Psalm 104, 23, 27.

In the Christian standard Bible say man goes out to his work and to his labor until evening.

How countless are your works, Lord, in wisdom you have made them all.

The earth is full of your creatures.

Here is the sea, vast and wide, teeming with creatures beyond number, living things both large and small.

There ships move about, and Leviathan which you formed to play.

There all of them wait for you to give them their food at the right time.

In this psalm, the psalmist is praising God for his work and creation.

And here they also reference how humans work and how God provides.

Rachel Jordan, why do you think the psalmist might mention these things in a psalm praising God for his creation?

That's a great question, you guys.

I think this verse, these verses hint at the interconnectivity of the created world.

Humans are not just part of creation, but we are actually co creators of Christ.

We've been given dominion over the world that God created.

We have a leadership role, but we're also very much a part of it.

We're animals, humans are animals.

And so we are part of the animal kingdom.

And I think it's really neat the integration of creation that we see in these verses.

Talks about ships, talks about sea monsters, the ocean teeming with creatures.

There's a lot of really beautiful lyrical imagery coming up in these verses.

So that's what I really noticed with it.

I also think the work aspect is interesting.

The labor element mentioned in the beginning of these verses, the idea that God is working to provide for and care for his creation.

You continue reading the psalm, it goes a little bit more into that about how God provides food for all things, us included.

But there's also a human work element too where probably the ships coming, going might be merchant ships, people working, working as part of creation.

So there's some really interesting things we pull out of these verses.

Yeah, yeah, I like that a lot.

Hey guys, welcome to the whole church science fair.

Earlier this year we did, we had our job fair.

Now we're doing the whole church science fair.

I am Joshua Noel.

My only job is to introduce other people.

So first up, of course my co host, the, the one with the absolute most site was created so that we could behold the greatness that is the co host, TJ Tabor.

Yes, one blackbone.

That's why you should be on YouTube.

Yeah, thanks.

Yeah.

Most of our listeners are not on YouTube now.

They should be.

We are also switch over with, as TJ called her, the master of marine biology, Rachel Jordan.

Rachel is the Author of if the Ocean has a Soul.

A marine biologist Pursuit of Truth through Deep Waters of Faith and Science.

A book about science and scripture that can both help us know God and his creation better.

Great intro.

Thanks guys.

No, thank you for joining us.

Yeah, so great time.

I just, I had my personal diatribe about why doctors have a title, but that's a whole separate thing.

Rachel is a professional marine biologist, lay theologian, self professed Jesus loving coral nerd.

She was raised in Idaho.

Since then she's traveled the globe chasing her passion for faith and science.

She has an Ms.

In Marine Biology and Ecology from James Cook University in Australia, a BS in Ecology from Seattle Pacific University in Seattle and a certificate certification.

I don't know why I struggle with that so much.

In Biblical studies Interchangeable from.

Yeah.

From Bodense Bible School in Germany.

So she's been all over the place.

All over.

She's been a coral biologist for the US National Park Service.

She's been in marine aquaculture research, organic chemistry labs all over, veterinary research facilities, the Pet Industry Museum.

When she's not riding or diving, she can be found reading C.S.

lewis, growing wildflowers and exploring creation with her husband.

We are so glad to welcome you to the show.

Thanks for having me guys.

It's a joy to be here.

If you're listening, check out the Onazow podcast network website link is below for shows that are like ours, shows that aren't like ours, that we like to like.

And if you're already listening on YouTube.

Hi, thank you.

Yeah if you're not on YouTube again, site site was created so you can watch TJ on YouTube.

These guys are super handsome so you should definitely check out YouTube.

TJ didn't say it wasn't us this time.

I, I don't think I've ever said that specific, specific line.

I say, I say greatness.

I don't know if I've ever called you handsome, you know.

Thank you.

You're a good looking fella though.

Any, any single ladies out there in, in the whole church.

You know, teacher's not bad looking.

Get on YouTube, you know see what.

You think or don't put the mystery.

So with that you guys know you can't be divided something unity.

I just like an excuse to ask a silly question.

So we're going to ask a silly question.

Today's is a pretty street state board at DJ and islands first give you time to think about it.

Rachel, who is the best animated sea creature not including mer people or fish people.

Yeah they don't yeah, because, you know, I would have just said Jim Bay, but.

Oh, man.

Okay, well, what?

Like first in my heart.

And there's gonna be some people who strongly disagree with him, but I'm gonna go with Flounder, the fish sidekick from the mermaid.

And I'm talking the cartoon version, which of course it's a very confusing situation because Flounder, he's sort of this like floundering character.

He's a little bit whiny, very skittish, but he's not technically a Flounder.

He's not a Flounder.

The kind of thing is it's actually a little closer to sergeant.

That's the best thing, though, naming something that is just not.

Yeah, it's just not.

It'd be like, you know, having a pet dog and naming it cat.

Like, it's just pretty funny.

Good plan.

But that's partly why I like him.

That's charm.

And I like that his name is more metaphorical for his characteristics inside than on the outside.

So I'm gonna go with Flounder.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good.

He was the first.

He was.

The first one I thought about was Flounder.

Yeah, definitely up there.

He's iconic.

Yeah.

Well, and flounders themselves are.

They're.

They're a perfectly flat fish.

Did you actually know that there's, there's right eyed and left eyed flounders in the same way that there's left handed people?

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Because when Flounders, when they're babies, when they're in like the really young stage, they have eyes on both sides of their head the way most fish do.

And then over time, their body sort of migrates over to the side and one of the eyes moves the opposite side of the body.

Eyes are on one side.

So certain fish are more right sided, certain fish are left sided and the eye migrates.

So there are right eyed and left eyed Flounder.

That's great.

That's great.

For me.

For me it's got to be SpongeBob.

It's SpongeBob.

I'm 26.

SpongeBob's 26.

Wait, he is?

That's in universe.

In universe.

He's like, someone did the math and he has to be like 40 something.

But the show is 26 years old.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

This is one of those questions where my answer probably will vary depending on the day that I'm asked.

So I'm not like, I'm not sticking to this.

Like, I'm not committed to my Answer.

Because, like, I want to say a creature from Little Mermaid or Finding Nemo or spongebob, because, like, they're all iconic or even one of the fish from Shark Tales would be be great.

Oh, yeah.

But right now, right now, my heart's saying Laboon the whale from one my favorite member of the star, Straw Hat Crew.

He's great.

Yeah, I understand that.

Yeah, I do understand that.

So those are some good answers.

Rachel, Jordan, could you share with us some about your history with the church and in your, you know, the scientific community at large?

Yeah.

So I grew up in church.

I was a classic Sunday school kid.

My family loves Jesus.

So Sunday morning going to church was really normal thing in my life.

And when I was about 13, I went to a public school, and I had just the best friend group throughout late middle school and into high school.

And most of my school friends were not Christians.

And so they would ask me these really brilliant, intelligent questions.

And whether it was intentional or unintentional, they challenged my faith in a really respectful, healthy way.

And so we had some phenomenal conversations.

But those conversations, a key takeaway for me was that it was really important as I got older that my faith became independent of my family and dare I say, even independent of the church that I grew up in.

And so in my teens, I started taking that more seriously and sort of came to the realization I have to figure this out for myself and make sure that things that I was brought up believing are actually true before I spend the rest of my life in pursuit of this thing.

And that was partly why I went to Baudence Bible School in Germany.

