The Trap of Perfectionism • Beyond The Sermon

Well, hello and welcome to beyond the Sermon, a Bethany podcast, where we have the privilege of digging deeper into our Sunday messages. I'm Tammy Delau, and today I am joined with Pastor David Baxley and Pastor Steve Musto. And the guy who's talking this Sunday is not here. Right. So let's do a podcast.

Yeah. He's like, I'm doing the sermon, and here you guys do a podcast about it. There you go. Real easy. Thanks for that.

Yes. So let's jump in because we have a lot to talk about. Well, I hope so. Maybe somewhere in the Bible.

All right, so we continue on in our series Under Construction. And last week we had Tyler talk, and he wisdom and compassion, which I loved. His lesson for the lives. God doesn't ask us to determine who is worthy of our compassion. He asks us to remember who showed you compassion first.

If that is the foundation, the whole ship changes. And so it was a challenging and a good sermon. Yeah. And it doesn't matter then whether I have a lot or a little. And my whole focus is on Christ has done this for me.

How can I do for others? Instead of, Christ has done this for me. Now how do I get more from other people? And it's about turning ourselves inside out and giving to others. And remembering is just so important.

And the beauty of taking communion and remembering what Christ does for us helps us to be compassionate to others. So I thought it was a great week. So this week, Chase is going to be talking about wisdom and work. So can I just go ahead and start with the verse? Yeah, go ahead.

Does that feel okay? It's really long. Are you ready? Okay. So it is Proverbs 13, 4.

The slacker craves, yet has nothing, but the diligent is fully satisfied. So he's going to be talking to us about work. And I know in his message he's gonna outline three common lenses that were raised with either work as a path to get wealthy, work as a source of personal worth, are working as a way to leave a legacy. And I think we all have a bent where when we are working. So I think that would be fun for us to talk about.

Either what did you learn growing up or what bent do you have? Naturally. Yeah, let's just describe these really briefly. So the first one, work is a pathway to wealth. This is all about the person who work is all about providing for you and providing for your family and more things and new things and things in addition to these things.

And so it's accumulating all this. Sometimes it's about accumulating for retirement or something else. There's a countdown clock of how long do I have to work? And then I can stop working. And it's not about the work itself.

It's not necessarily about helping other people. It's not about engaging with people in the office. It's not about any of those things. It's about the paycheck, putting money in the bank to do the. To do the things.

Yeah. And we've probably all had jobs where that was the. I have had jobs where that was absolutely the case. I felt like I am doing this at this point as a teenager or something. Yeah.

Because I'm trying to put. Buy a car probably. Yeah. Put gas in the. I was not a dishwasher at Red Lobster because I found joy.

Okay. And job I really wanted. I wanted money for the weekend. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. So. And then. So the second one, Personal worth It is more about I do this job because it fills something up in me. Interestingly, that is an angle of work that a lot of pastors and those who work in church and ministry and whatever get into.

We've all known people who are in it not necessarily because it's a calling on their lives, but because it does something really cool for them and they probably should not be in the position they are for that reason. They're looking for significance. Yeah. And that's why when they lose. And I have struggled with this, when you lose your job or when you step away from ministry for a while, you have this identity crisis.

Who in the world am I? My whole identity was wrapped up in being Pastor Steve. And then what happens when I'm not Pastor Steve anymore and I'm just a schmo who's doing what everybody else is doing.

That was my sense. And that has to be knocked out of you a little bit. And then leaving a legacy. So that third one is also about significance, but it's more about my name will live on and who is the goat. I'm going to be the goat of this position.

The greatest of all time, to do this or leave something that cannot be torn down or whatever. And we know folks like that, too. So would you say all three of those reasons are wrong, then? Interesting.

I think I might say that those having any of those things having our focus, I think that's what we're going to see in the message. Any of those having our focus, our heart, our motivation. Yeah. It's not that being encouraged and seeing value in something we do is wrong or, hey, I've got a Good paycheck, I can take care of my family is wrong. But the focus of those things, the mission, being those things themselves.

