Philemon, yeah,

Philemen, yeah.

Hey, everybody, it's Matt.

This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and thank you for hanging out with me. I know you have a bazillion things that you could be doing with your time, and I know there's a lot of internet out there, much more than there was when you and I started hanging out, however many years ago it was. And so it just, you know, it means more with every passing year that you would still want to slum it and pal around with me on the

internet. It really does mean a lot. Thank you for that. I don't know why I always feel compelled

to talk about castaway with Tom Hanks, but when I scan through the movies that have really

left a dent in my brain over the last, whatever that's been, 25 years, that one always comes

to mind. And it's not so much because of the island part of the movie. I'm spoiling this, by the way, it's an old movie. Hopefully, this is your warning if you don't know how a castaway ends and you don't know yet. There you go. I gave you the heads up. I probably should do that every time. At the end of the movie, Tom Hanks finishes everything after he gets off the island

and he's no longer a cast away who has been cast away. But now he's a dude who is back on track.

He delivered the packages, which were kind of the thing that was keeping him going. And he

reconnected with everybody and surprised them by coming back from the dead basically.

And now it's all done. What's left? And the final scene has Tom Hanks at a pair of dirt roads that

intersect each other, a crossroads out in the wilds of Texas or something like that.

And the movie ends with him thinking about his options. That's a powerful

image to me. I mean, Crossroads is a, you know, it's a metaphor for those moments in life where

there are a lot of options in front of you, but you can only pick one. And the one that you pick

is going to be at the expense of all the other directions you could have gone.

And crossroads additionally are the kind of thing that I think we reflect back on a lot as we age.

You can't help.

But go back to those moments and think about what might have been.

What if I'd pick this instead of that and gone this other direction? What would my life look like? Maybe that's a fruitful exercise.

Maybe it's not. I certainly have a few crossroads points that involve my own decision making.

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