0:00:00 - 0:00:35 Gotten a few feedback, emails and more comments about um this idea of accepting donations and um two of those emails so far and none of the comments as far as I'm aware have suggested that this is surprising and uh unpleasant to hear. And it's interesting because 03 emails, three. And so this is really 0:00:34 - 0:01:00 interesting to me. Um It's not a surprise to hear, but I am somewhat surprised from the people that the comments came from because in, in all three cases, these are folks who have been participating with all of this for a long time and um a long time. And so instead of addressing this directly, I, I 0:01:00 - 0:01:23 want to use it, I, I might address their specific concern. Well, I know I will eventually, but I'm not sure how focused in, in what kind of focus I will do. So I, I already have a, a layout of ways of going to address this topic as time goes on. Uh because it's, it's not uh it's not specific in any way 0:01:23 - 0:01:42 to me. These are ideas regarding God's kingdom and money that need to be understood by people for many reasons. Um that will be very important to them in their own benefit uh over time. But anyway, I'm not sure how much I'm going to advance the priority of those things as a result of those emails or 0:01:42 - 0:02:01 if I do it all. But instead of addressing them now, specifically, what I'd like to do is use this as an opportunity to address a general principle. That's actually really important. It's really important. So I've spoken at length and I will speak much more at length about this idea of Windows of Truth 0:02:01 - 0:02:36 or Windows of value. Um As a, as a very brief recap, what we are able to see of goodness is it only extends very a little bit beyond how good we are right now. In, in a sense, you could frame the Gospel as the challenge of conveying an idea. The idea is God's love. That's the idea, that's the point of 0:02:36 - 0:03:07 it all. And it is amazingly difficult to convey to someone beyond whatever fraction of it they already understand. So, um that's, that's a super deep concept that you could ponder for the rest of your life and profitably. Um So when we talk about these windows of goodness, whether we break down the goodness 0:03:07 - 0:03:45 to truth or, or value or anything else, any of its many facets, Godliness, I would say it's synonymous with good, but whatever the problem is that it is not possible to see very far beyond where you stand and So all the trouble we go through is to mitigate that, to address that at the end of the day 0:03:45 - 0:04:13 , the only thing that works is getting the person to take another step that at the end of the day, the only way you can come to see better than, you know, is to be better than you are. You can write that down and live by it. It's true. The only way you can see better than you do is to become better than 0:04:13 - 0:04:39 you are. That is true. By the way, in the good, the accuracy of your site, in the sense of the accuracy of your site to see better, to see more sharply, more accurately. But it's also just as true in the sense of being able to perceive better things that you currently cannot perceive. This is that when 0:04:39 - 0:05:09 Paul said, I have not seen the good things that God has prepared for those that love him, that's what he was talking about. You haven't seen it, you haven't felt it, you have not experienced it. So um there are many ideas that require lengthy explanations. Uh The love of God cannot be fully explained 0:05:09 - 0:05:46 through any amount of writing. The last bit of the gospel of John contains a disclaimer by John which says that even all the books in the world would be sufficient to fully describe Jesus. And that's something that's really something to think about. So the more you can write about Him, the more you can 0:05:45 - 0:06:14 teach. But there is some limit that you approach. And beyond that limit, it takes more than text. You know, all of creation in a sense was made to convey this idea of the love of God. That's much you can take that as deeply as you want to. And it's a phrase that, that absorbs any depth you can assign 0:06:14 - 0:06:41 to it to say that all things testify of Christ is true at every level of meaning. But on one extreme, what that means is that all of creation is necessary to sufficiently demonstrate, Christ testify doesn't just mean I testify. It doesn't mean sitting just sitting in a courtroom and sharing evidence 0:06:40 - 0:07:08 . It means demonstrating as well in the fullness of Christ can only be demonstrated through all of creation. And even then I would make an argument that it's still insufficient because to experience the fullness of Christ, you have to be like him because you can't see goodness very far beyond how good 0:07:08 - 0:07:51 you are already. And so what does any of this have to do with those emails? You know, it's amazing. So I produce a lot and it's very difficult to, to