Well, I mean, I think they ultimately poison us all in little different ways in our own hearts. Yeah. So if, if they are the motive for why you're working, there is a danger in all of those things. I personally, I think we often vacillate between these on any given day, week, whatever, and we might find ourselves in moments where this is the case, even doing this job. There are days when I'm like, we all have these days.

But there are days when I, not us, not you guys. Yeah, no, you guys are the exception. Let's rewind the tape to 10 minutes ago before the podcast started.

Steve. But we all have this sense of I responsibility. I show. I'm showing up today because people are counting on me. I'm showing up today because this is my job and I get paid to do this and I have to be there for this thing.

What is my responsibility? And it is fun to see light bulb moments in the ministry where people are catching God. Like that is exciting. But our motives are not 100% pure all the time, never calling. I mean, if I'm just honest, I think that's the reality of our sinful nature.

I think it's actually really important to say my motives are probably never pure because that's the reality of my sinful nature. God already knows this about me. Like, I think I'm. I hurt myself when I try to think, oh, today was a really pure motive. Tomorrow might be rough.

So I'm going to try and stay focused or whatever it might be and just recognize this is a constant battle and. But God knows that constant battle. He's not looking at our perfection. I think he actually is more he's looking for us to admit this is a battle and to keep going back to him with that so that we don't let the, the wrong things become our focus. And if we were to choose because we have a leaning, maybe that second one, personal worth.

For me, the Lord is revealing. I am not a 60 year old woman who has not done the work, has not looked at childhood stuff, has not prayed, has not done the things. But the Lord has shown me in the last few weeks that there's still a part of me that works, whether it's here or it's with my friends or at home to prove that I belong. There's still a lie that I can believe and my work. You're right, it's not always.

It's not always pure. And that's. It's been a challenging couple of weeks seeing. Seeing those things. But I'm so thankful that God reveals those secrets of our hearts that we don't march on into our 8th and 9th and 10th decade and don't see that we're still spinning the plates that Jesus is enough.

I think there's a subtleness that I've seen in my life, and I think even in a little bit in my family of origin was we wouldn't have said personal worth, but we would just. We would often talk about how busy we were as a way of affirming our value or importance. And so that was my. My wife picked up on that after we got married. And it was really insightful because I would talk about my business, like, how's life going?

Well, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. And she was really insightful. She's like, sounds like you're trying to prove that you're important. You're trying to prove you have a lot going on. Like, almost like everyone's ranking their busyness next to each other to see who is being the most productive and who is bringing the most value to the world around them.

It sneaks in with busyness. It really does. Like, I didn't. You know, I don't know if I would have understood how I was making my worth in my busyness. I now pick up on that narrative and how easy that begins to leave my mouth.

I even look at my calendar and someone will say, wow, your calendar is really full this week. And instead of saying, wow, I need to really balance this out and be more healthy. I'm thinking, oh, good, I'm doing a lot of things. And it's really easy to fall into that trap now. God is happy with me.

Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Performance mindset. Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah.

This. It's. That's tricky. And it's always tricky. And.

And I think we do that particularly around boss or whatever I like. I want the elder board to know that I'm working hard. I want them to know that I'm, you know, doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't want him to be like, you know, where's Steve? And he's on day four.

He hasn't shown up to work. No one can get a hold of him. You know, like, I don't want that to be right. Yeah. Legacy.

I want them say, like, whoa, you know, he's working Hard. And I think we all want that. But the way we do, the way we go about that is by filling up our calendars. Yes. And the way we talk about it, I think that's where it was for me, is I would find the narrative that best enforced that.

Yeah. So that kind of goes on to our second point. Our labor does matter, I mean, because we're representatives of God. And so how does image bearing play into this as we approach the jobs that we have at hand? We kind of are going back to the garden, going back to Genesis, as we're looking at work for those of us who are followers of Christ, we always represent Jesus in everything we do.

