Hello and welcome to the scriptures or real podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about elements of the scriptures that have made them become more real to us or helped us apply them to our lives better because we believe we need all the power we can get from the scriptures in our lives today.

I'm your host, Carrie Mealstein, and today I have a different, we're going to call her a co-host, a guest and a co-host.

This is my friend and colleague, Bethany Jensen, who I'll have as a guest later in like a couple months when we do Jonah.

We've been planning that for a while.

But just yesterday is Bethany and I are involved in an organization together.

And I was thinking I was just going to do this on my own.

And I thought, you know, Bethany would be really great to do it.

So we're actually going to have Bethany be the host today.

So I'll tell you just a little bit about Bethany.

And we'll tell you more when we get to Jonah.

But Bethany and I were together in Jerusalem just a little bit over 10 years ago,

over 11 years ago, because it's 22 now, because were there and starting in January of 2011.

And then Bethany was my research assistant and has gone on to get a couple of degrees.

I'll save some stuff for the next time she comes back rather than telling you everything now.

But she works on my excavation with me.

And she is part of the organization we were with yesterday is, well, I'll let Bethany tell you about it. Why don't you tell us a little bit about this? Bethany and welcome. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on. It's fun. So the organization is called Spark, which stands for the Society for Preservation of Ancient Religious Cultures.

And one of the things we do is, we promote the preservation and research of ancient cultures.

We do that in a few different ways, but we provide funding to excavations, including the one that we work on in Egypt, the BYU Egypt excavation project. And that's probably the biggest one. Well, it is the biggest one. Yeah, it is the biggest one. We've done Megito, we've done Petra and things like that, the Egyptian ministry in general. Right. And not only does it help us out with the excavation, but that also allows us to train other individuals, especially native Egyptians, to be able to study and preserve their own culture, which is awesome and super important.

And then with the organization, we do monthly lectures, either on the scriptures or on archaeology.

We have opportunities to hear from experts like you.

Love having Kerry involved.

And Bethany is doing an exciting lecture coming up soon.

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