make and use the time required to process it. But there are people out there who do this a in every degree that could be expected. And interestingly in 0:07:51 - 0:08:24 these emails, there were, there were statements that, that um indicated extensive deviation from what I would believe should be really obvious given what I've said and done and not said and not done. And interestingly, there are people out there who have experienced much less of what I've produced that 0:08:24 - 0:08:50 get those particular things that were misunderstood. Um And, and just to give you a simple example of this sort of thing because it happens regularly, um I wrote a blog post and I think it was called a Wise Woman. Um And I'm pretty sure it says right there in the post that this is someone I know, um 0:08:50 - 0:09:10 that emails me from time to time and vice versa, we correspond, it's not regularly, but, you know, maybe like once a quarter or something. But anyway, I, I thought that it was pretty obvious that I wasn't talking about my wife here. The post is not about my wife and there have been other posts that I 0:09:10 - 0:09:27 was not talking about my wife and people just assumed I was. But I thought that there were, it was really obvious that that wasn't the case. So if there can be so much misunderstanding about such a simple thing that should be so obvious and, and, you know, granted the most likely explanation is I'm a 0:09:27 - 0:09:57 horrifically bad communicator and I, I fully shoulder that assumption and I, I try as best as I can to improve as I go. But hopefully you've seen evidence for that in the books. But um if so much confusion can exist so much miscommunication can exist on such simple ideas with such concisely communicable 0:09:56 - 0:10:29 evidence. It's a very simple idea. My um is this blog post about my wife or not? Um or someone else? Um Imagine the confusion that could occur when someone's trying to demonstrate Jesus through, through the same noisy channels of writing or making videos or writing books or whatever. And so it turns 0:10:29 - 0:10:53 out it turns out that um the only way to fix this is greater exposure. I took a class once and it was one of these classes where I needed credit. I wasn't interested in any of the offerings. And so I threw a dart against a board that checked the boxes of whatever would advance me towards the end of that 0:10:53 - 0:11:15 degree. And I was an undergraduate and it was from a teacher who I'd never had before. And that, that's a very dangerous thing to do, especially in days before rate my professor, uh where you could have an idea. There are some terrible teachers out there. And, um, anyway, I just rolled the dice. The 0:11:14 - 0:11:40 guy ended up being a master teacher. He was such a good teacher that he expanded my belief in what an impact a teacher could have in terms of communicating complicated things in a simple way. And, and I would credit him more than anyone else in my decision to eventually to become, to go back to school 0:11:39 - 0:00:00 , which was an extreme challenge for me in many ways, it really broke several paradigms for me um, to be a professor. So it was an excellent class and, and it was so good that I said any class he ever teaches I will take as long as I'm here and I did and they were all good. So this class was called, 0:00:00 - 0:12:27 um, I think it's called Information theory. I can't guarantee that. But anyway, the relevant section of the class was when you send information across any medium in nature, the signal will be corrupted to some extent. And so in the, in the, the maybe the simplest way to think about this is if you've 0:12:27 - 0:12:49 got a chain of zeros and ones and magically it's transmitting through whatever the wire, a wire through the air is a radio wave or whatever it is. Um Some of those zeros are gonna change to ones and some of those ones are gonna change to zeros and there's only so much you can do to prevent that. So what 0:12:49 - 0:13:19 you do to correct those errors is you build redundancy into the signal and then by, by building in redundancy, you can use that to resolve the errors. And hopefully it's really obvious where I'm going with this. So the greatest way to mitigate misunderstanding is increase the quantity of information 0:13:18 - 0:13:45 or the, basically the, the time that you spend um not going over the same thing. Jeez, there really should be a clear way of saying this, Rob um basically continue the flow. And as the receiver continue the time that you're taking, processing the flow, you can also go back to old things and you should 0:13:45 - 0:14:17 , there's some tremendous presentations on this platform not to go Trump on you. They're amazing, they're the best. Um But there are some astonishing things as far as great value on this. Um So by continuing the stream, now you can increase the, your, your exposure to the screen to the screen for some 0:14:16 - 0:14:49 of you. It