Be safe is not my favorite greeting when you part ways with people. It wasn't a greeting at all

when I was a kid. Be safe. Now it's kind of a greeting. I like it. I'm not going to get mad at

people. Like, I mean, I like the sentiment of it that people are trying to be nice. Like,

why would you be mad about anybody trying to be nice? Somebody says, Merry Christmas and you're not

into Christmas. Like, come on. They were trying to be nice. If somebody tries to convert me to their religion or whatever, which happens to me all the time because of what I do on the internet, everybody's always like, you should become a this because it's the one true thing. On the one hand, it can be kind of annoying because most people who say it are a little brash about it.

But on the other hand, hey, thanks for thinking your thing is true and real and legit and not wanting me to be an outsider to that.

So I'm not trying to gripe too much about the be safe thing as a greeting.

But I do think it's indicative of where our hierarchy of values of good is at at this moment in society. And it hasn't always

been that way. Be safe is a greeting that has only existed very recently because it's a

path to walk that has only been an option very recently. The world's tough. Things happen.

And maybe we imagine that we can control things a

little better than we actually do. I'll tell you who didn't imagine that. The early Christians,

they knew it was going to be tough and they leaned into the tough stuff. One of the tough things

that they were told to do was not just to save their own skin, but they were supposed to look out

for each other and not to look out for each other

and not just look out for each other as a priority, but they were supposed to look out for

their enemies, people even outside the boundaries of Christian faith. Galatian 610 says,

therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family

of faith. We've been thinking about that for quite a while. To help us think of that,

I've brought on this book, The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark, and we've been looking

at a specific set of examples for how Christians in the first few centuries of Christianity lived out this

command, this instruction from Paul, then Galatian 6 that I just read here, how they

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