I went over there to sort of get away from everything I'd ever known before and be me and God in a community of people who knew the Bible really well, who were dedicated to teaching it accurately, and supporting students like me who were curious and had a lot of questions.

And that was a really instrumental time in my life.

So the church for me, I have a sweet but yet complex relationship with it.

It's sort of like, you know, when you grow up in a family, right?

Like, even if you grow up in a really healthy family that made you feel really loved, supported you really well, you still have moments of tension with your family members, right?

Like, you still have arguments, you still have communication breakdowns and conflict that you have to work through.

And forgiveness and reconciliation is a part of life when you're in relationship with somebody long term.

And that is a really good explanation of what my relationship church has been.

When I started pursuing science after My year at Bible college, I got some pushback from the church that I grew up in, and that was really hard.

It was very, very hard for me.

In short, people who had known me my whole life were questioning the validity, the realness of my relationship with God because I was so serious about learning the science accurately.

And it took me a long time to recognize for myself that it's possible to learn the science accurately, represent Jesus fully, and engage in conversations with other people, even people who think differently than you, respectfully.

And that has become sort of an anthem for my life, for my career, of how I want to engage with the church in conversations about faith and science and how I engage with people who are scientists and may or may not know God.

And that has been sort of my mission, I guess, now as I. I'm more at the forefront of talking about faith and science, and it's a big part of why I wrote the book.

Yeah.

And you couldn't have picked a better place to go to, you know, put some distance between you and your church than Germany.

It's pretty far away.

That.

Yeah.

And that's like.

That's where it started.

Follow Martin Luther.

Oh, yeah.

I hadn't even put together that historical connection.

Yeah.

But, yeah, some of my favorite theologians were like, German, because you got Paul Tillich, Dietrich, Bonhoeffer.

You get some good ones.

Yeah.

I do want to say.

I want to ask.

You use the word accurate a lot when you're talking about how your pursuit of science went and the Christian.

The church's book pushback.

And then again, this is not all Christian.

It's not all church.

You know, I do know when I was studying archeology in college for a little while, what I found really interesting when you do, like, the history of the church and archaeology and that kind of stuff is like, how much.

It's like, when archaeology was, like, backing up.

Hey, maybe none of those true.

Maybe this thing was true.

The church was like, oh, man, look at this science.

And, like, really backing it.

And then when it's stuff that's like, I don't know, this doesn't really fit the biblical narrative, people were like, oh, well, that's because it's bad science and you're just trying to be anti God.

I'm like, well, it's the same method.

Is that the kind of pushback you're talking about when you're like, why you're using the word accurate?

Is it something similar to that?

Yeah, yeah, it is.

That's.

And you just explained that very well.

I Think I feel like in the same way that as a Christian it can be tempting to cherry pick pieces of the Bible, of Scripture to support your particular worldview.

The same way that that's a temptation, I think the church also has a temptation to grab science and cherry pick from it to support certain worldview aspects.

And that is something that science fundamentally pushes up against.

Because science is supposed to be good science.

When it's done right, it's supposed to be as without bias as possible.

You don't go into it going, I'm going to prove X, Y and Z.

You're going into it asking a question about X, Y and Z and going, okay, can I uncover one piece of information, information is true or not true about this, and then go from there to the next question.

It's very logical, very analytical.

And that's hard to wrap around if you haven't really looked into the scientific method and how those, how the experimental process works.

Because faith is fundamentally different.

Like, we do not approach faith with the same, you know, I need to have X, Y and Z hammered out in order to like have relationship with God in order to communicate with the Holy Spirit or any of these things.

It's a fundamentally different process.

It's relational as opposed to analytical.

So when we have conversations about the intersection of these two things, it gets a little complicated.

Yeah, yeah.

I.

Trying to word things well.

Yeah, I think one of the.

I don't remember exactly who it is, so I'm not going to use any names in case I'm wrong.

But one of the earlier people to start terming the word inerrancy when talking about the Bible would kind of clarify.

What he meant is that like the more we understand the Bible and science, they won't contradict.

Not that, you know, one is triumphing over the other.

So he's like, if we read something in the Bible and it doesn't match science, we're either wrong in our science or wrong in the Bible and we need to examine both accurately.

And I kind of like that kind of view of it.

Even though I'm not an inherent myself that kind of heart behind it.

I'm like, that's more what I feel in line with.

I like this idea of like stuff is contradicting.

Let's re examine it.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to go about it.

I don't know if this is who you were thinking of, but John H. Walton in his Lost World Series oftentimes sort of has a concept.

Yeah, it's a great one.

Listeners, if you haven't checked it out, you're a reader and you want to do some deep thinking, like start with the lost world of Genesis 1.

It's phenomenal.

And you can go to the lost world of Adam and Eve and so on and so forth.

But it's a great book series.

And I think what I love most about that concept is that there's an assurance in our faith when we approach it with that mindset.

You know, the idea that, you know, if we.

We learn something, I'll use myself as an example.

If I learn something in science that is really confusing and bumps up against what I thought to be true in my faith as a Christian.

One example that I'm actively working through right now that I've spoken about publicly before is the question of death prior to the fall, the fall of man in the Bible.

And what.

Where science bumps into that for me, where it becomes a problem is the presence of fossils.

So the fossil record, the idea that there's scientific evidence of living things dying before the existence of humans.

How am I supposed to make sense of that?

I have been actively working through it.

Question I have, and I'm hopefully getting a little bit closer to feeling comfortable with an answer.

But when I first encountered that question, it really kind of rattled me.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, big deal.

Is the science wrong?

Is my understanding of Scripture wrong?

You know, which is it, faith or science?

Like, where's the problem?

And I kind of had this frantic feeling.

And thankfully, God is so kind and so all powerful and all knowing and whips and loving to meet us in those places where we feel rattled by something that we've learned.

And the process that it has been for me is to slow down.

And it's a long process to slow down, to take time, to learn more about the science and to learn more about Scripture.

And I have had such a sweet time realizing that regardless of where I land on this particular issue, it doesn't change the character of God.

I've been learning more about the scientific methods of things, and I've also been learning more about the Hebrew scriptures.

And it's been a really sweet process that I've been walking through with the Lord and with some really kind mentors and partners in my life who've come alongside me and provided input.

But I those questions that we bump into, it's really important that we engage in conversation with the experts, the people that are trustworthy who really know this information, but also engage in prayer with the Lord and ask him to guide our discovery process.

And know that regardless of where we land on a particular issue, God is still God.

Like, our opinion doesn't change who he actually is.

The goal is to get perspective, to line up with the truth of who he has been all along.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Really like that.

And I.

And I hope more.

A lot of people learn kind of from that example of, like, you run into this thing, you don't know the solution, because what you think about science and what you think about scripture don't agree.

And you know that you believe both things and being able to kind of hold that tension and try to figure it out but not let it, you know, derail you completely.

I think it's an important lesson.

You can not know the answer to things and keep moving on.

Yeah, for me, that was rough too, because I got to that point and I was like, all right, so I'm either a metaphorical Genesis guy or an old Earth creationist now.

So.

So what?

It's not an easy question.

Yeah.

But moving on, moving forward for this series, you know, our science fair, we're going to be asking all of our guests to step into the whole church lab.

So I'm going to ask you a few questions.

They are science adjacent.

I think it's a good word.

We've got a few different categories.

They're biblical, religious, everyday and mythical.

