Hello, one and all, welcome to the Pastor Mike Drop podcast.

I'm Pastor Mike, and with my co-host, Emily,

we have two outstanding pastors again, Emily. Well, we sure do. Every week. They just keep coming.

They just keep coming. Everywhere you look around here, there's an outstanding pastor.

Yes, they're inviting. So that's true. With us today, we have Pastor Andy Hermanson from Hope Grimes. Hello, hello. Good to see you guys. From Grimes. All the way. A short distance away. All the way from Grimes. Yes. And Pastor Ben Mason. How many hours does it take to drive from Grimes? Quite a bit. Pastor Ben Mason right here from West Des Moines. That's right. Not near as far as cramps.

Just down the hallway from my office. Yeah. We get to hang out. Thanks for being here, guys.

We're excited. Yeah, it's been a good year already. This is Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday,

Marty Gras, depending on how you, you know, what your tradition is.

Tomorrow's Ash Wednesday. So we start the 40-day season of Lent. And around here, we're calling it 40

days of discipleship at hope at all of our different locations and campuses. And we've got a lot of

different things that people can do. In addition to weekend worship,

we've got our daily Bible readings, daily devotions from our pastors, Bible studies, classes,

this podcast, a Lenton project, which I'm really excited about. That's good to be the church

together on all these things. What do you guys doing in Grimes? I think you had some other things

planned, too. Yeah, we're going to throw 40 days of prayer on top of all of it because we've been loving, reading the gospels, getting to know Jesus. I keep running to people that are asking, you know, how do I talk to Jesus? And I think that's a really important thing as well. So we just grabbed a bunch of things, including the mission partner. We're hopefully going to bless the part of the project and the church and the things we see in our community. We're going to be praying for that. Yeah. It's such a good time to invite people in. Oh, yeah. To try to do something new to get yourself learning in a new way. Absolutely. It is. Lent is one of the good traditions, I think. You know, we say around here, one of our core values is we worship God, not tradition.

This is a good tradition, though, where tradition helps get the Jesus thing going and the hearts and minds and souls of people, we embrace it.

And where tradition seems to be getting in the way, we have biblical precedent and teaching that says,

yeah, don't go there. For the sake of tradition, Jesus says you can make void the word of God.

So we don't want to do that, but sometimes traditions are good. And the Lentan tradition,

it can go south if you get legalistic about it. But if it's a tradition where we're like,

okay, this is a, this is 40 days. That's a good amount of time, six weeks, give or take a little bit, where we're going to pour into the good things in life, the best things in life, God's Word, and how to apply it to our daily lives. And we're here to help you try to do that in this podcast. That's the whole goal. That's the point and the purpose. So,

what do you say? Are you guys ready? I'm ready. Without further ado, then let's hear some

...