is that is what it seems like, but you can reduce the intermittency. Um You can increase the time and that contact is super important. So in its extreme, what this tends towards is a face to face relationship. This is I think a very strong argument for the idea of gathering. Now this is a 0:14:49 - 0:15:14 topic I'm taking very carefully and i it's important to set up certain controls to mitigate what could be explosively disastrous. Um In the old days, I guess you could buy dynamite anywhere. My great grandfather told me he had one brother that died because he blew up as a kid. He was playing with dynamite 0:15:13 - 0:15:35 and another brother I think lost a finger or two, which is a crazy thing to think about in the, in the modern world. But um it turns out that that dynamite is great for what for, for clearing roads and you know, making Mount Rushmore. But it's not so good as a children's toy. And actually the vast majority 0:15:35 - 0:15:55 of things you might use it for are really bad ideas and this doesn't make it bad. It just means that it takes a certain level of sophistication and discipline to make sure it's used for the good that it can do that. Nothing else can if you need to, to clear a mountainside and your choices are a pickaxe 0:15:55 - 0:16:17 and a stick of dynamite. I would go with a stick of dynamite every time. Um And if you had to use the pickaxe, you would too, that, that you would be willing to pay an awful lot for that stick of dynamite. So um gathering is like that. And so in saying this, um I will limit my disclaimers here to just 0:16:16 - 0:16:44 a very clear statement. This is never something that you jump into. It is very, very, very, very dangerous and it has to be done with mutual consent. Meaning please don't ever, ever, ever just show up to somebody's place and say I'm here because you said that um certain things can only be communicated 0:16:43 - 0:17:09 as, as a, as a function of contact. And so I'm here, don't do that. It's called trespassing. It's very bad. Um So yeah, um it's also a continuous distribution, meaning it's a great in, it's like a dimmer switch. You can't just go from one to the other. Um And, and God is like this in all things we aim 0:17:08 - 0:17:34 for a face to face relationship with him. Some of us have that all of us can have it. All of us should want it, but you can't jump from one place to another. There's a continuous path and along the way as you're going through it, many of you, many people will conclude that under what's revealed to them 0:17:34 - 0:18:01 , it's just not worth it to keep going. They're going to be very happy being relatively far away from God. And you don't have to imagine this. This is so, so Israel was brought out of Egypt and they were all offered the, the opportunity to come up into God's presence. But very few of them, they all seemed 0:18:01 - 0:18:29 interested. They all signed up. OK? But when they finally got to Sinai, they were deathly scared to actually set foot on the mountain. They only went up a little because Moses is a very persuasive person and even then only Joshua, the elders and Moses and Aaron, sorry for the random ordering there. They 0:18:29 - 0:18:58 were the ones that went a little further. They all saw God, he appeared to them in a, in kind of a vision sort of thing. Um And that was enough for almost all of them. It was only Moses and Joshua that kept going up, you see the stratification here. But they all in the beginning said this is what we 0:18:58 - 0:19:21 want, we're all in. So that's clarification number one as, as you try to treat this as a binary, on or off thing, you're gonna jump right off a cliff and it's bad. It's a continuous path. And so the very next thing is whatever is before you, that's thing, number one. And, and as you go, you, you're going 0:19:21 - 0:00:00 , many people will decide. I'm good. This is not where I am, is I'd rather be than where you're pointing to. And that's all part of the process. The second thing I need to draw attention to is is that this is the way it works. Um It's like how rainbows appear all over the place, not just in the sky, 0:00:00 - 0:20:10 but like in little uh water droplets or in prisons or all over the place. Why? Because there's something deeply intrinsic about this pattern and it recurs over many, many different circumstances. What I'm telling you, it's true in the absolute, which is the greatest sense, which is with God. It's true 0:20:09 - 0:20:32 in much lesser um situations as well. So I'm saying it's true with me. That's what this whole example is about, but it's not just true with me. It's true with everybody. Every, like for example, every romantic relationship anyone has ever had is like this, actually, any human relationship anyone has 0:20:32 - 0:21:07 ever had is like this, the contact that you have with someone in, in terms of the time that you spend with them. And the um what's a good word for this? The how fully that