Julie Lyles Carr welcomes Brent Crowe to the podcast, as he shares insight on how the continuing pandemic both impacts and creates a fresh page for today’s generation.
Interview Links:
Find Brent Online: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
Get his book: 10 Steps To Your Best Life
Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr: You’re listening to the AllMomDoes podcast where you’ll find encouragement, information, and inspiration for the life you’re living, the kids you’re raising, the romance you’re loving, and the faith you’re growing. I’m your host, Julie Lyles Carr. Let’s jump into this week’s episode.
Are you looking for the formula, the recipe, that guaranteed thing, that’s going to let you lead your best life? Well, my guest today is probably going to take a little bit of issue with the way I just presented that. But Brent Crowe is on the podcast today. Welcome my friend. So glad to have you.
Brent Crowe: Thank you, Julie. Thanks so much for having me.
Julie Lyles Carr: Now I love for my listeners to get to know the people who are on the shows so they can hear about their lives and where they live and be able to kind of picture who this person is. Who’s talking to them. So tell listeners where you live, where you’re from. And you’ve got a really unique twist on some family dynamics it’s just come around to. So be sure and tell them about that. So give them all the details.
Brent Crowe: Yes. Ma’am. I live in Orlando, Florida. Correction, I have lived in Orlando, Florida for the last 17 years. Two years ago, my wife of 19, almost 20 years, decided to pull the pin on the grenade of our paradigm for living. And we moved out to the country. And when I say country, we, it takes 12 minutes to get to the end of our dirt roads. So, wow. She bought a property and so now we live out in cow country USA with cows and donkeys and chickens and ducks and our six kids. And so when we walked into the pandemic, we had three homemade kids, and thought, man, we’re moving into this phase of life or we’re about to have three teenagers. And here we go. And and then a friend of ours who is a lawyer in child advocacy, reached out to us to help us to see if we could help her connect with some families, because she had a sibling group that needed to be placed.
She sent that email to my amazing wife, Christina, instead of me. If she would have sent that email to me at, I sat in my inbox for about three weeks. And next thing I know we’re on our knees out somewhere on our property, praying, Lord is this what we’re supposed to do? And within a month they were in our home. And so we went from a three to six and the youngest being five when we adopted. And so I, I know you have more experience with this than, than I ever could, Julie, but I kinda, my theme right now is nothing’s gonna make you feel young, like getting a five-year-old in your forties and stuff.
So we’re trying to figure it out every day. We’re just one big kind of messy, fun family and, and, and this plugging away.
Julie Lyles Carr: Yeah. I mean, a lot of people went through a lot of significant change during the pandemic, but you really leveled up my friend and triplicate. This really fascinating. You know, Brent, you’re such a trusted voice for young people, for young people of faith, trying to navigate the world and figure some things out. I was thinking the other day with my twins who are 14 and then my sixth child; so the twins are number seven and eight, the, in the, my sixth child who is 18 and her name is journey. We were remarking on the percentage of time they have spent as pandemic kids. And the twins actually became teenagers in the, in the spring of the pandemic beginning.
And so they called themselves quarantine agers. And so what is really remarkable to me is when I think about, yes, it’s been a couple years at this point for us, and it still seems to be partying on. It’s a difference in terms of percentage of my life versus the percentage of life it is for my kids, versus the percentage of life it is for kids who are younger. I have a friend who had a baby two weeks into the pandemic and every time I’m with Lucy Francis, that little girl, she’s like this walking, starting to talk. Model of the pandemics go have been going on because you can see this whole little person who is emerged. How do you think it’s going to be impacting our young people today?
