All right, all right. Join the Journey family, friends, and guests. You're listening to Join the Journey podcast with your host, Emma, daughter.

Thanks for joining. This week, we are reading Acts 8, 26 through 40, and I am in the podcast studio with one of our Watermark Institute students. It's Ellie Higgins.

Hello, I'm excited. Ellie, welcome. Thank you. Really quick, just we don't do this in every episode, but tell us a little bit about you because I know you're not from here. That's true. I'm from Nebraska. I was born and raised there, went to college there, moved down here like a couple months ago to do the Institute. Give us maybe, I don't know, two fun facts about Nebraska.

Ooh.

Okay. I just think corn. Yeah, that's mostly it. I was a tour guide. Wait, really? Yes. Wait, you were a tour guide. I was a tour guide for the university. Oh, of Nebraska. And our mascot is the corn huskers. Yes. Of course. Of course.

So that would probably be my first fun fact.

And then my second fun fact is I don't think people realize how small the towns in Nebraska are.

So like our football stadium is the third largest city by population.

The stadium.

The stadium.

But it's not a city.

It's not a city. But it would be 90,000 people in one place would be the third largest city. Do you know what the largest city is in Nebraska? Omaha. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's dive into Axe. So, Ellie, in this passage and this story, we meet the Ethiopian eunuch. Yeah. What do we know about him? Yeah. So as we're diving into this, there are kind of three parts of his identity that really stand out. The first one is that he's Ethiopian. He's from Ethiopia, which at the time would have been viewed by the Greeks and the Romans, as the ends of the earth, which automatically makes us think of Acts 18. Yes.

He was black, meaning that his acceptance of the gospel was the gospel reaching a new ethnicity.

Like, this is the first time we see someone of that ethnicity in Scripture accepting the

gospel, which is a huge deal.

Huge.

And then in the Jewish worldview, being from Ethiopia, he would have embodied the distant

south. And so in the Jewish

worldview, he was just kind of considered utterly other. And that's kind of this recurring theme

that we'll see in his identities is he is very much marked as being other. The next thing we

know about him is that he's a god fear. So he traveled all the way to Jerusalem to worship.

He's reading from the scroll of Isaiah, which would have been super expensive to purchase.

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