So we want to make sure that we're representing him well. But there's. We are image bearers of God. We were created in the. In the image of God.

And so even as we work, you know, God works. God works. God. I look, the story of creation is God setting about to do something, putting things together and, you know, work. And that's why there's a day of rest.

Not because he's tired, but to take a step back and to serve as a model for all of us and to observe the excellence of his creation and enjoy his creation. And so we have to think about that in terms of if we are going back to your point, David, if work is always the thing and we're getting our value and whatever from that. When is the time when we actually enjoy that which we are doing? When is the time when we can sit back? I got to do it this weekend.

I got to come to Kathy and I came to a service and worshiped together. And there are moments where we get to come in and see just the fruit of ministry and say, I don't have to do anything here. I don't have to say anything. I don't have to be thinking about. I got to do this and connect with this person and whatever.

I can just be an observer in the room. And that for me, is a moment of clarity and it's a moment of enjoyment. Good. I think the phrase image bearer reminds me of two things. One, if we come back to value is.

My value is who I made by, not what I do for him initially. Yeah. Like that initial love and that value. I bear his image as one of his kids, and he just loves me because of that. And I do want to try to earn.

You know, we were talking about that earlier. I will instinctively want to earn that love approval, probably because I know where I screw up. And so I've tried To make up for it by trying to earn that God. And I forget. I forget that love is centered on that image.

But the other piece is. And this I think I need to remind myself of this is as an image bearer, the work that God accomplishes is his work through me, not David's work. And it's really easy to want to put a look what I did. And, you know, I put that. And part of the mission is still to recognize I may be doing the labor, but the labor is empowered by God.

And if it's not God doing it through me, it is meaningless. It doesn't have value because it's David and it's not the Creator himself doing that. So if we go to that last path, leaving a legacy, if we are working and we're image bearers, the legacy that we want to leave is people are looking at Jesus. Okay, yeah, ultimately, okay, so then if we serve this perfect holy God, it's easy to let perfectionism sneak in there and think that we have to do everything perfect. So how do we balance?

Does that make sense at all, guys? Just the whole. You know, one thing that's helped me with that is. That's helped me let go of that is recognizing I'm not responsible for the result. I'm responsible to be faithful in whatever is in front of me to the best of my ability to do what we're doing.

And God's responsible for what happens as a result of that. And that helps me release the perfectionism. Because I think part of perfectionism, if I don't get it right, it won't be right. If I don't do it the way it should be done, it screws everything up. It stops what should happen.

And it's so centered on me. But as Christians, we easily say we're doing it because it's for God's glory, but we're not trusting God to be able to glorify himself through it. We trust ourselves to be the one that manufactures that glory for him. And I don't know. I don't know if that makes sense.

It's something that I have to do in my mind a lot is. That's as far as I can go. But I've done everything I could do. I can say to God, I've done what you've asked me to do in that, and I did it as well as I could or as in that moment, and to release it to you. And that's helped for me, I think, where I would have been much more uptight about a lot of those things in my first 10 years of ministry to release.

Because it's not about what I can do. I don't know. I don't know. Does that make sense, how I'm articulating that? Yeah, I think so.

We. We have overlearned the word perfection and perfectionist. We have people who just kind of giggle and say, well, you know, I'm a perfectionist.

You know. You know, what's. I don't know any of them. Yeah. Hands.

Well, I don't know that everybody who thinks they're a perfectionist is actually a perfectionist. I think they're persnickety about certain things. They're neat freaks. Well, that doesn't make you a perfectionist. It makes you weird about dirt and wanting things orderly and, you know, whatever.

That's fine. Are you calling me weird? Yes, you are weird to me in your own wonderful. I feel like we've said this to your face and behind your back. All right.

But we all have these areas.