window represents the fullness of reality, I guess the extensiveness of the time and circumstance, that's a good way. The extensiveness 0:21:06 - 0:21:34 of the time and circumstance of your interactions with someone absolutely determines the window through which, um, you can receive value. And, um, yeah, so, so these are principles that matter everywhere. It's just, you can get an awful lot of life out of life without ever understanding this or doing 0:21:33 - 0:21:55 it explicitly. But, but until you understand it, it's like, uh what can a caveman do with fire when the only source is when it, when lightning strikes a tree? And however long you can keep that going versus when you have flint and steel versus when you have a lighter versus when you have a blowtorch 0:21:54 - 0:22:20 , you know, whatever these, these are very different things. So anyway, I've, I've probably ranted about this for long enough. Um But maybe I would just say one takeaway from this is ex exercise extreme caution and to the credit. So I'm not criticizing those people. I want to make it clear to them because 0:22:20 - 0:22:49 obviously they know the content of their email and who they are. They were all extremely, I commend them for the wisdom of their approach. They were all very um very humble and you know, expressing with candor how they really felt while also um acknowledging reasons they had to not feel that way and 0:22:48 - 0:23:07 stating like this is just in progress and letting you know, but I'm not jumping to any conclusions at this point? Cool, good. That's, that's a, that's a solid um approach to that. When, when something like that happens, if you, if you're slapped in the face by an apparent contradiction, the best thing 0:23:07 - 0:23:34 to do is ask, is there something I need to learn here? And that's a wonderful attitude for us to take with God and to the extent situations or people have given us to uh given us evidence to believe that they're somewhere on that rent, the value of goodness. Um We should act the same way. So um so that's 0:23:34 - 0:24:00 good, but we should exercise extreme caution, I guess as these people have when uh when we are faced with topics or situations that, that require a lot of information, information, uh We have to remember that, that those channels of information are always limited and like sending any signal, they're 0:00:00 - 0:00:35 Gotten a few feedback, emails and more comments about um this idea of accepting donations and um two of those emails so far and none of the comments as far as I'm aware have suggested that this is surprising and uh unpleasant to hear. And it's interesting because 03 emails, three. And so this is really 0:00:34 - 0:01:00 interesting to me. Um It's not a surprise to hear, but I am somewhat surprised from the people that the comments came from because in, in all three cases, these are folks who have been participating with all of this for a long time and um a long time. And so instead of addressing this directly, I, I 0:01:00 - 0:01:23 want to use it, I, I might address their specific concern. Well, I know I will eventually, but I'm not sure how focused in, in what kind of focus I will do. So I, I already have a, a layout of ways of going to address this topic as time goes on. Uh because it's, it's not uh it's not specific in any way 0:01:23 - 0:01:42 to me. These are ideas regarding God's kingdom and money that need to be understood by people for many reasons. Um that will be very important to them in their own benefit uh over time. But anyway, I'm not sure how much I'm going to advance the priority of those things as a result of those emails or 0:01:42 - 0:02:01 if I do it all. But instead of addressing them now, specifically, what I'd like to do is use this as an opportunity to address a general principle. That's actually really important. It's really important. So I've spoken at length and I will speak much more at length about this idea of Windows of Truth 0:02:01 - 0:02:36 or Windows of value. Um As a, as a very brief recap, what we are able to see of goodness is it only extends very a little bit beyond how good we are right now. In, in a sense, you could frame the Gospel as the challenge of conveying an idea. The idea is God's love. That's the idea, that's the point of 0:02:36 - 0:03:07 it all. And it is amazingly difficult to convey to someone beyond whatever fraction of it they already understand. So, um that's, that's a super deep concept that you could ponder for the rest of your life and profitably. Um So when we talk about these windows of goodness, whether we break down the goodness 0:03:07 - 0:03:45 to truth or, or value or anything else, any of its many facets, Godliness, I would say it's synonymous with good, but whatever the problem is that it is not possible to see very far beyond where you stand and So all the trouble we go through is to mitigate that, to address that at the end of the day 0:03:45 - 0:04:13 , the only thing