This is the Baymont podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we continue our series on images we find in the desert. We will learn about the Arar and Timorous trees and what they teach us about living on our own deserts.

We have a map of the discussion groups available on the website. Check that out on the schedule page. If you want to start a discussion group, don't know how to do that. We would love to help.

I wanted to be able to throw that up there and let people see. Some of you might be like, I don't really know what you're asking from me.

Now we have some groups that have agreed to pilot this idea for us. Now you can go online and pull that up and you can see what we're doing there.

We're basically putting some markers and all that you're going to see is the name of the group, be it Baymont, Cape Coral, Baymont, South Bend, whatever. Then a first name, we're not putting full names out there, just first names.

There are maybe two of them. There's really not enough for a discussion group, but they would love to if somebody else was out there. That's what the term launch group means. If you're one of those, there's a lot of people out there that just listen to it by themselves. We'd love to connect with somebody.

We can put you on there as a launch group and see if anybody else out there comes across your path. There you go. Pretty exciting. Good stuff. Let's talk about trees.

We've been talking about desert images. We are coming towards the end of Torah. We went through the book of Genesis. We talked about the preface and the introduction. We set up the story by talking about the big conceptual ideas.

Who is God? Who is man? What is this world like and what is God up to? And as we kind of caught these big picture ideas, the introduction, Genesis 12 through 50, took us into the family of God.

This is what this means when we take these big picture ideas and we apply them to real life practical situations. This is what it looks like. This is what a partner with God looks like as they wrestle with the story.

Then that set up God's narrative, which really began in the book of Exodus. We talked about God's rescue in the story of the plagues. We talked about God's wedding at Mount Sinai. Then we talked about how God built this honeymoon suite.

We talked about the place of the preface and the place of the book of Genesis 1. The place of the preface would work. The middle of the book of the book of the book is if they marry him and enter into a special relationship with him, they will be a kingdom of priests.

We need to know what a priest is. So we went through the whole book of Leviticus and one podcast. This book basically dedicated to what does it mean to be a priest?

We had some great conversation in our discussion groups about that. That is what Leviticus ends up becoming. It is a big manual for priesthood.

We have been doing this kind of book of numbers. The book of numbers ends up being this time where the Israelites spend this honeymoon period in the desert. In our review, it is honeymoon in the desert.

We could go through the text of numbers and we will do that in a couple of podcasts coming up. We just wanted to get acquainted with the desert. It is impossible to do over a podcast.

We are going to do our best anyway. Sometimes we have to come over to Israel and get acquainted with the desert.

We are going to do it literally. You will be acquainted. Nice and hot.

I don't go over any other time of the year except August and September because that is when you have to do it over there. If you are an experienced desert, that is a time.

We try to bring some of the things that we have learned and bring them here and try to give them to you. You have to operate your imaginations.

We have been doing this. We have talked about shepherd. One of the images that you find in the desert. You learn all about what it means to lead. You learn what it means to listen to the voice. You learn two different kinds of leadership.

One of the things we do is we juxtapose empire in shalom. We talk about this narrative of God. A tale of two kingdoms. Empire versus shalom.

...