Talk to us a little bit about how you kind of came to that understanding of the, the, the role that wealth can play but really through the lens of scripture in a life of faith

Yeah, as we know, God is a great physician.

And for me, the great physician has been both cardiologist and psychiatrist.

He's had to replace my heart of stone with his heart of flesh.

And I've had a lot of mental problems, as I would describe them.

Two of my big ones were trying to find meaning in work, which we started to touch on.

But the second biggest problem I really wrestled with, Mark, was just God's perspective of money.

Uh, talk about how, uh, your prayer life, if you would be so, uh, so vulnerable and the importance of that in helping keep those, those circles sort of in a proper balance.

Yeah.

Um, uh, He's had to replace my heart of stone with, uh, His heart of flesh, and I've had a lot of mental problems, as I would describe them.

Um, two of my big ones were trying to find meaning in work, which we started to touch on.

But the second biggest problem I really wrestled with, Mark, was just God's perspective of money.

And, um, uh, I was just thinking about life and money all wrong.

And, um, it really came to a head as my wife and I were building a, you know, a nice house on a golf course.

We lived up in the Seattle area at the time.

Hmm

And just practically speaking, what does that look like? What does it look like to abide in the midst of the hecticness and the hurly-burliness with lots of different competing obligations and duties?

My understanding and probably my practice of abiding has evolved dramatically.

I think it starts as an aspiration, or for me, it actually started as anathema.

I mean, when Jesus says, apart from me, you can do nothing.

I said, nothing, really? And I said, no, surely I have some talent.

I can do something.

But it used to be something that I tried to avoid, and now it's something that I try to adhere to.

Can you talk about the things you've learned about navigating conflicts, really hard ones, in a redemptive way?

But anything you want to say about stewardship before I pull up the quotes?

I'd say next to my struggle to find meaning in work, my... my struggle to understand stewardship was the second largest struggle of my intellectual life.

And it's really important to get this right.

And it started with money.

I had this kind of unreconciled view of money.

And I had to go through really a whole process of God unraveling my previous understanding and replacing it with his own.

And out of that really came what you've come to understand deeply, Eric, and that is that nothing is ours.

That's the one I'm talking about.

Talk to me a little bit about that.

Yeah, you know, we are made for relationships.

We are made in the image of God, and God is in relationship with the three members of the Trinity.

So it's literally in our nature.

And I think we often, or the world, would have us view relationships instrumentally.

You know, what can I get out of this relationship? What will this relationship do to advance my own purposes? And God, I think, thinks about it exactly the opposite, that we are made for relationships and really the end state of the pinnacle of our being is relationship that ultimately comes into union with Him.

I mean, that is the end state of our faith is as we're emptied of ourselves and filled with Him that we come into union with Him.

Talk about that for a little bit.