I'm just going to pick a few.

I know if you looked at the outline, there's like 20.

You don't have to answer all 20.

We're going to give you five minutes, and we're just going to see how many you can get through in five minutes.

All right, let's do it.

All right.

Are you ready?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So the Bible claims there is a Leviathan that once lived in the waters that will return in the end times.

Where might that creature be now?

If it's real?

If it's real?

Well, I'm pretty confident it was real real at some point in time.

I don't know if it is still actively in the world or if it has gone extinct.

But whether it is literally real or metaphorically real, I'm confident it's literally real.

That kind of creature will come back around again.

If we're taking a literal interpretation of scripture, taking a metaphorical view of scripture, that's a bit of a different conversation.

But to keep my answer brief.

Depends on your interpretation of Scripture.

And I definitely think a form of Leviathan existed at some point in the past.

Yeah, I think the metaphorical Leviathan might be BP might be BP Oil.

Actually, there's a couple contenders for that title.

Yeah.

So most religions are believed to have formed their sacred traditions and items around the crops and climate changes observed during the Middle Paleolithic era.

What religious traditions and items should we then suspect if we discovered a people group that originated living underwater?

That is a fantastic question.

I actually feel like an astrophysicist might be better equipped to answer this because it's probably a little bit more in line with, like, discovering life on another planet, more advanced life, or actually someone who's legitimately an anthropologist.

So I don't have a great answer for this, but I'm a big fan of the Little Mermaid.

So, you know, maybe some kind of a mermaid hairbrush.

I really have no idea.

That's a great question, though.

We'll see.

Yeah.

So if we found the fossils of a dragon, how could we determine whether or not it breathed fire?

Ooh.

Yeah.

That's a bit of a different scope than radiometric beating would necessarily reveal to us.

I would have to say we would need to talk to the fossil experts and see what they say, because it would really depend on the anatomy, on the layout of how that fossil was when the creature died.

So the positioning of it, if there was any tissue.

I'd be really curious to know if this is just, like, bone structure that's preserved or if there's any tissue or.

Yeah.

Any skin scale type remnants.

Is there some kind of, like, a vocal cord like structure that seems that it would be to be able to breathe fire?

Those are some of the things we might look at first.

So when drying clothes outside, is sunlight or moving air the more important factor?

I'm pretty sure sunlight is because heat, like, the heat factor.

Think about it like, if you hang out your clothes on a windy day, but it's completely clouded over and cold outside, will they get dry faster than on a sunny day?

Beautiful, sunny, hot day with.

No.

So I think the sunshine is more important than the winds because of the heat factor.

I have to agree.

So what's with the beach and the lagoon in spongebob?

If you're not familiar, they go to a beach and it's a beach and they have their own water.

Well, I know the show is created by a marine biologist, but I don't really know much about how a beach would exist within the context of the ocean.

Maybe everything's beach.

I know it's like a designated area in spongebob, but when you're in the ocean, if it's like a sandy bottom substrate Everything's technically beach gas, Right?

That's true.

That's true.

They just have, like, separate water.

Yeah.

From the perspective of the sea sponge, I don't know what they would deem a beach.

So it's a good one.

Question.

Yeah.

We are out of time.

We are out of time.

I do think, however, I want to ask for one.

Oh, go ahead.

I want to know if Jonah had a smart watch in the belly of the big fish.

If, you know, assuming.

If we take the story literally, what health warning do you think it would send him?

First, acid PH levels are rapidly decreasing.

Get out.

Get out.

I don't even know if smart watches detect for ph, but me neither.

Imagining this stomach acid would be a problem.

Yeah.

All right.

It's a good answer.

It's a good answer.

I'm not sure if they're equipped to be like, hey, you're in a fish.

Oh, actually, can I revise my answer?

Can I revise my answer?

What would have hit before the PH alert would have been pressure, because probably the fish would have his mouth, stomach, whatever, swallow, and then dove down.

And the increase of atmospheric pressure would have probably been the first warning.

And the same concept that scuba divers are aware of.

It's not the going down so much that's the problem.

As long as you're able to equalize your ears.

The problem is more going back up when you have breathed in oxygen at.

Or gas when you breathe in at depth, because the gases in your body have built up in a way that it rapidly expands in your bloodstream, and it can create the bends, you can end up with a lot of different health side effects.

So I'm not quite sure how that all worked, but I would think the pressure would be more of a problem.

So that's probably the first alert.

I knew a diver would have an interesting answer to that.

Yeah.

I had a feeling.

I was like, I want to know.

I don't know what she says of this.

Yeah.

I love diving.

Never been swallowed by a fish.

Oh.

Never experienced that.

But if I do.

If you do, when I come back from it, I will.

Yeah, let us know wearing a smartwatch, and I will answer that question for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So moving on, a little bit more serious stuff.

I was curious what first inspired this book.

Was there, like, a single light bulb moment that you're like, I need to write this, or did it kind of build up over time and experience where you were like, I think maybe I should put this on paper?

Yeah, that one's really hard to answer because both are kind of true.

I had always wanted to write a book, but I always thought I'd write fiction because I love reading.

I read across a lot of genres.

And I.

As a kid, I always dreamt of writing book like C.S.

lewis's Narnia series.

And that's really where my heart was.

And so I never really planned on writing a narrative nonfiction book about faith and science.

That just wasn't something on my agenda.

And when I quit my job with the National Park Service in Florida and got married to my husband and moved halfway across the country to a landlocked state, I had some time on my hands.

I was trying to figure out the next steps and was adjusting to married life and trying to make friends in the area.

And my husband very sweetly, very generously advised that I take some time and just settle back into a new normal and figure out life and rest.

Because I was pretty burnt out from my previous job.

And I really enjoyed that.

I enjoyed the break for a couple months, and then I got a little bit antsy.

And I've always enjoyed writing just for fun on the side.

And when I sat down and started writing with the free time I had, just this flood of marine biology stories and theological musings came out.

And I was already a couple chapters into the book when I realized what was happening.

So it's not something I necessarily set out to create, But God kind of hinted a couple chapters in, like, hey, I have a plan.

And that note that you've had on your phone with all these faith and science pairings, these concepts that you've been mulling around for years, you should actually write each of those as a chapter.

So that's how the book came to be.

Like that.

That's cool.

All right.

So a lot of people, when they read your book, they.

I like the balance you have between awe and fear of the sea.

How do you see those emotions drawing us closer to God?

Well, awe and fear.

Right.

I think we approach him with both.

And it's for me, as someone who loves the ocean, just endlessly fascinated by it.

I almost feel like I have a personal relationship with it.

I've spent a lot of time with it.

That also, I think, is sort of a mirror for what relationship with God looks like.

A bit.

It's this awe and fear, but relationship and this.

This intimacy and this tenderness.

And obviously it's different with God than how I experience it.

Ocean.

But the ocean, I think, is a good metaphor for sort of diving in and getting to know God better.

And I think we really we experience both.

When you know God, you're awestruck by his power and his creativity, by the sacrifice that Jesus made for us because of his character, being what it is, and loving us that deeply because of the, the beauty, but also the, the pain of what we see and lament having happened to creation and for our own part in it.

There's this awe of God created this beautiful thing and look at what we've done to it.

But then looking with awe at what Jesus has done to redeem and restore all things to himself.

And there's that wonder there too, that awe and wonder and the fear, the fear of we've hurt what God has created.