Everywhere, kids who are younger into our young adults. Because you know, one of my daughter, one of my sons and his wife got married two weeks prior to the pandemic and they spent their first couple of years, they’re still in it where their companies have them working remotely. They’ve been in this one bedroom apartment. I mean, they have had more together time, Brent than most couples who’ve been 12 years. I mean, they have been together day and night and all that they have is each other in some of those times where we’re quarantining or whatever. So what are some of the things that your seeing in terms of what impact this is going to have, and we’ll have carrying forward as we now are settling into the idea that this is an endemic, not just a pandemic,
Brent Crowe: Well you know, I think we gotta get rid of two or three things. Number one, I think we got to get rid of the myth that is, is as soon as 2022 gets here, everything’s going to be okay again. As I listened to people there’s this great anticipation for when this is all going to be over and quote unquote, we can get back to normal. If humanity has taught us anything in history, it’s been that we all suffer from short term memory loss. This isn’t over at the drop of a ball at midnight in New York. This is, this is we’re going to limp through this a little long. And so they’re number one. I think it’s really important to mention time. You know, my, my, my 12 year old, I have two 12 year old daughters and you know, that a very significant portion of their life has been spent in the pandemic. Like your 14 year old now, 14 year olds. They if life is a week, like if you’re, if your whole life was seven days, then about three fourths of their life or of one of the days of their life have been spent in pandemic. That’s that’s, they’ve known a lot more of that than, than the rest of us have.
So I think it’s important, number one, to realize that a younger generation is this is going to feel bigger to them because it is. Because it has consumed more of their time percentage-wise than the rest of us. But I do believe the pandemic is disrupt really disrupted three things, primarily. It’s disrupted our rhythms. When everybody says they want to get back to normal.
They’re not what they’re really saying is I just want a rhythm again. That makes sense to me. And so it’s disrupted our, you know, we used to have these rhythms. Life used to make sense to us, even if it was messy, it still made sense to. And this is a mess that’s very uncomfortable. It’s disrupted our relationships and that for a lot of reasons, not just, not just, not just health, but political and all the issues of polarization. This, and I won’t mention examples because Lord knows we don’t want those emails coming in, but, you know, however you look at on a multiplicity of levels, our relationships have been affected,
and our reasonings have been affected. I mean, people reason differently now. We reason based on the tribe that we agree with and that wasn’t. So prior to the pandemic, we, we, what that was, it was beginning and in an age of polarization, tribalism takes root more and more based on certain perspectives
and views. But it was accelerated through the pandemic and we’ve lost the art of extending grace to one another. And so, I say all that to say our, our rhythm, our relationships, and our reasoning and our reasons, this generation is going to have to rediscover what that is. They’re going to have to start with a blank. There’s no going backwards to rediscover go, okay, well let’s, let’s go back five years. No, no, no, no. We’re going to for them, because this has taken up so much time of their life, they’re going to have to start with a white board and they’re going to have to go, okay, here’s what a healthy rhythm looks like. Here’s what types of relationships I want to have and develop in my life. Here’s, here’s my perspective, my reasoning on the world around me. And so I really think that they’re going to have to start over in some ways. That’s going to be the biggest, the biggest impact.
Julie Lyles Carr: Let me ask you this, Brent, because in some ways the idea of this generation having to really start over sounds scary. In other ways, I know that when my husband and I were starting out and young adults, We were going to set the world on fire. Like we were going to come up with new ways to do new things. Now it didn’t feel as much of a compulsory moment, but it certainly felt like something that we were going to go in and discover new ways of reaching people for God. And new ways of looking at business development. And new ways of thinking and writing and creating.
And it wasn’t coming off of something like a pandemic. Now to have this blank slate again, in some ways can feel free in some ways can feel overwhelming, but isn’t necessarily a bad thing that we have a generation of people who are going to have to troubleshoot and come up with something completely fresh in the wake of all of this?
Brent Crowe: I don’t think it’s a bad thing. And I think particularly for this generation. I think, I’m part of the smallest probably generation that there was, you got the gen X-ers and then the millennials and then the gen Z or so I’m a gen X-er. So we were, the smallest generation were very cynical, probably too stoned to remember anything, but we had good music. Let’s be honest. We, that was when music was music and but you know this generation, I think is best equipped to handle something like the pandemic. And here’s why. What sociologists are teaching us is is that all the research being done on gender. And it’s my, the best way to remember who well, who is gen Z, they’re the Pixar generation.
