So a couple of weeks ago, I released an episode that some of you all may have seen where I told you that I was done.

I was finished with podcasting.

It was my last episode.

And honestly, in that moment, I meant it.

Or at least I thought I did.

But here's what has really been going on.

For a long time, my faith felt inherited, if you will. Like it was

something that was handed to me, something that I grew up with, built a platform around, talked

about for years, as you all have seen, but never actually gone and found for myself as deeply as

I could. And about two years ago, that started to bother me in a way that I couldn't ignore. I started to

ask deeper questions around my faith in sitting with the Bible differently in ways I never had

before. I was going to the original language of passages, looking at the historical context, the actual

world that the words were written into that I was studying and what I found wrecked me in the

best possible way and in that process my faith stopped feeling like something that I received

and started feeling like something I had discovered for myself and I started to find God through firsthand information. And I say that because we've all

had those instances where we always hear about someone else through a different source.

So it's like you have a friend or a peer that tells you about someone that you've never

necessarily met, talk to yourself personally,

but you only know of through other people's experience. And for a lot of my life, I didn't realize

that that's the way that I had interacted with God. I only knew him through secondhand information,

but I had never gone directly to the source myself. So two years ago, when I started studying the Bible differently, that's what happened.

I was going straight to God, experiencing him, hearing him for myself.

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