There's a word that we talk about a lot around here, and that's excellence. And the word excellence is a hard word for me. It's kind of a dirty word for you. Yeah, it's been weaponized against me. I think it was for years.

In the early part of ministry, Excellence was weaponized. So now, with the benefit of time, I can look back and see what happened. Church in general had gotten kind of lazy and just not very good. The quality of church when I was growing up in the late 70s and early 80s and whatever was just not very good. The messages were kind of lazy.

The music guy showed up that morning and picked a couple of hymns that we were going to sing. Just the whole thing felt thrown together. I remember going to a conference once, and one of the major pastors of his day who led this movement towards excellence, talked about being on vacation and going into a church where the sound guy took the cord, turned on all the amplifiers, took the cord, took the microphone, and plugged them in. And when you do that and the sound is up, there's this big thumb that happens. He's like.

And every time we went to this church, it was the same thing. He goes. And I'm just thinking to myself, just. Just turn the volume down and then plug it in. Just do that.

And so it's not this big boom in the room that makes everybody. And nobody thought about it, and it felt that way. And so sermons were sloppy and theology was sloppy and everything else. And so there was this movement in the mid to late 80s that was a push towards, hey, let's do everything. This is for God.

Let's do everything a little bit better. And where the pendulum swung was to a performance driven thing where it's not pleasing to God unless it's done with absolute precision and perfection. So I learned this. It's still a part of me. I have a hard time pushing it out of me.

I believe that we are to do things excellently. I work really, really hard. I will labor over and pray over and spend inordinate amounts of time over a word, crafting a word in a sentence. Like, I don't want to use this word. I want to use this word.

And I will spend really hours on that word. Is there any other word that I can use here that is a level sometimes that I go, am I being ridiculous about this? But I believe that I'm handling the word of God, that we're supposed to do things. We're serving a God who's perfect. Yes, let's do things, actually.

You want to give him your best. Yes. But there's a point where that becomes ludicrous and a God in and of itself, where the thing, the event is more important than what you're getting out of it. So how does someone know when you have crossed a line, you're not loving your God, and now you're behaving unhealthily. How does Steve Musto know that?

How does David Baxley know that? I think I'd go back to what I was maybe trying to articulate earlier. It's an internal thing. But what am I trusting in that it's gonna be effective? Am I trusting in that word if I don't get that word right?

Not to pick on what you're doing here. Cause I know you're hard behind that. If I don't get that word right, then the spirit of God won't convict somebody. How much am I trusting in all of this to accomplish a kingdom? Purpose versus God?

I'm bringing, I'm gonna, I'm gonna spend time, I'm gonna be in prayer. I'm gonna be on this. And, and, and, and I've seen you do this and then you get on stage, but then you release it. You really do release it. And if you stumble, you trust God with that.

Stumble. And if you miss it, you're like, God, I did what I could and now I release it to you. I think if you follow up the next day and it's like, now someone won't get saved. You know, like, like just this type of Thing, I think that's when you've said, it's about what I am doing more than what the spirit of God is doing. It's so hard to catch because you can spiritualize all of those things.

I think we can, as we can do with any of our work that we're doing. Yeah. And I think it's hard for you guys because I. I know, because I watch you and you try so hard, and you're thinking about this person in the room who maybe doesn't know the Lord, this person who's struggling with cancer, this person whose husband struggles with. I know you care so deeply, but I've learned this week you guys can craft and do all you think all you want to do. And people hear what they want to hear sometimes, no matter how hard the two of you work.

Because I've seen you both work really hard, and I've seen people take away things, and I'm like, I am sure that is not what our pastor was saying. One of my favorite lines from Simon and Grace Garfunkel still, a man hears what he wants to hear, and he disregards the rest. And that is absolutely part of our human nature. Yep. You know, the other side of excellence, though, is, you know, we've talked about this before.

We have, like, almost opposite stories when it comes to this word. Excellence is. I feel like I have been in sloppy church, where the condemnation of excellence became a spiritual narrative. Yeah. And I remember one time I was.

