with a certain kind of tenacity that we have set our will on trying to accomplish good things for him. Setting our will just reminds me of that. What did you say on the last episode? Goals are wishes that you aim for, right? Your song. Yeah, it's that idea, right? You're looking down the barrel through the site and you've got something targeted that you're shooting for. And I think that idea of like, what is it that you want? What are you aiming for? And aim and vision and clarity, all of these things I think are super important. So I appreciate that idea as well. Second thing that I found here in the book that I really appreciated was that he talks about the journey being better with friends in chapter 12 and how he talks about how choosing those friends that we share our goals with carefully can be a powerful motivator to keep going. And for me, if I don't have those sort of relationships with other people, I could set intentions, I can set goals, I can have a theme for my year, whatever it is that I want to do. But if I don't have somebody there with me along for the ride, it really is a challenge for me to keep with that. And so he talks about here the importance of looping other people in, but not just anybody and not throwing it out so that the entire world knows exactly what we're dealing with or what our goals or challenges are, but targeting that. And like you were talking about aiming for something like aiming for a specific person or some groups of people to loop them in. It's not always a good idea to let everybody know, but success really does require help and lots of it. He talks about in the book. So I appreciated the iron sharpening iron reference here and the verses about making no friendship with an angry man, really being clear on who it is that we let in and share with, but finding somebody to share with, finding somebody to be a thinking partner with is a huge thing. And I do appreciate that you and I can have this private one-on-one conversation and that nobody else will hear some of these things we're talking about. Yeah, you might want to think about that a little more carefully, but I'll still publish this episode. Don't wait. Yeah, there's value in being somewhat selective about who you're going to entrust yourself and your commitments and your failures to it's, you know, you think of James five and confessing your sins to one another. You don't just go up to somebody on the street and start telling them how awful you are, you don't in a sermon, just make it all about airing your dirty laundry about everything that's ever happened. Doesn't mean you're not open and honest, but you need to think through what am I trying to accomplish here and who is the right person to share this with? Who is going to help me accomplish that? And yeah, I think that's really good and really goes with the spirit of this podcast and why I thought this would be fun to read with you. My second favorite thing here was the way that it leads me at least to process some deep stuff. I mean, it gets into the murky water when you really start taking some time. And I would just encourage anybody who's going to do this work to get away somehow, even if it's just at a coffee shop or something, but don't have your phone on and your email up and you know, like try to get away. I went up the other day to one of our favorite places, a place I've gone with you, Pocahontas State Park, the lodge and looked out on the beautiful snow covered beach and the lake. And I worked for several hours on this and I did some work in different places as well, but you know, you want to be able to slow down and pray a lot and think a lot and look back at old calendars and journal entries and, you know, really think through questions. You know, when you ask a question, it wants to be answered. And so you choose your questions and then you sit with them and you work through it. So it seems like you said, like a businessy five steps to a better life. Here you go. There's so many trademarks and branded names and stuff in it. Once you move past that, I think it is really deep for sure. You know, his first big best seller was a platform, which is all about building your brand basically. And he's got so many brand building things, but there is some thoughtfulness to how he designs this process to take you into emotions and issues and your cynicism, your resentment, your limiting beliefs. I always find it helpful. And Adrian and I really enjoy sharing with each other some of the questions about the past year, like what's the theme of the movie that you're in? What's the name of the movie? Oh, that was cool. What is the genre of the movie? And then there's this trophy that you give yourself. If you were to name this trophy, what were you unacknowledged for? And, you know, as we've talked about before, be aware of the golden pad on the back and the golden trophy, but you're just processing what you did that nobody else seemed to see. But, and maybe you didn't even think about it very much, but you realize I really spent myself on this and it for me, it gives some peace to just acknowledge it, to know the Lord saw that I did that. And then, like I said, for me, I always share it with Adrian and Adrian shares hers with me and that just feels good to then there's an opportunity for her to say, or for me to say to her, you know what? Yeah, you did do a great job with that. That could be encouraging again, with that kind of picking your partners, right? That's another thing. But just, I guess my favorite thing there is just the way that with a few simple questions, it gives you space to get into the deep waters. This book actually pushed me a little bit to do some things that I've not been super comfortable with in the past. And from the perspective of emotions and just the inner heart kind of work, I'm not the kind of