They, their birth rate ear is 1995 to 2010, which means that they they’re the year of the first round of gen Z years was born the same year that the full link first full length computer animated film was created, toy story. And so that’s probably an easy way of remembering it, but it’s the starkest shift that we have had an, a generation to date. The gen Z years look at the millennials and go, you guys don’t make any sense to me. You know, a millennial wants 10 jobs on their resume. By the time they’re 30, they want to have all these eclectic experiences, but a gen Z or doesn’t. They want longevity. They want long-term commitment and they want to have a deep, rich experience. When they commit, they commit for the long haul. Now they’re slower to commit. But when they commit, they’re committing over the long haul. They’re also the most fiscally conservative generation that we have, rivaling even the boomers.
And so they they’re careful with their money. Now, you know, they, they are the most socially liberal generation that we have. But I do believe that they are they’re the cultural DNA of gen Z is designed to go, okay, I’m gonna figure out what the future needs, And I’m going to commit to it, realizing that if I don’t solve everything by tomorrow, that’s okay cause I’m not a millennial. It’s okay. I cause I’m committing over the long haul. And so I see a lot of upside you know, the apostle Paul used the phrase, the door of opportunity. The pandemic can be something that changes everything about your life in a negative way, or it can be a door of opportunity. And we’ve learned this the, in a beautiful way in our family. I mean, we tried to adopt years and years ago had every door shut in our face. We tried for three and a half years. And and then we said, okay, well maybe, you know how you rationalize your, you know, well, we’re Christian. So we rationalize, oh, well, you know, maybe the Lord was preparing us for something else.
Right. And but we had no idea that we were thinking we were going to adopt a child, but the Lord was going, then I’m going to do exceedingly abundantly more than you could ever ask or imagine. I got three in mind for you. And what year we’re going to try to do in three and a half years, I’m going to do in a month. And, you know, so where we were learning, we’ve learned that through firsthand experience that, that this thing can be, while there are some very negative, frustrating, difficult days, boy, there’s some great doors of opportunity for those who are willing to step through them. And I really believe gen Z we’ll see those who passionately follow Jesus and kind of have a gen Z mindset are going to see this as a door of opportunity.
Julie Lyles Carr: You know, that speaks to me about this idea of what’s happened to the rhythms of our life as we have allowed for, if you will, this, it to expand and yawn wider than we ever thought that it would. And we’ve created some new rhythms. And then I think in some ways, this generation, both speaking specifically to gen Z and then to our kids who are in that sort of next generation, who are going to be, I don’t know exactly we’re going to designate those who came into
their more sentient childhoods, if you will, during the pandemic and into their teenage heads during the pandemic. But I think there will be some really unique markers for that generation as well. And part of what I think is sort of beautiful to come out of this is when those rhythms show back up, those are things that we tend to value a little bit more. And at the same time, maybe we won’t be quite as beholden to them. I did have to laugh at myself Brent, because we watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade, obviously on Thanksgiving morning. We have a whole routine that happens during that, and it was great to see people back being able to watch the parade and I’m going to confess, kind of asking for a friend, what does it mean hypothetically, if when Santa Claus’s slay comes into screen on the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade and you find yourself tearing up and going there’s Santa, it was very emblematic to me of just how disruptive things have felt to where that moment, all of a sudden you’re like, oh wow.
You know, he’s back, type of thing. That was really interesting to me in terms of rhythm, but there’s also some real power when we can let go of our leaning on rhythm, so heavily. Part of what we’ve seen statistically, and these were some stats that came through in your press kit from your new book, 10 Steps To Your Best Life, 40% of adults say that they are currently struggling with mental health and substance abuse during this continuing situation. And 23% of younger adults say that they have some mental health care needs that are going unmet, that are real challenges for them. What are some things that you’re seeing in that way?
And do you find that a younger generation is more willing to say, Hey, I’m struggling and I need help? I mean, how do we come alongside if, if we’re the ones in that generation wrestling with it, or if we’re seeing those things in our kids, what do we do? How do we handle that?