I was leading a ministry, and I was. I was teaching that week, and I. And I was in the worship guy was leading beforehand, and. And they had a whole band and everything. And I realized he was having his own quiet time on stage.

He hadn't prepped, he hadn't prayed through the songs. He hadn't invested even spiritually to be prepared for that moment. And so on stage. And then he spiritualized that to say, listen, we don't need to prep, and we don't need to prepare, and we don't need to practice. We're just going to let the spirit do his thing.

And. And I went up to him afterwards. I said, you didn't fail to just prepare. You failed by dismissing everybody in the room that God asked you, the minister, for the sake of what you wanted in that moment. Yeah.

What made you. And so I, I, I, as I was in that, in ministry worlds, I feel like I had to say, we need to be better. We. We need excellence. I found myself saying, we.

We should be striving to prepare. We should be striving to study, we should be striving to practice. We should be striving to think through what's going to happen throughout the flow of the service because we overly sp. Not caring about the details. And I think that puts a stumbling block in the, in lives of people we're ministering to on the mission that God's put us on.

So was that received or did you get pushback for that? I think you get pushback on both sides. Yes, I would have said it just like, you know, you just, you're rubbing, you end up rubbing something the wrong way. And because behind both of those, I think behind the need for everything to be perfect, it's ego. But I think behind the need to have to say I don't need it to be perfect is ego.

Like, like we can get like. So over here we're like, I'm afraid of failure, so I'm just not going to try. And we actually can do that to God. I'm afraid of failing God, so I'm just not going to try. And we almost go with Paul's warning so that grace will abound and we dismiss really bringing God spiritually all that we can to him and then releasing the rest of him.

I think for me with my perfectionism is especially with children. So much of my life has been raising children. It's just easier to do it yourself. And if you do it yourself, you know it's going to be done the way that you want it. But if I would have done that with my children, I was always going to make a bed better than a five year old.

But if I would have lived in that reality, they would have never learned to make a bed. You guys as pastors were like, well no one's going to do it as good as I do. No one else would learn to preach, no one else would learn to do anything else. And so perfectionism can be so dangerous. If we're only putting out the best product, then no one under here gets to learn and raise up.

And that's a problem. I think my bent, David, is like the opposite of the person you're describing. My thing is to over prepare, be overly ready. That that's where worth and value and everything comes from. And not allowing.

I mean there have been moments when God has said I'm not. It's Saturday. Yes, it is Saturday night at 8:30. And this concept is not clear in your mind. You have to preach it in 12 hours and it's not clear in your mind.

Do you trust me? Yeah. Do you trust Me to walk up there and have it be clear enough for you to explain. And the answer often is no, no, I want it right now. I want it now.

I don't want to because I know I'm not going to sleep really well and I'm going to be weird in the morning and all of those things. And we see both extremes. Certainly in ministry world, you see both extremes. Tammy, you ask, how do you battle against this? Or how do you know this?

When it's excellence in the way I think, but when the result is not what we want, that's good, and we walk away disappointed, even though we have committed it to the Lord. If you've not committed it to the Lord, then the result is going to be what it's going to be. But if you have prayed over this, and this is an offering to you, God, here you go. My story about this, I was praying once before service. This was at another church, and I was praying, and I did the same prayer every Sunday.

And I would just say, jesus, this whole service belongs to you. It is yours to do with what you want. And clear as can be, Jesus said into my mind. The impression that I got from, I believe was from the Lord was, can I mess it up? Yes.

And it was so terrifying to me. That thought entering my head was so terrifying to me. I was like, well, wait a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The service went off without a hitch.

That was not the point. The point was I realized if we're really saying this is for the Lord, then all of the things that most matter to me, the whole point of it, the result being what I want it to be, I need to release and say, yeah, it's not going to be my result, then it's going to be somebody else's. You guys know, nothing drives me battier than when I am presenting the gospel. And I know there are people in the room who need to hear the gospel, and there's a distraction, and no one takes care of the distract. The distraction just continues and continues and continues and continues.