that works is getting the person to take another step that at the end of the day, the only way you can come to see better than, you know, is to be better than you are. You can write that down and live by it. It's true. The only way you can see better than you do is to become better than 0:04:13 - 0:04:39 you are. That is true. By the way, in the good, the accuracy of your site, in the sense of the accuracy of your site to see better, to see more sharply, more accurately. But it's also just as true in the sense of being able to perceive better things that you currently cannot perceive. This is that when 0:04:39 - 0:05:09 Paul said, I have not seen the good things that God has prepared for those that love him, that's what he was talking about. You haven't seen it, you haven't felt it, you have not experienced it. So um there are many ideas that require lengthy explanations. Uh The love of God cannot be fully explained 0:05:09 - 0:05:46 through any amount of writing. The last bit of the gospel of John contains a disclaimer by John which says that even all the books in the world would be sufficient to fully describe Jesus. And that's something that's really something to think about. So the more you can write about Him, the more you can 0:05:45 - 0:06:14 teach. But there is some limit that you approach. And beyond that limit, it takes more than text. You know, all of creation in a sense was made to convey this idea of the love of God. That's much you can take that as deeply as you want to. And it's a phrase that, that absorbs any depth you can assign 0:06:14 - 0:06:41 to it to say that all things testify of Christ is true at every level of meaning. But on one extreme, what that means is that all of creation is necessary to sufficiently demonstrate, Christ testify doesn't just mean I testify. It doesn't mean sitting just sitting in a courtroom and sharing evidence 0:06:40 - 0:07:08 . It means demonstrating as well in the fullness of Christ can only be demonstrated through all of creation. And even then I would make an argument that it's still insufficient because to experience the fullness of Christ, you have to be like him because you can't see goodness very far beyond how good 0:07:08 - 0:07:51 you are already. And so what does any of this have to do with those emails? You know, it's amazing. So I produce a lot and it's very difficult to, to make and use the time required to process it. But there are people out there who do this a in every degree that could be expected. And interestingly in 0:07:51 - 0:08:24 these emails, there were, there were statements that, that um indicated extensive deviation from what I would believe should be really obvious given what I've said and done and not said and not done. And interestingly, there are people out there who have experienced much less of what I've produced that 0:08:24 - 0:08:50 get those particular things that were misunderstood. Um And, and just to give you a simple example of this sort of thing because it happens regularly, um I wrote a blog post and I think it was called a Wise Woman. Um And I'm pretty sure it says right there in the post that this is someone I know, um 0:08:50 - 0:09:10 that emails me from time to time and vice versa, we correspond, it's not regularly, but, you know, maybe like once a quarter or something. But anyway, I, I thought that it was pretty obvious that I wasn't talking about my wife here. The post is not about my wife and there have been other posts that I 0:09:10 - 0:09:27 was not talking about my wife and people just assumed I was. But I thought that there were, it was really obvious that that wasn't the case. So if there can be so much misunderstanding about such a simple thing that should be so obvious and, and, you know, granted the most likely explanation is I'm a 0:09:27 - 0:09:57 horrifically bad communicator and I, I fully shoulder that assumption and I, I try as best as I can to improve as I go. But hopefully you've seen evidence for that in the books. But um if so much confusion can exist so much miscommunication can exist on such simple ideas with such concisely communicable 0:09:56 - 0:10:29 evidence. It's a very simple idea. My um is this blog post about my wife or not? Um or someone else? Um Imagine the confusion that could occur when someone's trying to demonstrate Jesus through, through the same noisy channels of writing or making videos or writing books or whatever. And so it turns 0:10:29 - 0:10:53 out it turns out that um the only way to fix this is greater exposure. I took a class once and it was one of these classes where I needed credit. I wasn't interested in any of the offerings. And so I threw a dart against a board that checked the boxes of whatever would advance me towards the end of that 0:10:53 - 0:11:15 degree. And I was an undergraduate and it was from a teacher who I'd never had before. And that, that's a very dangerous thing to do, especially in days before rate my professor, uh where you