Hey friends, welcome to another episode. That sounds fun. I'm your host Annie F. Downs. So happy to be here with you today.

The music in the background is from our good buddy, Mr. Tornwell. Make sure you grab a copy of his album, Citizen of Heaven.

Let me tell you a little behind the scenes here at that sounds fun podcast.

We often have our shows scheduled in our guest scheduled weeks and sometimes months in advance. In fact, currently we are booked through most at least half of the fall.

And we have our summer totally booked up. And that's great and it's so fun and you are going to love the conversations. And every now and again, something happens in our world, in our culture, in my life that I want to interrupt our normal

schedule of who we're going to be talking to and bring a guest on that was not pre planned. Now you'll know the plan is I never record shows more than a week or a couple of days ahead of releasing them because I want them to be timely and I want them to matter to you on the day you hear them.

But usually they're scheduled for a little bit. But today's show is one of those where I made a SOS call to a good friend.

And he agreed to be on the show today. As many of you know, I have been on a public journey over the last year and a half to be better educated and better communicate and better advocate for my friends of color, my friends that are not white.

And recently there have been some really public stories of the death of some African Americans. And I want to talk about it with a friend who's African American.

And so I called pastor Mike Kelsey. He is a pastor at McLean Bible church in Washington DC. You'll hear him tell you all about himself. But I called Mike and I said, you shouldn't have to do this. You don't have to educate us.

Would you mind coming on and having a conversation with me about what is going on right now. And he very kindly agreed.

Mike does not have a book coming out Mike does not have an album coming out. There is nothing you can buy for to get more of Mike Kelsey. You can go listen to his teachings on McLean Bible's podcast.

You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter. And I will also tell you that Mike has given us a list of resources of books we can read and documentaries and some other things. And we've linked to them here in the show notes.

We will link to them on YouTube. Remember YouTube.com slash Annie F. Downs T. S. F. For that sounds fun. Where Mike and I talk about those resources. They are linked there as well as well as on any F. Downs.com slash podcast.

They are all there for you and every one of those links is an affiliate link that the money will go directly to Mike. So he built the list for us. It is super fair. He built the list for us. And since he built the list for us, he will get paid off the affiliate link.

So that is one of the ways we get to thank Mike is by thanking him for building this list. And I promise you every penny we have built a separate affiliate account that is not mine. And every penny of that will go to Mike and his family to do whatever they want.

Get a trampoline or you know, eat out one night or whatever. So every everything you buy through the links that we share with this show will be an affiliate link to Amazon that directly benefits Mike Kelsey and his family.

One other quick thing for my mini BFFs. This is a totally appropriate conversation for my young friends who are listening and I hope it is one that will help springboard parents any conversations you want to have in your home.

You may want to listen first just to get your mind around what Mike and I talk about. And then mini BFFs are very, very, very welcome here because we get to raise the next generation of people as Mike says that have instincts of justice.

Yes, yes, yes, instincts of justice. So here's my conversation with pastor Mike Kelsey.

Mike Kelsey, hi friend. What's up? Thank you for doing this today. Yeah, absolutely thanks for having me. I mean, well, here's what happened is I put up the help me Mike flag and you said, OK, yeah, yeah.

Here's the thing I started to say to you before we started recording, but I wanted to say it publicly is my listeners and my friends on the other side know that I have I got called out in a very healthy way that I wasn't being diverse enough in my friends and in my guest on the podcast.

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