There's a fear of how could anyone redeem and restore this?

And, and then Jesus has and does, and he has the ability to actively do that in our individual lives as well.

So it's not just a overarching cosmic story of redemption and restoration and reconciliation.

It's a personal one for each of us as well when we come to know and love God.

So I think the, the fear for me, you know, I feel like a lot of the time Christian leaders talk about fear like it's a two layered thing.

Like there's that, that healthy fear of like, like a respectful fear almost.

And then there's the fear of like, oh my gosh, I'm just absolutely petrified.

Like I'm so incredibly scared right now.

And I've heard it been said that we should approaching God with the respect kind of fear, the way that you would respect, like if you were a child and were being respectful of a parent who has the authority to discipline you if you misbehave.

But my experience personally of relationship with God has been a lot more of just awe rather than the fear of him in the sense I'm fearful of discipline.

I know he has the capacity and the willingness to discipline me if I need that.

But he approaches me with so much tenderness that I.

The fear part, really interesting to me.

So I don't have a great explanation for that.

It's really encapsulated by the awe.

I don't know if that makes sense, but yeah, it makes sense.

Makes perfect sense to me.

I just, I don't think there is a better metaphor for God than the ocean unknowably vast.

But you know, you can spend your whole life exploring it and then there's still more.

Yeah, but at the same time, you know, we say unknowably vast also.

Look at the access he's given us himself.

Right.

Like so much of Himself is knowable.

He's.

He makes himself knowable.

And so I. Yeah, there is this element of there's more than I could ever learn in a lifetime.

But maybe that's partly why he gives us access to eternity with him, so that we can know him to that intimate level.

There's a real beautiful love behind that.

Yeah.

Do you think it's an issue if I start referring to the altar as the church beach and my closet is like the spiritual beach?

The prayer closet?

Yeah, it's the church beach.

It's where I go to have access to the ineloibly vast.

No, I think whatever terminology works for you, whatever the distinction is, that's.

That's great.

I'm confident my pastor won't care.

For me, the spiritual beach is definitely the.

The beach beach.

The literal, actual beach.

Yeah.

Really just being outside, like creation is being outside in nature, is a way that I worship and find it almost easier to engage with God when I'm being constantly bombarded with beautiful reminders of who he is and what he's done.

Right.

So you mentioned the pairings that you would make in your notes app on your phone earlier.

Yeah.

How do you cope with those connections?

Do they just come to you?

How do you decide what passages to pair with your stories?

Ah, yeah.

So the things that I was pairing in my notes app when I was unknowingly developing kind of this outline book, it came really slowly.

It was more of like, you know, when, you know, when you're kind of wrestling with something in life and if you're somebody listening and you have relationship with God, you've probably experienced this kind of phenomenon.

But like, you go through a phase where God teaches you something really instrumental about yourself or himself or the world and you just don't want to forget it.

For me, I write those things down, but not with the intention anybody else is going to read it.

It's just more of a reminder for me and my phone, you know, my phone's with me.

So I have memories of being at Dried Fortugas national park, which is where I worked prior to writing the book most recently, and making my breakfast in the morning and sort of having this realization of, oh, my goodness, God's been.

God has been teaching me, know about restoration spiritually.

But I'm about to go do a restoration dive this afternoon and care for corals.

That's a wild connection.

And so I jot that kind of thing down on my phone.

And the verses actually came later.

And I think some of that is when you're when you're actively reading God's word, you're.

You're chipping away little bits of time with him.

And in scripture, whether you're reading it daily, weekly, monthly, whatever reading your Bible looks like to you, when you're doing that and you're also engaging in conversation with God, you're immersing yourself in his creation, these connections naturally arise and you actually, the verse that you picked for this episode was a verse that I randomly sort of scrawled in Sharpie on the back of the clipboard that I used to dive with.

So when I was diving underwater, I'd have my data sheet on one side that I'd be tallying up diseased coral colonies with on one side.

And then if you flipped it over, it would have.

Sea is vast and spacious, teeming with creatures without number.

And the leviathan which he formed a frolic there.

Those verses were written there.

And so I feel like when scripture is integrated into your life, when you're just exposing yourself to kind of arises naturally and that's how a lot of the pairings happen in the book.

Most of the references that I put in came to my mind just sort of floated to the surface, if you will, as I was writing it and exploring these concepts.

Yeah, yeah.

For me, some of like, I don't know what I would say, like the life of the book or in like the creatures and stuff that you talk about.

I always loved whenever you were about to tell us about, you know, a new grouper or like some like little fish that came out or one of the corals.

Yeah, I loved it.

Yeah.

Like the character.

I love character work.

It's what I'm about.

And some of the ones you mentioned, you mentioned like Porky the porcupine, the Goliath group or there's a great grandmother coral you talk about.

I know one stood out to me is your co worker with the night blooming Sirius.

Yeah, all of these were great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was just curious.

I really want to give you a chance to kind of tell our listeners some about the characters in the book.

I guess.

I guess it sort of comes about where, you know, when you have an experience with a person, it could be someone you chit chat with at a gas station or you know, someone who gives you a cup of coffee.

Like it's just you have these encounters and you're sort of struck by somebody's character of wow.

They're just like the memory of their presence sort of sticks with you.

I've had that experience With a number of different people, but also creatures, animals.

And as a scuba diver, I have the unique opportunity to meet lots of different kinds of creatures.

And so naturally some of the characters that stand out to me are aquatic.

And one of, one of the stories that I love best from the book was the story of meeting the yellow headed jawfish, which I did not even know this little species of fish existed until I was diving this day.

And I actually, well, I finished the dive where I first encountered them and I got back up on the boat with my dive and I was, I had to describe the fish to my co workers to figure out what they were.

And they were like drawing pictures like, is this it?

I was like, no, it looked like this and kind of going back and forth.

And eventually we got back to the mainland with Internet access and I was able to figure it out.

But yeah, the yellow headed jawfish I met on a day that I was, I was really down.

I was feeling really sad.

So for some context, a big part of my job was to physically manage a oral disease event that was passing through the Florida Keys.

And at the national park where I worked was my job as the coral biologist to lead a team of scuba divers on intervention dives to go out and physically locate this disease on coral colonies, which.

There's a number of different stony coral species affected by stony coral tissue loss disease, or SCTLD as I call it for short.

So we would go find the squirrels, these infected animals with sctld, and then once we found them, we would treat them with this special antibiotic medicine that we would create on the boat by mixing amoxicillin and a special cocoa butter based formula called base 2e.

So we would pack that medicine into caulk tubes on the boat, put them into caulk guns, strap them to our dive suits, suit up with all of our gear, dive down, find the sick corals, and physically, with our hands, treated the surface of corals that were infected.

And it was really hard underwater labor.

You're working really long days.

Diving is a full body workout.

You're actively swimming most of the time.

You're also having to manage your breathing, make sure that you're breathing well and also paying attention to your gas consumption, how much air you have left.

And then you're experiencing the heartbreak of watching these coral animals that you've worked your whole life to get this job, to be able to work with corals.

And you're watching your favorite animal die in front of your eyes.

And there were these particular corals that were this really beautiful endangered species called Dendrogyrus cylindris.

They're commonly called pillar corals.

And at this site where we had these nine endangered species of corals, they were called magic castles because the way that they were structured from a distance and through like the watery haze, it would just giant, towering, silhouetted castles.