Brent Crowe: Yeah. Well, I, you know, it’s a, it’s a great question because it’s a, that is a challenge that is only going to become more discussed. And it’s a challenge. That’s only when it come more challenging with time. You know, so many of the, the adults, which is another, some statistical analysis that we’ve seen is those adults. There seems to be a correlation between adults, young adults and older adults struggling with mental health issues, and self-medicating whether that be through alcohol or other means. Because liquor sales skyrocketed have skyrocketed through the pandemic. And, you know, there, there is this, this correlation of mental health challenges on the rise, but also self-medicating on the rise, which is, is, is never a good thing. I actually believed that if you’re, if you’re, you know, adulting wherever you are in that journey, that there’s a, you could learn, we all could learn from,
from a younger generation. And by that, I mean from gen Z’ers, from those who are in their teenage years, early twenties, who, who are much more open with mental health struggles. And much more honest and transparent about the implications of those struggles on their relationships and on their world. And, and so I, I think if anything, they’re they’re an incredible example of what it looks like to be gosh, a little vulnerable and your transparency, and your authenticity, to say that this is a very, very real struggle. Now, the answers to those struggles, a lot of people have a lot of different perspectives on counseling, and medication and all those things. I would just say this counseling is not for the sick. It’s also for people who want to stay healthy. And what this generation is showing us is just because you’re willing to go see a counselor it doesn’t mean that you’re just saying, well, I want to, I’m sick and I want to get, well, what you’re saying is you want to be healthy. And that those are two different messages. And I, I, I think you know, I of course I’m married to a counselor, so it might a little that impacts my view on counselor a little bit. But whether you agree with medicine or non-medicine, as a what, and all of that aside, we all need the right kind of counsel in our lives.
And I think gen Z is showing us with how the rates of them going to see counselors, versus other generations, that there is a desire for health and that desire is something to be praised and emulate. Not looked down upon. And so I think there’s something we can learn from them.
Julie Lyles Carr: Absolutely. One of the things that I do think about that’s interesting, and my kids have brought it up, I had the distinct privilege of having a grandmother who lived to be 102, and she was born in 1918 during the Spanish influenza pandemic. And then she passed not from COVID, but definitely in the, in the wake of COVID because she had been in a retirement living situation, very, very social, very sassy. And we were restricted access to her, you know, for basically until the end of her life.
And one of the things it was in, it’s really been fascinating to me to think of, is, this does feel so unprecedented. And how many times have we heard the word unprecedented in the last few months? And the word pivot, those two words, I’m going to just have to retire. I think my vocabulary, I know, I know I’m like doesn’t need to not be in my writing anymore. I need to stop saying those words. However, as much as we want to believe we’re special, and there are things about this situation, and about the generations that are grappling with this, that are special. We’re sort of special, like a lot of other generations and for my grandma, While she was concerned and had great sympathy and empathy for what was happening with the pandemic, she also was, I wouldn’t even call it jaded, Brent. It was more this sense of, yeah, these kinds of things happen. These are the things that happen, but there is a lot to be said for, we have faith in an eternal God. And she, she navigated it well, even though it costs her because of her age and her stage of life, it costs her a ton of freedom. It costs her access to us. It costs her in many, many ways. And I do think that the pandemic was complicit in when she did pass, because she was just frankly, so lonely. Yeah. But I look back at her example, my kids look back at her example, and there is this sense of going, okay, we do see, we may have a blank slate for what needs to happen now
for us, however, there is wisdom that is accessible there in generations who have faced things in the past. How do we open room for that? Acknowledging our own hurt and the challenge and the grief that this situation has brought. And yet at the same time, understand that we’re special, just like generations who’ve been special and they’ve made it through as well.