guy who likes to do the inner heart kind of work as often. I like to do the systems and the automation and getting things done in my physical world. But the sitting and thinking is a challenge for me. I'll just be honest. But one of the things that as I talk about the trademarks and some of the branded things that he has in here, he does recommend taking this life score assessment, TM, you know, it's just how he basically goes through all the different aspects of your life and you rate effectively your progress on all these different aspects. And I didn't go take the test or anything like that. He does go through and list and describe to you like all the different aspects of your life and how important they are to make sure that you're giving your all to each of these things. And he talks about the idea of your being, your relating and your doing. And so like your being focuses on your intelligence and your spirituality and your emotions and really the inner kinds of things that we do, your relationships. He talks about how you are as a spouse, how you are as a parent, all of these kinds of relationships that you might have. And then he talks about your work being obviously your vocation or your hobbies or the finances that you have going on in your life. So all of these things paint a big broad picture of the things we care about in our life. And as I was looking through that list, the emotional piece of it was really, it was very low on my totem pole. And I viewed a lot of these other things, like even spirituality being very high on the list, but emotions were not really big on the list. So it did actually push me to go buy another book, which I haven't really gotten into, but a friend of mine recommended it to me. It's the Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown. I have that checked out of the library. Oh, do you really? Yeah. Coffee Table Book, very much not like a read it, cover to cover kind of book, but there's a lot of different emotions in there. I think she talks about 87 different emotions in there. And I've really enjoyed going through that and looking at different aspects of my heart and things I think about and things that could just grab me and grip me and just working through some of those things is a good, helpful reminder. And I appreciated that, I think, from his book for sure. Yeah, you know, there's an app called Blinkist. I did a blink on that book, Atlas of the Heart. And one of the one of the basic things that she starts with is whenever most people are asked about to describe their emotions and to list how many emotions they have, the average number is three. Yep. Glad, sad and mad. Yep. Like the stuff that when you're three years old, you get, and we're actually much more complex than that. So having a taxonomy to work through all of that. Yeah, I think that's helpful. But this book really does prompt you to do your own work. It's not going to lead you there, but it's going to prompt you to give you room to flesh out what some of those emotional issues are. Is there some baggage somewhere? Is there some good things that you can appreciate? So that leads to my third favorite thing here, the last one on our list. And I was thinking about how much I appreciated his emphasis on experimentation in this book. It's no surprise. And I think I just mentioned it, but sometimes I get so wrapped up in the strategies or the systems and I forget that it's really not about those things. These things are just tools to help me get where I want to be. Like he talks about here in the book, he says your goal might be sacred, but your strategy isn't. Don't give up on your goal. Just change your approach. That means modifying your activation triggers, as he calls them, until they're working right for you. Sometimes all it takes is a small tweak. And I think that fits right in line with what we like to do on the Bible Geeks. It's like, what are the small changes that I can put in place tomorrow that are going to help me be closer to the goal I want to achieve? So I don't know. For me, I think that's been super helpful is just thinking about, okay, maybe tomorrow I'll try this. Maybe the next day I'll try that. And just using these little opportunities to kind of tweak things and experiment and say, nope, that didn't work. That was terrible. I'm going to try something else. Being intentional enough and thinking with clarity to be able to see what I did and where I want to improve for tomorrow. For me, it's, it centers around journaling and around prayer and around talking to other people and looping my wife into conversations, looping my daughter into conversations and my mom and all sorts of other people in my life. Having these opportunities to just look back even just the last couple of days or the last week and say, is there something else today that I can do to make a difference where I didn't make that difference yesterday? And I like experimentation. I like trying new things, but man, I do get so married to a strategy. Sometimes I love me a good strategy. We were talking the other night about that idea of whenever you, you start building something, sometimes you can get attached to what it's going to look like or how it's going to, how you're going to get there. And the more you can keep like a fierce intentionality towards where you want to get to, but a loosely held commitment to what it's going to look like, not attached to all of the pieces of it, just the direction you're going and getting some clarity there that has helped me move things forward. A lot of times we were talking about how sometimes you have this vision for what a sermon is going to look like and it ends up totally different than what you actually thought it was going to be. And you can't just call it a failure because it's different than the vision you are attached to. If you're