Friends, welcome to the Ransom TARP Podcast. I'm John Eldridge and happy summer to you. Hope you are enjoying these summer months.

We did a conference back in March called the Restoration of the Heart, where

Dan Allender and I spent two days, basically sharing our combined 60 years of experience working with people to share what

we think is necessary for human hearts and human lives to be restored.

What we want to do with you in the next two podcasts is to share with you the opening session.

It's entitled Assumptions we are making and in this session Dan and I are laying out some of the basic

convictions we have about what is necessary for change.

We thought we would handle this session

by going back and forth and talking about some of the assumptions

that we are operating from and on as we move into the material.

Some of the things will say will be kind of foreshadowing

of where we're going.

And some of it is a sort of contextual that will give you sort of oh okay this is where

they're coming from this is kind of some of the core assumptions that that we're

making and so we thought that that would be probably the most

valuable place to start this morning. So, Dan. Well, the first assumption is one that at one level we could cover in about 10 seconds, and that is we are at war.

And if you need to be convinced that you live in a war and that you are at war, in one sense, all one would need to do is to tune in to one of the so-called debates and the acrimony, the polarization, the schism.

The fact is you can find that level of contempt and violence simply by checking on to the internet and listening to people interact about almost any topic.

And we will live in a world where... interact about almost any topic.

And we live in a world where road rage,

as it might have been 10 years ago, rare.

The reality is you can't ride on the roads without a sense of there is violence in the air.

...