Brent Crowe: Isn’t it amazing that some people with some very significant scars trust more, not less than the sovereignty and sufficiency of God. And I, I love that your grandmother, she didn’t, she wasn’t, you know, down on the pandemic, but she wasn’t freaking out because of the pandemic. She was going, stuff happens. We live in a broken world. And I just, I, one of the great themes I think we see of saints, who live long lives, is that they’re, they’re on they’re undeterred in their view of God, based on circumstances and the ebb and flow of how things should or should not be. And I remember right after 911, I was, I was I was preaching at a church and of course the Sunday after 911 is a Sunday, that kind of goes down in the recent history of boy,
where were you on that Sunday? And I had no idea what I was doing. I was a young 20 something year old kid that had no right to be preaching in front of several hundred people at a church on a Sunday morning. But the pastor I was preaching for was stuck overseas because he couldn’t get back because of what had happened. And I remember calling a mentor of mine and I said, what do I do? What do I do? And he said, well, tell me what your message is. I went through the message. He said, your message is fine, but you need a visual. He goes, yeah, Stand in front of that room and say, Hey, I need everybody that fought in world war two to stand up right now.
And then they, and then he said, after they stand up, you’re going to have a bunch of people stand up. And he said, after that, they stand up, then have all the children in the room, stand up, say 10 and under. And have all those kids say, Hey, kids turn around and look at all these men and women who are standing. They are a living witness that we’ve been here before and we’re going to be okay. And he said that message is not as much for the kids as it is for the adults in the room. Right. And your grandmother is a, is a living witness of we’ve been here before and we’re going to be okay. So there’s no point in freaking out. Don’t let this thing determine who you are. At the same time, yes, it’s for real, and it is serious, but our scars only make us trust in God more now. And so I, I, I think that there’s a lot of wisdom to the friending and to having active relationships with people who have gone before you, I think you do this in three ways.
Maybe another way of saying it is how do you get wisdom in your life? And I think there’s three kinds of people you need to have wisdom in your life. One is people who are just a chapter or two ahead of you in your own story. I love what Henrietta Mears wrote in What’s The Bible All About years ago, she wrote in a section on Ecclesiastes that we all write the autobiography of our own souls. Always loved that phrase. So we’re all writing a story with our lives. God allows us to write our own autobiography. So get somebody in your life that’s just a little bit ahead of you in the story. There’s some wisdom to be found there. Get some people in your life who are towards the end of their. There’s a lot of wisdom to be found there.
I mean, I had a very, very close relationship with my grandmother who lived through the depression who was one of nine children. Her mother died in childbirth, was the ninth child. And my grandmother at the age of eight was thrown into an orphanage by an abusive father and never, no, never, he never came back. And she would have aged out, but at the age of 17 and a half, an older sister who got married, came back and got her out of the orphanage. And so you know, I was very, very close to her. Well, she shared something with me in the last two years of her life that she had never shared with anybody else other than one of her children and her husband.
And it was, she talked about what it was like the day that her mom. And what that experience was, she felt like. And so, but being in a relationship with her, like literally taking time to just sit with her and to listen and to ask questions and to, I mean, she would win when you could begin to read books on tablets, we got her a tablet.
She read 200 books that first year. And she just was an avid reader right up to her death and, and, and a student, all these different things. And, but she, she always had something to discuss. She was learning even as she was aging. And so she always had something to discuss. So I think there’s a wisdom there to getting people who are towards the end of their story.
And then there’s a third type of person that we need to get in our lives. And that is people who are dead. People who died and left something behind. One of the great traditions of you know, an era gone by is that people would keep diaries. And their diaries were kind of a record, hey, here’s what I, here’s what I did today. Here’s what I learned today. Here’s what I’m trying to learn in my life. And they would actually read their diaries to each other at times, because there was no such thing as TV or radio or any of those things. You couldn’t stream anything at that point, but you could, you could listen to each other’s ideas and discuss them. And those, those documents, those books, those whatever journals and all that’s been left behind. I know that sounds old fashioned. But if you want wisdom in your life, I, you know, you need somebody just ahead of you in the story, you need somebody who’s towards the end of their story, and you need to have an appetite for those who lived and died and left something behind. So I think that, man, I I’m a big fan of, of getting around people who have lived a little bit, have some scars, have something to say.
