Joshua Keith Craft

0:52 Like we talk about your neighbor and loving your neighbor and um a lot of that sort of stuff. How well do you know your neighbors? Because as I was driving in I saw a term I just I was driving and I saw a term that I love. It's called rural luxury specialist. It was like you're rural luxury specialist. And I don't know the brand like on a billboard or something. Yeah. I was on some plot of land building. A rural lux luxury specialist. Yeah. Which I started thinking about this like just this is so random but in the world where like people you can homeschool your kids, you can get remote education like if you you can have your groceries delivered to your house. If we didn't have a need for connection as human beings, if God did not put something in us that needed other people, what would be logical is to like move to as far away from everybody as you can where you can get a lot of land for a less amount of money and have an amazing house and just be all about you and like dude, I'm I'm rural luxury living, bro. Like that's that's the dream.

1:44 Well, I think Yeah, I I think that we I think the connection thing is such a big uh thought because I think we all even introverts and extroverts and however people would characterize themselves. I think we all try not to be as connected as we should be. And what I what I mean by that is even a person who's like extroverted, they kind of would only want to connect with people that that are like them, right? Yeah, man. That that's like you're talking about rapport cuz I'm you're probably you're an extrovert. I'm an extrovert. I love people. I'm not at all. Right. Yeah. I think it's I mean I there's a whole bunch of stuff to say about that, but you're I would say by default you're right. Well, culturally, you know, we just uh I think people have always tried to build echo chambers. Yeah. you know, people in, you know, all the way back to tribalism thousands and thousands of years ago when you had warring tribes, like you're not a part of our tribe.

2:40 Yeah. So, I'm only going to do life with people that are in my tribe. And and tribalism leads to all kinds of uh not great effects, I feel like. Yeah. But, well, yeah, there's that's what I'm saying. There's like a balance to this stuff. Yeah. Because we were talking about like last episode we talked about love your neighbor. And I think that just talking about, you know, we live in a culture today that we always are going to have there's always going to be at some point in any culture massive cultural issues that are taking place. So we're we live in 2026 now. And in 2026 in the country that we live in, there's uh illegal immigration dynamics. There's uh all kinds of religious religious implications that come with that. There's there's uh Islam. There's all kinds of different people groups that are coming in. And there's this there's this interesting definition of uh barbarism that I read recently that being a barbarian is uh is coming into a culture and refusing to assimilate.

3:46 Huh. And that's some of what we deal with in America a little bit right now is there's not America has always been a little bit of a melting pot. That's what makes America great. One of the many things I would say. Yeah. But to be the melting pot, you have to want to like all assimilate together. Got to have some heat. Yeah. And and now we're we have this increase in tribalism not just from people that are coming into America, but we have an increase in tribalism in politics. I mean, you're either you're pretty much now you're either far left or far right. Like you're not going to be there's no there no one's allowed culturally no one's allowed culture to be in the middle. Yeah. Middle of the road people don't really exist right now. No. Cuz even if you say, "Oh, I'm I'm in the middle of the road like I'm a centrist or whatever you want to say. I'm an independent. No one's going to allow you to stay there. They're going to hear what you say and then they're going to go, "No, here's what you are and here's here's where you belong." And it's, you know, we're we're we're just drawing battle lines all the time. And so I think that the challenge of that like to me the challenge of that is is that the question that I have to ask myself I was talking to someone about this recently. The question that I have to ask myself is does that represent New Testament or biblical whatever. Does it represent biblical believing and biblical living if I if I construct society that way?

5:12 Yeah, man. 12 tribes of Israel, bro. It's in the Bible. There we go. Answered your question. We got two tribes in America. We got we got conservatives. Conservatives and liberals. Yeah. There you go. So there we go. We're following the Bible. End of episode. Well, but when you look at, you know, when you look at Jesus saying, "Love my neighbor." And we talked about the Samaritan and all those different dynamics. The tension is uh if you're going to love somebody, you have to be willing to uh engage with them, be around them. Yeah. You know, I remember during the uh whenever the I can't I was I was like in college, I think, when the gay marriage debate got really big and it went to the Supreme Court and all that and um a lot of people assumed and and thought that this was even the idea that we would legalize gay marriage in America would be the downfall of American values and on and on. And um the the fascinating thing I was talking here's here's what I was here's the conversation that I was having with somebody. I was talking about how if you had your your conversational tone shifts when you're in relationship with somebody big time.