speaking God's word and you are giving your all to it, it probably is pretty good, even though it's very different. So I like that. I like the idea of continuing to work with it, continuing to see what tiny habits, right? You can put in place to help you move forward, trying to look at what other approaches are going to help you accomplish your goal. And like you said, who can you call on finding the right partner to help you achieve it sometimes takes some time. I've found so my final favorite thing is, it sounds pretty broad, but if I'm just saying why I'm suggesting this system, it has to do with efficiency. And we've talked about like getting deep and getting emotional and all of that, but it's very effective. You know, like I said, I just work with a worksheet. I don't look at the book these days. Usually I just have the prompt and in a few blocks of time, I'm able to get quickly deep into what I need to think about and then start working out where I've been and where I need to go. And these conversations, the process, it's one of those things that once you see it, it's obvious and that's a mark of a pretty good design, you know, like, yeah, there's really no other way that you should do that. That's how that should go. Obviously these are the five steps that you want. So that's one of my favorite things about it is just if it's just a good design and it moves you, I won't say quickly, but you're not spending a bunch of time on tangents that aren't important for the end goal. I feel like each step is essential to being where you need to be complete with the past, a clear vision of the future and a plan for how to get there. Pulling back the curtain ever so slightly before we decided that this book was going to be our next book in the list, or maybe around the same time, Ryan, for my birthday, sent me a little book, a little journal, and it's the full focus planner, little pocket TM TM. Yep. Definitely Michael Hyatt's product du jour. And I opened up the book and it just, it hooked me big time. Um, I just need to say that here because you're talking about the efficiency of the system and how much it makes sense and how quickly it is to like get into it and make a real difference very fast. That is my experience going through this and just sitting down and working through these limiting beliefs and dealing with the past and then setting the reasonable goals and really just getting clear on why I'm doing all of this stuff in the first place and then getting out there and starting to do it. If the system is so hard that you can't remember it, then it really isn't an effective system, right? It's not really an effective set of process to follow. And I, I do think that this is a really clear, simple, easy to explain to other people kind of thing. Maybe not everybody's jam. And it's not something that honestly I'm going to do every day for the rest of my life going forward. But I think just having this opportunity at the turn of the year, maybe as a starting place to get clear on things. And it's been super helpful for me. So these two episodes may not have seemed your cup of tea, possibly, if you haven't read this kind of book, or you've not really been a big productivity nerd in the past, but hopefully just thinking about your own life and your own future has been a productive use of your time here. Let's get into our final segment on the episode. And that is our reach out question. So the question is what themes do you see in your planning for 2024? So you could get into some specific goals, but we've been thinking about how sometimes there's a, there's a theme that starts to pull together and you shared with me your theme, but you didn't tell me what it means. So I'm excited to hear this. So we have waited until this moment. There's so many times where Ryan and I will be talking and we'll basically as have to say, no, no, save it for the show for the podcast. And so this, this moment is the time where I get to pull back the curtain on my theme for 2024 and 2024 for me is the year of the shield. And so I've been thinking a lot about shields and you could say this probably comes from our conversation in Ephesians about the shield of faith. And that's an important aspect of this, but honestly, Captain Picard is a huge factor in my yearly theme because my theme has three parts and it is shields up shields down and shields extended. And so such nerds it's so nerdy for sure, but I cannot tell you every little time that I have an opportunity to make some kind of a decision throughout the last few weeks, I have been thinking about Captain Picard shouting shields up and I just immediately have to make the right decision knowing that I've got to put some boundaries in place. So shields up for me is about establishing boundaries. I have been too easy to reach and I have been too responsive to things. And you might say, well, Bryan, that's a good thing, right? Well, not when you're being so busy that you don't have time to rest. And for me, establishing boundaries is huge and I need to be better at that. And I've been working and taking small steps to do that. One of the big things for me has been time blocking. It's just this practice of sitting down and intentionally laying out a purpose for every hour of the day. And every morning I look at the day's time block every week, I look at the upcoming week's time block and I adjust things as needed, but I have really, and this was spurred basically from your full focus planner that you sent me and there's a section in there about designing your ideal week. And that was super helpful for me. Just thinking about if I had my druthers, what would I want my week to look like? And you know, I have some, some requirements here. I, I'd like to spend some time exercising. I obviously want to spend time with my family. I need to make sure I'm spending