It's like the Disney castle, you know, with like the moat leading up to it and all the pre lights and the way the sunlight would cascade through the water to touch the turrets of these magic castles.

So gorgeous.

And they're living animals and they're far bigger than I am, they're incredibly tall.

And I was treating one of these magic castles that was sick.

And I had this realization that the coral was so far gone it was going to succumb to the disease.

And I was actively watching it die.

And I was grieving in the water on this dive, feeling really physically tired and overworked and just emotionally wrought.

And I look up and I see this little yellow head jawfish peeking out of the sand.

And for context, yellow headed jawfish, they burrow into the seafloor and build their little homes underground.

And then they poke their heads out and they peek around and look at the world.

They have these really yellow heads and sort of this creamy opalescent body.

And this jawfish poked its head out and then sort of swam over to me and we sort of had a bit of back and forth.

And the next day that I was back diving at the same site, missing coral, that little yellow head jawfish introduced me to its buddy who lived next door.

And there were actually two of them.

They were probably a mated pair.

And they just sort of swam around with me that dive.

And it was such a cathartic thing for me because.

Well, yes, I had my.

My dive buddy and my dive team underwater.

They were grieving too.

They were struggling as well.

And so to be able to connect with the creature who I felt like they understood what I was going through.

And they were grieving the coral as well.

I mean, that's the loss of their home, their habitat.

That was a really special creature story that I love getting to share in the book.

I'm sorry, that was a long winded answer.

No, it's good.

Yeah, it's a bit about my work.

Yeah, that's what we're here for.

Yeah.

I really appreciate you telling that story because part of why I got your book in the first place, I've actually always wanted to go to Dry Tortuga.

It's like on my bucket list.

Of places I've always wanted to go to.

I was like, oh, she went to Dry Tortuga.

And I remember reading the story and I was like, I mean, this is a bummer.

The place I always wanted to go with all the coral are dying.

And then so I kind of, like, not to the same degree, but I kind of shared that joy with you.

You're talking about the little yellow jawfish.

And I was like, yeah, so there is still something here.

Like, I'm still excited to go one day.

Yeah, yeah, there's still lots of critters there.

It's just.

It's different, you know, it's.

The coral ecosystem has collapsed, but there's still a lot of critters.

Also, the way you were describing your friends trying to draw the picture of the jawfish, I just can't help but think of, like, adventure time.

And it's like Jake during the Describe vampire somebody, and he kept drawing the picture.

And we do that in my house a lot.

It's like one of those, like, verbal cues, like, no, that's not right.

That's not right.

That's all like.

Like, that's all good on it by it.

That's not it.

Yeah.

Good episode.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah.

So here at the Whole Church podcast, we focus a lot on unity, shockingly, and we find that that often requires careful listening.

And what you do is, you know, tell your stories and relate to the Bible.

So do you think that your stories of the reefs and the sea creatures like you just shared could help the whole church, as Christians from different denominations, find common ground?

Well, I mean, I hope so.

When I wrote book, specifically when I was editing the book with the intent of publishing it, I was really cautious to have it read by people with a diverse variety of different beliefs.

Some of my very dear friends read it.

Different denominations, different religions, even a lot of my non Christian friends were some of the book's first readers.

And it was really important to me that, especially the points where I was talking about Christianity, that Christians agreed with that, that it was in concordance with the most important things, the sort of tier one theological concepts that we talk about, and in the same way that the science was represented well and that my scientist friends felt that it was an accurate representation of.

Of their work.

So on both sides, making sure that it was, the book had a good representation of both sides was really important to me.

And I'm blessed to know now that the book's been out for a little while, that it's met the needs of A number of different people with different theological backgrounds, interests, different amounts of scientific interests.

Yeah, seriously, like, it's.

It's been really sweet to discover the points of views of people who've read the book and appreciated it.

It's been really fun for me.

And I feel that, you know, I came to it with this vision of I love God.

He's called me to pursue science.

And there were some points in my life and my career where that was really hard and also really joyful.

And I wanted to share both so that other people who might be in a similar position to me, they're wrestling with faith and science questions.

Maybe they grew up in a Christian church, but they're getting some pushback or pursuing science seriously, or maybe they're a science curious person who's never really considered faith.

They think that perhaps faith and science are incompatible.

I wanted to open the doors to conversation with.

To people who have those kinds of thoughts and descriptors.

And so it's been really sweet to see how God's done that.

It's definitely.

The book was definitely written primarily for Christian audience, very much with a non Christian audience present in my heart.

And so my hope is that, yeah, the book contributes to a unifying conversation for the whole church when it comes to faith and science, but also that it includes non Christians in the conversation.

Because while faith in science is, you know, fantastic, it's not a salvation issue.

The questions that we have about it, the exploration, the concepts that I talk about in the book, a lot of it's.

So I very much wanted to include non Christians in the conversation as well.

And while faith in science is obviously very important to me, I want to acknowledge that it's not a salvation issue.

We don't need to have all these questions about how faith and science can fit together in order to have relationship with God and pursue truth.

We don't need to have all that hammered out.

Is it helpful?

Yeah, I think so.

It's worth spending some time on.

But when we come to conversations with non Christians, it's a little bit more important because although faith and science isn't a salvation issue, it can be for some people, an evangelism issue.

So I think it's really important that Christians, the whole church, recognizes that faith and science, if they are incompatible, that is a roadblock.

That is a massive stumbling block in someone's path through pursuing Christ, especially if they're analytical minded, especially if they're a trained scientist, especially if they subscribe to the scientific method, especially if they're just a really curious person like me.

So I want to open the door to that.

I want to remove the roadblock.

I want to come alongside the church in learning to help, to provide more access.

Access that Jesus first and foremost provided.

He has not put the stumbling block there.

He has not said, oh, you have to believe X, Y and Z about how I created the world in a specific way in order to know me.

He didn't say that the gospel is Jesus plus nothing.

It's not Jesus plus a specific belief about science.

We believe that God created all things, but that's really.

That's really it when it comes to faith and everybody.

I want everybody to recognize that they have access to Jesus.

And your beliefs about faith and science are kind of on a lower tier.

It's not the most important thing.

But the church needs to recognize that for some people, that's.

That's the.

The rung of the ladder they can't get past in order to access a complete understanding of the gospel.

So hopefully that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah.

I could hear the CS Lewis behind your message with, you know, Screwtape and the Christian Christianity and stuff.

I was like, okay, I kind of see where she's coming from here.

See where she's coming from.

Fellow Lewis fan, you know.

Oh, yeah, hugely.

So that's good stuff.

Yeah.

So you're reading your work really thinking about, like, church unity and stuff, too, and how much you deal with, like, ecosystems, you know, ecology.

And I've studied that, you know, and I can't help but think of, like, parts of the church.

You know, we've interviewed a lot of different people here.

You know, I love Dr. Tom Ward and his emphasis on love, but then I'm like, I feel like maybe you're belittling Power Guide a little bit.

And I have some people that I'm like, I think you're forgetting God's love here.

We have all kinds of different beliefs and thoughts and theologies and stuff in the church.

I can't help but relate it to the great coral reefs and stuff that you're talking about.

Do you think your study of ecology really has maybe influenced your thinking of how the church functions?

Oh, definitely.

I mean, ecology by definition, the study of relationships between living things and their environment.

So living things and other living things, living things and non living things, all the relationships in that, that's ecology.