6:22 So a person can be very anti-homosexual, anti-gay, anti- whatever, anti-trans, anti all that stuff. Would you still be that way if a person who you really loved, like one of your children, was like, "Hey, I think I'm this right." Uh, I probably I'm I'm not really that that intense of a communicator on those issues, but I probably would not be very intense about those issues because I would hope that I could love this person in my life into transformation, right? And I think what's really interesting in the Bible is the the Bible says the goodness of God leads people to repentance. Mhm. So repentance is metanoia in Greek. It means it means to change your thinking. So I want someone to change their thinking. Like I want someone to buy into the idea that uh gender is male and female. Mhm. Right. Um the question becomes how do I how do I get someone to buy into that?

7:15 Or it should be I think it should be the question. How can I bring someone down this journey? Because most people just don't know what we know, right? We live in a we live in a and I've quoted this before on the podcast. We live in a country where 96% of Christians don't have a biblical worldview. Right? So we think we understand this stuff. We think, you know, we think that we really have a grasp on what it means to be a Christian, to build a Christian society, but then at the same time, we don't behave in Christian ways towards people who are who we feel like don't deserve it at times. Right now, there's a lot you just said. I could I could respond to a lot of different things, but I I think where I want to go if you're willing to follow is like so we talk about like loving your neighbor and we all think about like oh it's very difficult and like you know we we get concerned like if Muslims come in this is going to happen if we allow this foreign person this is going to happen but like we don't often I lived in the UK right and what I've seen this is a very human thing we don't often look in the mirror because it's it's a lot easier to see the threat of somebody else than the threat of our own actions, right? Cuz like in the UK cuz so the gay mar so gay marriage is a great example. I remember very specifically cuz at the time I'm a Bible believing Christian been raised. I was like dude this is we can't have this.

8:38 This is awful. You know what I mean? And the thought was it's going to destroy the sanctity of marriage. Marriage is a God-given idea. 100% true. And you know what the response back was from people who were pro uh gay marriage? Um as somebody who's very close to me said, "What are you talking about ruining the sanctity of marriage? the divorce rate amongst Christians is just as high as the as non-Christians. Yeah. When has there ever been? Yeah. Y'all have already ruined that. And I was like, "Oh, yeah." I didn't have anything to say. Now, here's here's my answer to that now. Just because it's it's been ruined doesn't mean we shouldn't still demand more from everybody. But at the time, I was like, "Man, that's a great point." Like, it's kind of hard to throw your stones from your glass house at that. And so, that is a great example because when I lived in the UK, the point I was making, there was open they when they were part of the EU, it was, you know, open open borders. So they're getting people from all over the the country, all over the the EU coming in. And the story was, man, we have these people coming in. They're taking our benefits and they're doing all this stuff and they're like, "That's bringing our country down." And then the immediate response is like, "Hang on a minute. The UK, as of the time that I was living there, is 92% white, okay? White Anglo-Saxon, aka they're from there. And who's on the who's on benefits? It's a bunch of people that are scamming the system that are from there. So like, yeah, you can get mad at the small percentage of people come from the outside. And I don't know whether you know these are huge generalizations but the bulk of the weight on the system is coming from within. And we're very I find that this is a common trend is like I think you sent me actually a uh this me this this like reel and it says it's a it was a meme. It says when you actually see who's who's the source of your problems and it's this big grizzly bear and he walks up and sees a mirror and just starts attacking the mirror.

10:13 Yeah. And it's like yeah that's it man. No, I think yeah, I think it's a, you know, cuz I I mentioned to you doing this next episode on loving your neighbor. I think that it's so easy to throw out love your enemies and, you know, which we did last episode and I think it's a very important conversation, but you have to have the right um you have to have the right sense of proportion to say it that way. Like what does God actually make us responsible for? And what you see, what I feel like you see in culture and what what the pull is for all of us, the temptation for all of us is to spend way more time thinking about what other people are doing than what we're doing. It's like you're you you'd said at the beginning of us recording this, like how do you even know your neighbors? Yeah. You know, it's the whole the whole reason why I live where I live is so I don't have to. I don't want to talk to them. I don't have nothing to do with them. I just want to be about my thing. Right. Right.