And I feel I want to tear my hair out. I'm like, wait a second. But there are people in here who need Jesus. And the gospel is being hijacked by this moment, and people are looking around, and the people who are looking around are the people who most need to hear. This is driving me crazy.

And in my spirit, in that moment, I have to turn all of that off and say, this is not mine. And so if Jesus wants to mess up my plans, they're just my plans. And wants to do something else entirely, I've got to let him do that. And that is a lesson that I continually learn most weeks around here. And just to kind of bring it back to our first thing, that way of thinking, whether it's ministry, how we go into our workplace, how we go to our job, like, I think that's what helps protect us from the wealth, emphasis, like, God, you'll provide for my needs.

I'm just gonna go and do what you've provided for me to do and trust you to provide with what I need for my family. God, I'm gonna go and do this and just ask that you would use me today for your glory. And I don't care whether I see the result of it or not, you know, and, you know, the legacy piece goes away and the value because we keep returning to God providing and God doing. But it's, it's almost gotta be a daily prayer because it's, it's too hard to not run after those. It's the, it's the, it's probably what makes work and our tasks and whatever it is, ministries, whatever it is so complicated is I have to keep the reason I work, the reason I exist, the reason I do these things coming back to a bigger mission for God's kingdom.

And that's just, that's just hard. It's so easy to lose focus of that in our ministry. I, I, we've all had the experience of looking at our calendar in the morning and saying, okay, here's my day. And then we get here and something happens and it's that old, you know, God, I would be successful in ministry if it weren't for all the people. There's a crisis or somebody needs us or whatever.

And all the things that we were supposed to get done that day don't get done. And we have to be able and willing, as Jesus did, to set aside our agenda. I was actually praying this this morning as I was on my way in and just remembering Jesus being in grief from the death of John the Baptist, hearing about John the Baptist and wanting to reflect on that and being in grief and being tired and gets in the boat and goes to the other side of the lake to retreat. And there's a crowd waiting for him. And he sees them and he realizes they're harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.

And he says, well, there goes my retreat. There goes my calendar agenda for the day. There goes the things I was planning on doing. I'm going to set those aside to do the work of My heavenly Father, by his grace, God empowered Jesus to do those things. He still had a human body.

He still was exhausted. He still needed to sleep, he still needed to eat. But he was able to reach down and find that little place within himself that was like, okay, just a little bit more energy, just a little bit more power, just a little bit more. And he was able to do that. And I think for all of us, that's a.

That's where we live day to day. I don't have the strength. I don't want to do this today. I don't have the strength to do this today. I have things on my calendar all the time.

Like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. I want that to cancel. I don't want that to happen. I want this person not to show up to work today.

You know, like, whatever it is. Oh, man, you've never had that? You've never had that feeling? No. God is asking me to do some things this week that I do not want to do.

And I was reminded today that when I see my weakness, it's time for me to pray like Paul and to ask for the spiritual power to do what God is wanting me to do. And that's actually a blessing in some ways when I see my weakness. Okay, so let's talk about work, because I think there are some who believe that Adam and Eve just really messed it up in the garden, and we would all be on a cruise if. If there wasn't sin that entered this world. And so that's not true, is it?

They were playing all day, frolicking. Yeah, they were just. Yeah. You know, looking at the clouds and seeing rabbits and all the things. But that's not true.

Work was always a part of God's plan for us. Yeah, it's a garden. It's a working. It's a working garden. I mean, God set the standard for this in work and in creation.

So where this comes from is Genesis 3 and Genesis 4 and the fall and then the consequences of the fall, where specifically what God says is that work is going to be going to turn into something. There's going to be aspects of work that are toil, and that's some of the things that we describe.