could have an idea. There are some terrible teachers out there. And, um, anyway, I just rolled the dice. The 0:11:14 - 0:11:40 guy ended up being a master teacher. He was such a good teacher that he expanded my belief in what an impact a teacher could have in terms of communicating complicated things in a simple way. And, and I would credit him more than anyone else in my decision to eventually to become, to go back to school 0:11:39 - 0:00:00 , which was an extreme challenge for me in many ways, it really broke several paradigms for me um, to be a professor. So it was an excellent class and, and it was so good that I said any class he ever teaches I will take as long as I'm here and I did and they were all good. So this class was called, 0:00:00 - 0:12:27 um, I think it's called Information theory. I can't guarantee that. But anyway, the relevant section of the class was when you send information across any medium in nature, the signal will be corrupted to some extent. And so in the, in the, the maybe the simplest way to think about this is if you've 0:12:27 - 0:12:49 got a chain of zeros and ones and magically it's transmitting through whatever the wire, a wire through the air is a radio wave or whatever it is. Um Some of those zeros are gonna change to ones and some of those ones are gonna change to zeros and there's only so much you can do to prevent that. So what 0:12:49 - 0:13:19 you do to correct those errors is you build redundancy into the signal and then by, by building in redundancy, you can use that to resolve the errors. And hopefully it's really obvious where I'm going with this. So the greatest way to mitigate misunderstanding is increase the quantity of information 0:13:18 - 0:13:45 or the, basically the, the time that you spend um not going over the same thing. Jeez, there really should be a clear way of saying this, Rob um basically continue the flow. And as the receiver continue the time that you're taking, processing the flow, you can also go back to old things and you should 0:13:45 - 0:14:17 , there's some tremendous presentations on this platform not to go Trump on you. They're amazing, they're the best. Um But there are some astonishing things as far as great value on this. Um So by continuing the stream, now you can increase the, your, your exposure to the screen to the screen for some 0:14:16 - 0:14:49 of you. It is that is what it seems like, but you can reduce the intermittency. Um You can increase the time and that contact is super important. So in its extreme, what this tends towards is a face to face relationship. This is I think a very strong argument for the idea of gathering. Now this is a 0:14:49 - 0:15:14 topic I'm taking very carefully and i it's important to set up certain controls to mitigate what could be explosively disastrous. Um In the old days, I guess you could buy dynamite anywhere. My great grandfather told me he had one brother that died because he blew up as a kid. He was playing with dynamite 0:15:13 - 0:15:35 and another brother I think lost a finger or two, which is a crazy thing to think about in the, in the modern world. But um it turns out that that dynamite is great for what for, for clearing roads and you know, making Mount Rushmore. But it's not so good as a children's toy. And actually the vast majority 0:15:35 - 0:15:55 of things you might use it for are really bad ideas and this doesn't make it bad. It just means that it takes a certain level of sophistication and discipline to make sure it's used for the good that it can do that. Nothing else can if you need to, to clear a mountainside and your choices are a pickaxe 0:15:55 - 0:16:17 and a stick of dynamite. I would go with a stick of dynamite every time. Um And if you had to use the pickaxe, you would too, that, that you would be willing to pay an awful lot for that stick of dynamite. So um gathering is like that. And so in saying this, um I will limit my disclaimers here to just 0:16:16 - 0:16:44 a very clear statement. This is never something that you jump into. It is very, very, very, very dangerous and it has to be done with mutual consent. Meaning please don't ever, ever, ever just show up to somebody's place and say I'm here because you said that um certain things can only be communicated 0:16:43 - 0:17:09 as, as a, as a function of contact. And so I'm here, don't do that. It's called trespassing. It's very bad. Um So yeah, um it's also a continuous distribution, meaning it's a great in, it's like a dimmer switch. You can't just go from one to the other. Um And, and God is like this in all things we aim 0:17:08 - 0:17:34 for a face to face relationship with him. Some of us have that all of us can have it. All of us should want it, but you can't jump from one place to another. There's a continuous path and along the way as you're going through it, many of you, many people will conclude that under what's revealed to them 0:17:34 - 0:18:01 , it's just not worth it to keep