an appropriate time at work and doing all the things that I need to do for commuting and everything else, just lay all the things out. And so I got to sit down and lay everything out on my calendar and that's been super helpful and I've been really following pretty much on the nose to my time block every day and being intentional about how I spend my day. So that's shields up shields down. I have some pretty high standards for things. I like things done in a certain way. I like to be involved in certain projects. I like to be the person who is the linchpin in things or are getting involved in things that I feel like are really essential shields down for me is just letting go of stuff, letting go of being defensive about some of the projects that I'm involved in, letting go of non-essential work and just getting other people involved, obviously letting them take care of the things that need to be taken care of, but really I can't continue to do a lot of the things that I have been doing without taking a break and just letting go of some stuff. So that's shields down for me. And then shields extended is that idea that we were talking about from our Ephesian study about using your shield to interlock with other people's shields. Or in Star Trek, as you'll know, sometimes they extend their shields to protect another ship that's nearby. I just love this picture of being a better friend of getting to know people better, being the kind of person who has other people's backs and who knows things about people that they share with me and sharing with other people, the things that are going on in my life, just the idea of, of linking shields with someone else and strengthening somebody being an encouragement to somebody, being a Barnabas for somebody and letting them in on my life so that they can do that with me. There's just been so many times here that I've needed that friend or I've needed that support and I feel like these three aspects of the year of the shield for me are big and I've been doing a lot of journaling, I've redesigned a lot of routines, I'm trying to make the best time of my energy and my attention and everything else that are going on. And I don't know, it's, it's been a good thing to think about over the last few months. I've, I actually started really in the end of November. So it's been kind of a, an ongoing process for a bit. And that's my theme, the year of the shield. So welcome aboard. I love it. I love, so shields up boundaries. Shields down, making sure that you're taking care of your inner life. Yeah. Right. And then shields extended reaching out and connecting with others is that's really cool. There's this metaphor that Adrian and I often talk about where we like to think of our family as a big tree, like a big Oak or something that the branches extend out. And, you know, we can give shade and give a place for other people to come and find themselves within the context of our family, but we have to make sure we're maintaining the roots and make sure that we're, our tree is strong or we can't reach out too much. If we're not, if we're not taking care of that, but that idea of being able to bring people in under those shields or under that, that protective shade, I guess, in our metaphor is something we think about a lot and adopting people and connecting with people and having what we're doing be a blessing to others and extend outwards. So that's really cool. As I look at this answer, I think here, as we wrap the two episode review of this book, I should confess that I am paused at step three right here until I get a chance to share steps one and two with Adrian and we get a chance to catch up with each other. And so I've been exploring step three and my goals and my themes and vision for this year, but I'm not yet into some finalized goals yet, but some themes that have started to appear, one is definitely to go with what we were just talking about is family and community and settling in. There's this phrase that we talk about in our family, which is cabin life. We want cabin life every day, which has a particular meaning to us. As you know, for all of Adrian's life, she has spent the first week of the year at this cabin up in the mountains in California and a place called Arnold, California that they would go to for a week and you shut everything down. There's no electronics, no TV. All you do is you read, you journal, you play games with each other. You cook a good meal for breakfast and a good meal for dinner together and eat together. You go for walks and that kind of thing. And it's just, I got brought into that from the first time I started dating her and it instantly became my favorite week of the year. Oh, that's so cool. And it takes like maybe two and a half days to fully settle in and slow down and to unclench. Yeah, you totally switch into this different gear because there's nothing to worry about. There's nothing to do. There's no show to turn on. There's no email to respond to. And it is just the most wonderful time and you connect with each other in a different way. And so for a while we've been talking about how can we have a family? How can we have cabin life in our home every day all the time? Because cabin life, it's not about being on vacation in our experience. Like some of our best experiences, some of the times we felt most like we were starting to create that is when we were most fruitful. Whenever I'm working and in that flow state and I'm digging in and working on a sermon or I'm visiting with people or whatever. So that's something that we've been just thinking about. What are the attributes of that? And how do we really start more manifesting a different kind of lifestyle? And I could describe it, but hopefully that with other attributes that aren't this insider cabin life phrase. But I think that probably got it across. Oh, it