I love going to work. I love most days. I love what I do. Certainly if I could write my own job description, there are parts that I would do and there are parts that I would give to somebody else. But no matter what, even if I wrote my own job description, even if I only did the things I want to do.

There are still times when some of that is going to be toil, difficult, slog, challenge. I don't know what to do. Heavy, heavy. And that is part of the burden and the consequence of sin. You know, I think we, again, we think of work as the thing we have to do to get to rest.

Even post fall, we see God as he talks about the things, the work. It's almost like this is the mission from me for how you care for your family, the mission for me, how you cultivate there, the mission for me from me how you meet each other's needs. And I. I think we. We're so preoccupied because we. With rest and.

And not rest in the sense of sitting with God, rest in the sense of vacation and doing what I want to do for myself, that we miss the great joy that God actually gets from watching us work. If it's on mission for him. When that perspective is, hey, I'm going to this, this job, whatever it is, we're in the office or factory, whatever it is, it is. It is a mission that God has put me on for his kingdom. God, help me see your mission today.

Help me see, like as Jesus prayed, how your kingdom can come in what I'm doing. But if I only see it as this thing I gotta go do until I can go home or the working for the weekend, I think it's always gonna be unsatisfying because we're missing the most satisfying part about labor pre and post fall is the fact that this is something God has created us to do for him. And how do you find joy in heart or even a job you love if we miss the Jesus part of that? Yeah. I mean, there's all the prep for him and with him and through him, like, work has all of those elements, you know.

Wow. So I'm feeling a little bit of sadness, my friend, because this is the last time that the three of us will sit like this. And I have to confess, the first time I was on, I was so afraid and I joke that it is not fun to age in front of a camera. But talking with my two brothers about the things of the Lord and getting to pick your brain and doing this, the three of us brings so much joy. And I'm gonna miss you.

Yeah. This has just been such a fun journey to be able to do this aspect of the journey. This part of the journey with you has been really fun. Not just the podcast that's just part of it, but all of the. Everything we do around Bethany.

And so it is not going to be the same. It is going to be a completely different thing. We're going to have to create a completely different thing. I remember when we left our church in South Carolina, I remember someone asking me the question, how about this person? Can they take over for you?

Are they going to be? And I said, absolutely not. That's not the right person. And it was later on that I realized, oh, I was right about that, that they couldn't take over for me, but they stepped into my role and they did something completely different. And so it's never going to be the same as it was when David was here.

Somebody's going to step into the role and do it completely differently, and it's going to be. That's how God designed it to happen. Yeah. But I also. Here's the other great part.

I've told you this. I'm so excited that you get to go to a new place and have everybody fall in love with you and go, oh, my goodness, this is just amazing. How did we get this guy? This is incredible. So I'm looking forward to this.

Forward to that. I've already had that conversation with the senior pastor at your church where it's like, he's like, what? Are you sure you want to do this? Like, it feels like we're getting the better part of the deal. I said, no, you absolutely are getting the better part of this deal.

I. I'm so excited for you. I. Well, I will. Well, you know, one of my favorite things about the podcast is that we get to have the conversations that I know all of us love to have, and we don't often have time for. Right.

And so just for all those that get to watch this week in, week out, as all the other people come in, it's so real and it's so fun to be able to. To just. We're friends, getting to talk about Jesus, wrestle through things. I will. I will miss doing that.

Not just in here, but the. What God's been able to do through that all. All around the church. Well, thank you. I know I have learned so much being your friend and your sister, and I let myself feel real, feels the.

The day that you made the announcement and I was ugly crying in the back of the ch. Anyone who is watching at the same time, I am so excited for you. And I know that this church is going to be blessed and. Yeah. And I know God will be faithful to us here at Bethany, too.

So. It's bittersweet, but it's exciting. Man. I didn't know we were going to talk about all this. I'm getting all choked up.

I love you guys. Love you, too, man. Yeah. So thank you. Have a great week, guys.

Bye. Bye, Sam.