going. They're going to be very happy being relatively far away from God. And you don't have to imagine this. This is so, so Israel was brought out of Egypt and they were all offered the, the opportunity to come up into God's presence. But very few of them, they all seemed 0:18:01 - 0:18:29 interested. They all signed up. OK? But when they finally got to Sinai, they were deathly scared to actually set foot on the mountain. They only went up a little because Moses is a very persuasive person and even then only Joshua, the elders and Moses and Aaron, sorry for the random ordering there. They 0:18:29 - 0:18:58 were the ones that went a little further. They all saw God, he appeared to them in a, in kind of a vision sort of thing. Um And that was enough for almost all of them. It was only Moses and Joshua that kept going up, you see the stratification here. But they all in the beginning said this is what we 0:18:58 - 0:19:21 want, we're all in. So that's clarification number one as, as you try to treat this as a binary, on or off thing, you're gonna jump right off a cliff and it's bad. It's a continuous path. And so the very next thing is whatever is before you, that's thing, number one. And, and as you go, you, you're going 0:19:21 - 0:00:00 , many people will decide. I'm good. This is not where I am, is I'd rather be than where you're pointing to. And that's all part of the process. The second thing I need to draw attention to is is that this is the way it works. Um It's like how rainbows appear all over the place, not just in the sky, 0:00:00 - 0:20:10 but like in little uh water droplets or in prisons or all over the place. Why? Because there's something deeply intrinsic about this pattern and it recurs over many, many different circumstances. What I'm telling you, it's true in the absolute, which is the greatest sense, which is with God. It's true 0:20:09 - 0:20:32 in much lesser um situations as well. So I'm saying it's true with me. That's what this whole example is about, but it's not just true with me. It's true with everybody. Every, like for example, every romantic relationship anyone has ever had is like this, actually, any human relationship anyone has 0:20:32 - 0:21:07 ever had is like this, the contact that you have with someone in, in terms of the time that you spend with them. And the um what's a good word for this? The how fully that window represents the fullness of reality, I guess the extensiveness of the time and circumstance, that's a good way. The extensiveness 0:21:06 - 0:21:34 of the time and circumstance of your interactions with someone absolutely determines the window through which, um, you can receive value. And, um, yeah, so, so these are principles that matter everywhere. It's just, you can get an awful lot of life out of life without ever understanding this or doing 0:21:33 - 0:21:55 it explicitly. But, but until you understand it, it's like, uh what can a caveman do with fire when the only source is when it, when lightning strikes a tree? And however long you can keep that going versus when you have flint and steel versus when you have a lighter versus when you have a blowtorch 0:21:54 - 0:22:20 , you know, whatever these, these are very different things. So anyway, I've, I've probably ranted about this for long enough. Um But maybe I would just say one takeaway from this is ex exercise extreme caution and to the credit. So I'm not criticizing those people. I want to make it clear to them because 0:22:20 - 0:22:49 obviously they know the content of their email and who they are. They were all extremely, I commend them for the wisdom of their approach. They were all very um very humble and you know, expressing with candor how they really felt while also um acknowledging reasons they had to not feel that way and 0:22:48 - 0:23:07 stating like this is just in progress and letting you know, but I'm not jumping to any conclusions at this point? Cool, good. That's, that's a, that's a solid um approach to that. When, when something like that happens, if you, if you're slapped in the face by an apparent contradiction, the best thing 0:23:07 - 0:23:34 to do is ask, is there something I need to learn here? And that's a wonderful attitude for us to take with God and to the extent situations or people have given us to uh given us evidence to believe that they're somewhere on that rent, the value of goodness. Um We should act the same way. So um so that's 0:23:34 - 0:24:00 good, but we should exercise extreme caution, I guess as these people have when uh when we are faced with topics or situations that, that require a lot of information, information, uh We have to remember that, that those channels of information are always limited and like sending any signal, they're 0:23:59 - 0:24:13 always noisy. And so we've, we've just got to look for the redundancy, I guess, uh whether it's, it exists in what we already have or if we can go out and get it. So that's, I think a takeaway from this.