And are still trying to figure it out at the same time.
Julie Lyles Carr: Absolutely. And Brent, that to me brings up this idea that we have a responsibility wherever we are, in our age and in our generation, in terms of this season, we’ve been walking through as a people, to make sure we’re recording our experiences and the wisdom and the mistakes and the things that we’ve learned along the way so when this happens again, because it probably will, and when it does, we’re leaving some kind of mark we’re taking the responsibility because the reality is at this point, and I’ve talked about this with my kids several times, you know, this is our first pandemic too. We are having to walk out and lead in ways that we feel ill-equipped for. We feel like we haven’t had the experience to be able to do this. And yet there are going to be those who look back on what we did during these times, and they’re going to see cautionary tales, and they’re also going to see examples of leadership, and how to navigate what it takes to develop
perseverance. Which is really, to me, what a lot of this has been about is this is a living classroom, what it means to develop perseverance. I love that you bring up really being intentional to reach out to those who are a little further ahead in their story and those who are near the end of their story, and those who have passed and left record of their story, because there’s something that I’ve seen in our faith communities that I did not, I didn’t really recognize it,
first. I really thought we were being powerfully evangelistic, but I’m coming into a season of being concerned that in our desire to make things relevant and current and modern, and I love all that stuff, but we sideline a generation that potentially had a lot to say to us because we saw it as old-fashioned or not hip or not relevant. All of the things. How do we go about in our faith communities being more intentional to make it matter? The ideas, preferences, rhythms, wisdom, insight of generations that we typically don’t think of, quote, unquote marketing to. Now the irony being, we know that older generations are who you should market to in terms of just plain old business, because they’re the ones who hold the purse strings for the most part. But how do we make sure in our faith communities that we have a healthy representation? Of course, of diversity, of race, of ethnicity, of experience, but also generationally so that we’re not losing the wisdom that’s readily available to us, if we’re willing to look for it.
Brent Crowe: Yeah. Wow. That’s such a great question, Ms. Julie, Julia, I, because it is you’re hitting on something that is a without, and I’m not being critical, I’m not throwing shade, cause I don’t like it when people talk bad about the church, but you and I are both followers of Jesus and we care deeply about the local church. So I think it’s okay for us to say you’re hitting on a glaring weakness in most churches. We value what we celebrate, and we don’t seem to be celebrating those who our long in years and have followed Jesus longer than most of us have been alive. And there there’s there’s, there’s something very sad that.
I think we lose something about our, our, our, the history. We’re still Christianity, but maybe the historical Christianity. We don’t feel as historical when we’re following a paradigm of, well, let’s get together. We, the staging has to look this like this. Let’s play these four songs and the sermon has to be topical, and we’re going to have this series and it’s going to hit this button. And we got this audience.
You know, at some point we just need to go, you know, what, if it can’t be preached to every generation at any time in history, it’s not the gospel. And, and so there’s this, this really significant thing that I think would, would add a richness to our, our rhythm of, of, of church if we celebrated those who were living and loving Jesus, even in the, in the latter parts of their stories. And by celebrating them, we honor them. And that’s another, I think, lost art. A lot of times we, we honor talent. We honor growth. We honor progress in our churches. But do we honor those who have simply lived a long obedience in the same direction as Eugene Peterson wrote? And of course that phrase was, was taken from an, from an, from somebody in church history as well. But do, do who, how, who are we honoring? What are we honoring? And I’m not saying we shouldn’t honor talent or progress or growth or any of those. But man, we should also be honoring those who have, have lived and loved well. And then I think there’s this, there is something to memorializing, not in a idolatry kind of way, not in an icon kind of way, but to memorialize how people were used is a good thing. In fact, when when you remember in Exodus 17, when Joshua had to fight his first big battle, and he went down in the valley and fought the Amalekites, and Moses was up on the mountain, overlooking the valley, do it with intercessory, prayer, holding his hands towards heaven. He had Aaron on one side and her on the other side and you know, that great story. Well, when Joshua came back from the battle, when it was over, Moses did two things. He said, let’s write this down in a book. Now that wasn’t the Bible. It was a, it was just a book to remember.