did. I love it. Yeah, I want to do it too. Can I join your cabin life? Yes. Yes. Join cabin life. I'll send you an email. Okay. And the other thing that I've been noticing as I looked at some of the early drafts of some goals that I was thinking through is how much of a foundation has already been laid in the work that we have done, whether it's the work that you and I have done to think about what we want Bible Geeks to be, what we have coming up and some of the other projects we've talked about the stuff in the church that we've, we finally launched a new website that is only going to keep expanding, but has changed some things I'm doing. And it's something that is a long time coming. A lot of the other work we have started to lean into a church and then so much of what we've designed in our family, rethinking our time schedules and some of the ways we want to approach things to have a blessed life for both of us, me and Adrian, and then all of our kids and to really be fruitful in the work. So I just look at all that I've done and think, okay, it's time to lean in and sustain this and live it. And I don't know as much as in the past, what the big next thing is. There's not something showing up clearly on the horizon. That's like, okay, here's the giant mountain that's right ahead of me now. It's more, okay, there's a long road ahead of like living this blessed life. And then we'll see what the next big thing that the Lord brings into our life or that shows up as something we need to take on. So it's just kind of living into leaning into what we've designed. I love the peek behind the curtain of your process and the things you're thinking about. And I think maybe the takeaway that is helpful for me in this is that this is a process, right? It's just a, it's an ongoing, like where do you want to be? What do you want your life to be like? Obviously, we want to be good servants of the King. We want to be fruitful in his work. We want to do all these things, but you can't do that by burning the candle at both ends. You can't do that by just continuing to push and push and never set those time blocks aside or these moments aside where you just breathe. And I think it sounds to me a lot like what you're talking about is just breathing and reconnecting and making sure that everything you're doing focuses on that goal of having enough and living within enough to be able to do everything God wants you to do without having too much stress over the control of everything. And it really could just consume your entire day and time to just- -Been there. -Yeah. And to let go and a little bit of cabin life. I mean, sign me up. That sounds wonderful. -I love it. -As we've reached out to each other, maybe you could find an opportunity to reach out to other people, but this week we do also have a challenge and let's get into that. -I am ready to face any challenges that might be foolish enough to face me. -So this week's challenge is to spend some time in prayer, dedicating all your work to God and let him establish your plans for 2024. So we're thinking back to that passage that Bryan brought up that last episode in Proverbs 16 verse three, to roll your work to the Lord or commit your work to the Lord and he will establish your plans. -I don't really know if there's anything better that we can be doing, any spiritual discipline we can be practicing more than to incorporate prayer into our goal planning and setting. -Amen. -We've talked about it a lot, but man, if you're not including God, your plans are not going to succeed. And we see that here in Proverbs 16 verse three. Where does God want me to be this year? How can I be a better servant to the King in 2024? Wherever that's going to take us, it's clear that we're only going to be successful when we first made God the central focus of our hearts, when we first set our intentions that line up with his and then, and only then really can we expect to have fruitfulness and success in the upcoming year. So may the Lord bless you all and may the Lord bless us with that kind of fruitfulness and joy, being able to serve him in a way that he is absolutely aligned with. -Absolutely. And one of the things that's fun about looking back in a time like this, and I always look back a little bit further than just the past year and think about some of the past goals and what the experience was, is seeing how God answered those prayers. -Oh yeah. Were you reading my journal this morning? -It's not what I expected. -That's exactly what I was journaling this morning, dude. That's super weird. -That's cool. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't always look like what you think it's going to look like. Sometimes it takes a little longer than you thought it would or a lot longer, but it's amazing how he answers these prayers and brings about these bold things that you're trying to do for him, these changes you want to make in your life and your heart and your relationships, and they just show up in beautiful ways and unexpected ways often. -Well, very well said. We are going to now put your best year ever, Michael Hyatt's book, on the shelf. We'll pick up another book at some point in the future, but on the next episode, Lord willing, we will be talking about another chosen episode. We did tease that a few episodes ago and then we bypassed it for a bit. The chosen season one, episode four, we will be doing another conversation about that here on the next episode. Then after that, episode 200, we've got some cool stuff lined up for that conversation. Then we're going to let you all know about some plans that we have moving forward with the show. Don't worry, we're not going anywhere, but we've got some really cool things on the horizon that we're excited to share with you. So until then everyone, may the Lord bless you and keep you. Shalom.