So absolutely.

I love learning about relationships.

And a big concept in ecology and also theology is the concept of biodiversity.

So in ecological thinking, and this is scientifically demonstrated over and over and over again.

We've seen this in thousands of studies.

Biodiversity strengthens ecosystems.

What do I mean by this?

Biodiversity is a measure of the number of different kinds of living things within a given environment.

So, for example, your front yard, how biodiverse is your front yard?

You would go through and you count all the different kinds of species living in your front yard, and that would determine how diverse, how biodiverse your front yard is.

So a ecosystem, a given area that has a lot, a very high number of different living things in that area is better able to withstand disturbance than ecosystems that have a lower biodiversity.

So if you have, you know, 100 different species within a small section of a coral reef, realistically, it's probably more a number in, like, the thousands for all the different living things that are there.

But if you have a really high number of biodiverse creatures within a given area, biodiversity is high.

If a hurricane rips through, which hurricanes do that, if some giant disturbance comes through and terrorizes that ecosystem, the ecosystem is better able to withstand that disturbance.

It's better able to build and thrive again in faster time than if it has small biodiversity to begin with.

If there's only one or two species, it could just get completely wiped out and then be gone, and it never recovers.

But if you have a lot of species, it's more likely to be able to come back.

That's true for coral reefs.

It's true for terrestrial ecosystems.

And I also think it's a bit true theologically as well.

I think diversity strengthens our faith communities.

And I would even go so far to say that as someone who loves faith and science, when we have a diversity of different perspectives about how faith and science intertwine, it has the potential to strengthen our conversations in getting towards truth.

I think we're better able to withstand and weather through the sort of spiritual disturbances that we may have when we have different ways of viewing the same topics.

And that's not to say that we should always be in disagreement.

That's not what I'm advocating for at all.

But what I'm saying is that the things that are really, really important things like, you know, Jesus is God, and God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him will have eternal life with him in his presence.

Those concepts, those are the important ones, we have to be unified on those things.

But stuff like how long did it take for creation to come into being?

Did death exist before the fall of man?

Can we reasonably rely on radiometric dating to understand our theology?

Like when we start getting into some of these other things.

These are, like, tertiary issues.

They're important and interesting to think about.

They're not crucial for having salvation.

And so having biodiversity, having diversity of thought in those areas, I think is really beautiful and leads to some really interesting conversations.

That's my favorite kind of conversation.

And so I.

In the same way I want to see biodiversity across ecosystems, I love seeing diversity in the church.

And not just with this one area of thinking.

I'm talking, like, racial, ethnic diversity, diversity of the ways that people worship.

It's a beautiful variety, and it's indicative of God's creative character.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We do another podcast with our friend Christian Ashley, and him and I disagree on most theological things.

Nearly everything, you know.

Yeah.

Inerrancy, same sex stuff, you know, like, pretty much all of the things me and him disagree on.

It's fine.

But, like, I do think he makes me stronger, and hopefully I make him stronger in his beliefs.

And, you know, we work together.

Well, I want to see if I could push your metaphor to its limits.

Yeah, I want to see if it holds.

So before recording, TJ And I were talking about lionfish.

I'm like, man, they're pretty and they're cool.

And I had one in my fish tank in Florida, and I loved it.

And he's like, yeah, but it's an invasive species in Florida right now, and it's causing a lot of problems.

I'm curious, how do invasive species play into this conversation?

Like, does that, like, affect biodiversity?

Is there such thing as an invasive species in the church where someone's, like, forcing everyone to believe their way?

Like, like, can we use this in the metaphor?

Am I pushing it too far?

CrossFit people, that's the invasive species in the church.

Oh, no, it's an open garage.

Invasive species have puzzled me for a very long time because so often, like, they're kind of pretty.

Like the lionfish, for example.

If you look at the picture of a lionfish, it's a beautiful creature.

It's got these fins.

They're all, like, spiky and pointy, and they splay out kind of like a peacock tail, and it's striped kind of zigzaggy orange and white.

And they flare their fins when they swim, and they just look, you know, they're the fashionist of the marine world.

They're just.

They're awesome fish, and they're super badass.

They have their fins, they have these spines that inject this venom if you bump into them or if they feel threatened.

Yeah.

They're just, they're super duper cool, but they're really problematic, especially in Florida and the.

And we're not really sure where this invasion began, but it's hypothesized that someone who owned a pet lionfish, presumably a mated pair, dumped them into the ocean.

And now we have a bunch of lionfish because they found their ideal niche and they've just taken off.

The species has just gone wild down there.

There's so many, in fact, there's so many lionfish that there's hunting, sort of like these fishing.

I don't even know what to call it.

Tournaments.

There's, there's these tournaments where people go out and see how many lionfish they can spearfish in a day.

And there's competitions to see how many hundreds people can get to go.

And that's just to try to keep the species at bay.

I enjoy seeing lionfish from diving, I think, because they're pretty, but I always cringe a little bit.

It's like, oh, but you're not supposed to be here.

They're native to the Indo Pacific.

So if you're diving in Australia and you see a lionfish, don't worry, they belong there.

Different story if you're off to Florida.

But to your question, like, invasive species.

Invasive by like, whose standards?

I guess I would ask, and I hate to answer your question with a question, but that's probably exactly what I'm going to do because what really makes lionfish so different from.

Right.

Like it's a species that.

An invasive species is a species that shows up where you don't want it.

Where it wasn't in the past, but now it is.

So you could argue that humans are the most invasive species in all creation.

So that's what we need to get rid of.

I'm not saying that.

I'm not saying that at all.

God designed humans, designed lionfish.

What are we, the leaves growing in ditch on the side of the road?

My house.

I actually, when I first moved here, I thought they were so pretty.

But I went out and I picked some and put them in a vase, put them on my dining room table.

And my father in law came over for supper that night, saw them.

He just was hysterical.

He laughed so hard, was like, why would you bring these weeds in from outside and put them on your table?

I was like, because they're pretty.

To him, they were an invasive species.

They don't belong.

They should, they should be gone.

Spray them in the ditch.

Get rid of them.

To me, they're pretty And I'll take them inside and treasure them.

So a lot of it's just your perspective.

Who's calling it a weed invasive species, who's calling it something beautiful that God made and who gets to decide whether a thing belongs in a certain environment.

So much of that is based on our frame of reference, the moment in time where we sort of established a collective way of thinking about the normalcy of an environment.

And so I would say when we think about it in the context of church, we're going to take it metaphorically.

If you are listening to this conversation and you're like, oh, I know who the invasive species is, like whether it's a CrossFit or you know those, if there is someone walking into your home church and you're disappointed to see them there because to you they're an invasive species, that actually says a whole lot more about your perspective and your heart and where you maybe need to have a conversation with God.

And it says about that other person's identity or that other person's belonging or what God thinks of that other person.

God loves everyone.

God created everybody.

And we as his representatives on planet Earth are responsible for loving his creation well, stewarding it well and representing God to them with that same kind of love.

So how then are we to engage with the quote, quote invasive species who comes into the church?

I think we're supposed to that with a lot of passion and I think the tendency to, you know, in a theological context point to oh, invasive species, we need to interrogate that.

Why are we viewing it that way?

Because maybe God wants to teach us something.

You're more than welcome to push back on that or take a different angle with it.

I would love to hear your guys thoughts.

Those are mine for now.

No, I think that was a good answer.

I liked that a lot.