And then the second thing he did was to memorialize the events. And now the Memorial couldn’t travel with them. The book could as the, as the, as the Israelites wandered, but, but they wanted to memorialize the events so that people would never forget as they pass through that that, that valley, that there was something significant that happened here and that the God of the universe still concerns himself among the affairs of human beings. And so when you memorialize how God has used for you, it is a way of honoring, but it’s also a way of pointing future generations to what God can do through his people.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. That’s part of what I love in the book that you have put together over the pandemic while you weren’t, you know, busy adopting three kids and things like that, going.
10 Steps To Your Best Life, but here’s here is the caveat on that, that I think is really important, because obviously there are things that we want to tell each other, and we want, when we think about our best life, but you connect all of it from the events of the pandemic, the unsettling that we have had going on, you connect what you call the new normal to the ancient wisdom of Jesus. And I think those are the things that we can really see that endure, like I was saying about my grandmother going, yeah, you know, these things happen. But here’s, what’s core. Here’s what’s foundational. What do you really hope that readers will get in a nutshell from exploring these 10 things that you point out about the wisdom of Christ and how it still speaks even into a today that feels like it’s a completely new human situation.
Brent Crowe: Right, right. Wow. Well, it does feel foreign. It may not have felt foreign to your 102 year old grandmother, but to the rest of the city does, I mean, it does. It’s a very foreign age that we live in. But I, I, I, what I simply tried to do was take this question what the best version of living that we could hope for, what would that look like now? And as we emerge out of this pandemic? And let’s just simply take that question to the feet of Jesus. And what I discovered is that the Lord in his infinite wisdom has offered us a paradigm of living that works in every age. That is not just theoretical, but hyper practical. It’s amazing. 90% of what Jesus said were words of application. Everybody goes well, the, you know, the apostle Paul is great theologian, 50% of what Paul said, words of application. The Bible is so practical. And so Jesus actually gives us an ethic of living. A paradigm of living that works as we navigate a very difficult foreign feeling,
times and circumstances. So that, that really, you know, miss Julie’s my hope is that, is that, that, that people would read this and go it’s my best life is not about oppose for a social media post. No, no, there there’s something very rich and, and very meaningful filled about my best life. And it wasn’t dreamed of by anybody other than God, himself. And it’s, it’s probably less cluttered than what I would think of. It’s much more focused and, and fulfilling and, and it’s incredibly sacred. It’s it’s a paradigm that has, Jesus’s the purpose and Jesus’s teachings as the process, and Jesus’s promise as the product. And so it’s a, that’s what I’m hoping is that people would see this paradigm for living, in a foreign time for a foreign that works all times for all.
Julie Lyles Carr: Well, Brent, it’s just been a delight to have you on, and I want to encourage our listeners to go and check out 10 Steps To Your Best Life, connecting the new normal to the ancient wisdom of Jesus. And Brent, where can listeners connect with you on social media, all the things. And I got to tell you, this guy has a doctorate in philosophy,. He’s got two master’s degrees in divinity and master of arts and ethics. He’s got a wife, who’s a counselor. Like he’s got lots of great things to say, and to help you, particularly in such a weird time, because the pandemic’s not new anymore and it’s not over. So where do we go with that? So, Brent, where can listeners connect with you and find out more?
Brent Crowe: Yes, ma’am. Well on social media, my handles are Brent A Crowe, @brentacrowe. Not @brentcrowe, because I was late to the social media bandwagon. At a middle school event, some middle-schooler took Brent Crowe and decided to post about teenage mutant ninja turtles on my behalf.
But there you go. So I’m just Brent A Crowe.
Julie Lyles Carr: Well, we’ll get that in the show notes where listeners can find you Brant again, thanks so much for your time today, helping us navigate some really weird times and doing it both with a fresh slate and asking God for innovation, but also with an eye to the ancient wisdom that is readily available for us to go back and to get grounded again. Brent, thanks so much.
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