Yeah, the only, the only thing I was thinking, I was thinking it a completely different way.

I like how you took it.

My, my brain was more like what I think I was thinking more like invasive ideas like what is it in our churches that we're trying to like that are so prevalent that it's keeping other people from speaking out, you know, like.

But I don't think CrossFit's that prevalent teacher.

But I don't know.

I don't know.

That's why I was asking you.

I was just curious.

I like that take a lot better than my.

Yeah, no, that's, that's a great question.

Is there's definitely, there's definitely worldviews basically about things that I Don't think accurately represent God the way that he actually is.

And so.

Yeah, how do we interrogate those things and sort of weed them out?

Yeah, that's good.

Interesting.

You handed really well the random curveball I threw in.

Sorry.

Oh, unfortunately, I'm known for that.

Yeah, I love that.

I mean, maybe that curveball will inspire a deeper exploration of my life.

I don't know.

Maybe that'll go the next book and then we'll do another interview.

Yeah, there we go.

I do think it's really interesting that you mentioned just invasive species tend to be pretty.

Because it's true.

You've got the spotted lanternfly.

Horrible for local plant life.

Gorgeous, gorgeous insect.

Here where we live, we've kudzu, lots of kudzu.

What is that?

It's a.

It's a Vietnamese plant that chokes out other plants.

But it's beautiful.

It's like vines.

Yeah, it's big vines.

They spread.

You just get kudzu blankets on everything.

But it's beautiful.

And there's actually a lot of Vietnamese recipes for eating it that I need to start trying, that I know about.

Go foraging.

That sounds fun.

I need specifically an invasive species that kills ragweed.

That's all.

I just want something to completely eliminate ragweed.

I'm okay if it goes extinct.

That's the one thing we give her a ragweed mods, that's fine.

Nope, moths don't bother me as much.

So.

Wait, are those the cinnabar moths?

The little pink mixing ragweed up ragwort?

I don't know.

Sorry.

The.

The.

Pretty sure they do.

Previous terrestrial ecologists in me is like, wait, I think I did a research project on those back in undergrad.

So anyways, I'm pretty confident I'm okay with any creature over ragweed.

If we got rid of ragweed, and for some reason that means we have pythons now, I'll take it.

That'd be cool.

Personally, I'm cool with that.

Yeah.

But moving on, what has been the most surprising response you've received from readers about the book?

Oh, yeah.

I think the most surprising thing has been.

I've heard this from a couple readers.

The most surprising piece of feedback has been that to some people, the book feels or is serving them as a devotional.

And the reason why that throws me a little bit is I am notoriously not the biggest fan of devotionals.

I think they're great.

If that's the format of book that speaks to you.

Just for me personally, I've never really jived devotionals.

There's one exception.

My friend Aaron Lynam wrote this great book called the Nature of Rest.

It's phenomenal.

It's a great devotional, but that's really the only one I like.

So I'm not the biggest devotional person.

And it shocked me that people were using my book, which is not formatted like a devotional one.

Very long narrative, storytelling style chapters with really meaty theology sprinkled throughout.

Some people have described it as a dense read, which that did not surprise me at all.

The devotional comparison did surprise me.

Oh, that's like a completely different genre of book.

And you know, in the book industry, there's not really anything about my book that makes it a devotional.

But the way that it's resonating with some readers who love devotionals, they're calling it that.

And I think that's great.

It's like so awesome.

It's a compliment coming from people who love that style of book.

So I'm really grateful for that.

For other Bible nerds who don't like devotionals like me and Rachel, Psalms by the Day and Isaiah by the Day by Alec Matier, it is a devotional.

I don't read it as a devotional, but it's basically like, what if a Bible commentary was actually readable?

It's fantastic.

Great.

Sounds awesome.

He says that, but he does also read Bible commentaries a lot.

I do.

I enjoy just reading Bible commentaries, but I appreciate it more when they're able to be just read and I don't have to actually have a Bible and something else and go reference just to be able to read it straight.

Wonderful.

Yeah.

One book.

Yeah, it's what it should be, the Bible.

So, Rachel, is there anything else you wanted to mention before we go or where can people go to get your book?

Yeah, so my book is available wherever books are sold.

There's an audiobook.

Again, wherever you get your audiobooks.

Some dear friends of mine, at the book launch, they were like, let me find your book.

I was like, oh.

Like, wherever books are sold.

And they were like, oh my gosh, you're on Spotify.

You can find me all over the place.

It's also, if you want to learn more about me, work I'm doing, or just the book itself, you can check out my website, rachelgjordan.com I also am recently getting into some super dolphin research, some dear friends of mine.

So if you're interested in potentially coming alongside us and collaborating on the dolphin project, check out that tab on my website.

Super cool.

And what else?

I'm really active on Instagram, so you can find me at Shoreline Soul or you can just type in my name, Rachel G. Gordon.

That's about it.

Yeah.

Website.

Instagram is where you can find me.

I'm gonna find your Instagram now and do my best to remember to link your website in the show notes, which I don't think terrible for some reason.

I'm just so bad at remembering that.

I don't know.

But, you know, one thing we do like to do on the show for every episode is just to ask our guest for a practical action that would better help engender unity for the whole church, I guess.

Yeah.

You know, I said whole church.

I get.

I get my own train whistle.

Love it.

So we just wanted to hear from you.

What is something you think our listeners could stop and do right now, something they could actually do that would better engender Christian unity?

That's a good question.

Usually it's the hardest question.

Yeah, yeah, It's a really good one.

And I want to make sure I'm giving it proper thought.

I think something that you could do, regardless of where you're at right now, where you're living, who you're with, is next.

Next time that you have like a free five minutes or longer if you have that, great.

But step outside.

Even if it's, you know, outside your office building or your backyard, whatever it might be, just.

Just go outside for five minutes, leave your phone inside and look around at the world, around at trees, sky, ground, birds.

Bonus points if you're barefoot.

And just be still for a moment and ask God to meet you in that place.

The irony is you can ask him to meet you in that place.

He's already there with you.

Like his presence isn't limited.

He's not absent in the way that I might be when I leave a room.

He's with us whenever we need to talk to Him.

So ask him to be present with you more so to make yourself aware of his presence and ask him to help you appreciate his creation.

And the reason why I think this is a great practice for whole church is because we oftentimes think about church in the context of humans.

That's primarily what the church serves is our humans, fellow humans, and the church, the whole church.

I guess I would kind of push back a little bit.

And while, yes, in prayer, God might reveal something you can do to minister to another person or put someone on your heart to be able to text, or maybe you're going to step outside with another person and do this practice and do it kind of in that community.

I think the church has a role in ministering to creation.

And so I would encourage you to think about God's creation as temple that he designed for Himself to be able to dwell in.

And because of the role that humans played in the wretching cosmic story, we know that that temple has been corrupted.

There's been a lot of fallout.

And I think it's important that we recognize, like our integration into the temple, like we as humans were meant to be priests, stewards of God's good creation of feast.

So go out under the temple, look up at the sky, the things that God has made.

Contemplate who he is, ask him those questions and consider what the church might look like from a more creative aspect than just your fellow human beings.

What if the birds and the trees and the fish and the cows in the field are all included somehow?

What does your relationship look, look like to them?

How is this biodiverse planet a testament of God's character?

So, yeah, I would encourage you to view the whole church for a moment in the context of everything that God's made and spend some time in it.

So what changes in the world?

If everyone listens to you and goes out and has that moment, you know, that five minutes, what do we see change in the church?

Well, I know for me as a person who can get really focused on things that are maybe very pressing in the moment, but not eternally important, I think it slows us down a little bit.

I think it's an opportunity for us to realign with God not just in that moment, but for more eternal perspective, to acknowledge his.

His plan not just for our lives, but everything that he's made.

It's an invitation for us to remember we're a part of that.

He's invited us to be co creators of the world that he is continuing to make.

He's restoring and redeeming day by day to what Jesus has done and now through Christians, through His people.

So I think the world would change in the sense that our hearts, like those of us who know and love God, would be a little bit more attuned to God's heart and that we would maybe start to see other people and other creatures with his eyes rather than just our own.

All right, great answer.

So before we wrap up, we like to ask everyone to share a moment they saw God in recently.

Whether it be a blessing, moment of worship, challenge, a curse, whatever it is, always make Joshua go first to give the rest of us enough time to Think about our God moment.

So, Josh, you have a God moment for us this week?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Weirdly enough, it coincides perfectly with her practical action.

Yeah, I was at Disney World recently and also kind of sick.

But, you know, that's not the point Today at time, I built in a lot of free time where we weren't, like, at parks or doing stuff.

And I went on a walk because, you know, you don't walk enough at Disney as it is.

You need extra walking.

Of course.

I'm a crazy person, I guess.

I don't know.

There's like, a walking path that goes between pop century and animation.

Whatever.

People don't care what hotels it was.

But I was on this little walking bath, and of course, there's all the little signs, like, beware of gators.

And it's not until, like, you're, like, far enough away from people that, like, you have a chance of seeing them.

And I saw a gator, and I was like, oh, sweet.

And I just kind of sat there watching this gator just chilling in the water.

Like, you know how they get where they're, like, barely in the water, so their eyes are, like, just popping out, like, near the shore, And I'm like, man, I understand why so many people don't like that this thing is here.

Like, I do get, like, I get it.

You know, kids going up to it would be stupid, but, like, man, God made this, and this is, like a beautiful creature if we just let it be, you know?

And I don't know, I just kind of admired the gator for a while.

And that's gonna be my God moment.

Yeah.

Mine actually is also kind of related to practical action.

Perfect.

Because this past weekend, it's.

It's a little different.

It's a little different.

This past weekend, I went to Bristol, the NASCAR race with my family.

And it's.

If you've never been to Bristol, Tennessee, it's a holler, you know, there's really nothing down.

So we're staying at an Airbnb in Virginia, like, an hour from the racetrack, and after we make it off of this mountain in Damascus, Virginia, on our way down to Bristol.

So it's been, like, 20, 30 minutes.

I'm like, huh?

I left my phone.

So I had no choice but to just experience people.

There was no break.

I got to experience people enjoying each other's company, enjoying the race, which is pretty.

Pretty far flung from, you know, God's beautiful nature.

But watching people interact with each other and being fully absorbed in that moment was really special.

It really was just watching the community develop there.

It's pretty.

It's pretty awesome.

Also, cars going really fast is pretty cool.

That's fun.

Yeah, I love left turns.

Yeah, Well, I guess that's good.

Yeah, man, it would suck if I hated them.

I wouldn't be able to stand it, but I think they're almost as cool as right turn.

So, Rachel, do you have a God moment for us?

Yeah, I'm gonna, actually.

Yeah.

So shortly before hopping on this call with you guys to record this podcast, I had a conversation with the friends, and they revealed some.

Some things that are just, like, challenging.

They're happening in their life and got off the call.

And I love this person dearly.

And just like, I had this moment where it was like, I can't meet the need that they have.

They're not asking me to, just for context, but, like, they have a need that, like, I want so badly to be able to just rush in and fix what's happening for them and make everything better, and I can't.

It's not within my ability to do that.

And I didn't really know what to do.

And I just felt so helpless because I wanted to do something, and God very sweetly, sort of prompted me to spend some time with him, and it was really the best possible thing I think I could have done prior to getting on this call with you guys.

But one of the practices that I do when I am struggling to engage with God or like, my.

My head's just in a different place, or, like, my heart's really not feeling it, is that I. I don't try to pressure myself to, like, get into scripture and, like, study things, or I don't.

Sometimes you just don't want to leave your house.

And so one of the practices that works really well for me is this playlist that I've really slowly curated over time.

And so I just put on this playlist, and it was on shuffle.

And all of these songs are songs that speak to God's creative, redemptive restorative role in the world, both in creation and in my life or, like, an individual's life.

And so I'm all about the lyrics for songs, and this one song in particular, and it was on shuffle.

It's called the Secret Place.

And I listened to the acoustic version.

It's by Phil Wickham, and Madison Cunningham accompanies him on it, and they sing this really gorgeous duet.

But the words are just phenomenal.

And it's just very much that song really ministered to me.

It really Helps remind me that God is a place I can continually go back to when I'm.

I'm just sort of at my wits end and I don't know what to do and I'm feeling helpless.

And it was the balm to my heart that I needed to move forward from this hard conversation with this friend and to pray for them and come into this podcast.

So just.

I really feel like God comforted me by reminding me of his own character right before getting on the podcast with you guys.

And that's just timing.

I'm really grateful he had me take that pause and spend some time with him.

I desperately needed that.

That's awesome.

So if you like this episode, first of all, thank you for listening this far.

If you made it this far, consider sharing it with a friend.

Share with an enemy.

Share with your cousins, especially your cousins, and especially the closer it gets to Thanksgiving, they're obligated.

Or share it with a sea anemone.

Yeah.

Enemies.

Or see an enemy.

The closest sea you could find.

Yeah.

And make sure to check out our merch store.

We revamped.

Everything moved websites, changed distributors.

Everything's different.

Check it out.

If you weren't impressed before, you probably will be now.

And it's way better.

I mean, it's not a competition, but according to my wife, the whole church merch site is much better than the Systematic Ecology's new merch site because it's like simple and clean and yeah, I made a Kingdom Hearts reference, which is.

Crazy because they're ran by the same person.

Yeah, same person, same distributor.

Figure it out.

There's not a Kingdom Hearts shirt for whole church yet.

Yet.

But list of other shows.

If you want to hear me talk about Kingdom Hearts, Systematic Ecology is definitely an option for that.

If you want to hear Will, who I just referenced, my pastor, who's okay with me calling the altar the spiritual beach at church.

The church beach.

Will Rose, the homily.

You can listen to that podcast, the Homily with Pastor Chill, Will from Chapel Hill.

Yeah.

All on the network.

The amaz, All Pockets network link below stuff.

I'm bad at words, but we hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you so much for your time, Rachel.

We couldn't do this without you and our many wonderful guests, but we hope everyone enjoyed it.

Coming up in this series, we'll be speaking with Dr. Shailene Kendrick.

She's an expert in neuro relational and spiritual integration.

Then at the end of this series, we will have on Pastor Will Rose and Thomas Johnston to discuss their upcoming educational miniseries your matter matters in partnership with Onazow podcast and the ELCA at the end of season one, of course, Francis Chan will be on the show.

Yeah.

He doesn't know about it, though.

But someone does have to tell him.

Someone's gotta let him know.

Someone's gotta.

It won't be us.

You gotta invite him.

Because we won't.

I invite him.

We're too lazy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We still can.