11:05 And that's like a funny uh introverted way of living life in in uh the particular neighborhood I happen to live in. But we're a part of a church together and we're part of a tribe and I feel very uh I feel like I know a lot of people. I have a lot of great relationships with people in that tribe. But then the question of being a neighbor is how well do you manage really your interpersonal relationships and how well do people feel loved and and all the Christian values and all the things we claim to hold like the virtues that we believe in and the things that we think and communicate are that important. Do the people around us really have an understanding of that? And you know there's this balance. There's like these two things. One is what are you really responsible for? Yeah. And the second thing is do you really live up to your own standards for that you set for other people right it's like having the discussion on the sanctity of marriage I think is really hard because for a generation now right 50% of marriages end in divorce the divorce rate theoretically the divorce rate's going down in America but that's so the 50/50 of that I guess a lot of people say is the balance of that is that people just aren't getting married anymore they're just living together Right.

12:23 And so, yeah, when you break up, there's not a statistic for uh breakups or whatever of people that cohabitate or whatever that dynamic is. And so, we have this ideal of in culture like people that go don't take their marriage as seriously maybe as they should. And there, you know, again, we're making generalizations. I don't like if you're listening to this, we're not talking about your specific situation. It's like people go like anytime I talk about divorce, people go, "Well, you don't understand what happened." I'm like, "Well, we're looking at broad statistics. I'm not talking about you and your specific situation." So, there's, you know, nuances everywhere. But we live in a culture that wanted to have the gay marriage debate about the sanctity of marriage as if we as a culture have valued that. Right. Right. We don't. Right. like we live in a culture where uh we've built this culture and this is the really the place I point I want to get to. We've built the culture that we live in that says that marriage really uh isn't that sacred.

13:26 Mhm. Like we've built that and we want that and well why h how would we how would we want that? Well, you know, if a person's unhappy or if they feel like, you know, we talked about this on a previous episode of the podcast, living life and thinking that people are there to serve you and that relationships, it's just the worst idea. It's like the most poisonous idea to go. I'm not going to be in relationships that don't serve me. That's that's absolutely ridiculous. It doesn't even Well, it's not ridiculous, but I would say if you want to be a great person, it makes no sense because the one of the purposes of being in great relationships if you're a great person or one of the purposes of being in relationships if you're a great person is to serve other people. It's not to be served. Like Jesus said that himself, I didn't come to to be served. I came to serve. So, if you want to have great relationships, you should go into the relationship thinking, how can I serve these people? Right? So to develop a cultural narrative that says these people exist to serve me has all these follow-on effects of then we approach our marriages that way and we approach you know I've seen people approach their relationship with their kids that way where they have a dream for what their kids need to go do. So my kid needs to be a professional basketball player or my kid needs to be the smartest kid in their class or my son's going to be this have this whatever imaginary level of masculinity as he grows up or whatever that is. Like we project all these expectations on other people whether that's a a relationship, a child or whatever. We project that because of what that does for us for that person to be that.

14:57 Right. Yeah. It's selfishness is in the simplest form. And like you want to make your life hard, just be really selfish. Well, and the and the thing I think we don't really readily admit to ourselves is how selfish that we all are. Yeah. Cuz if I can sit there and say, "Well, I'm really selfish." Yeah. Yeah. And I have selfish motivations and selfish desires. Then what I can do is I can look at how I'm approaching any aspect of my life in relationships, whether that's who I'm voting for or who I'm spending time with, and go, why am I really why am I really investing time in this? Because if we were honest, most people will just do these things based on what it does for them. Yeah. Personally, we get this pumped into us. So this is where I mean I think you talked about we talked about this on a previous episode but the comfort and convenience message that we have as a capitalistic society. I think an unore value. Yeah. An unwanted effect of that is that we make it all about us because everywhere we're getting that message drive-thru this instantaneous this we can have it delivered to your door. Like you start to get the message. Yeah. It really is about me and my and what I'm doing and like look it's great. I love having Amazon drop a package at my door and knowing that like I don't have to go out and do stuff. Like there's a month every year where I'm on my own cuz my family's in the UK. I make it a goal to not go to the grocery store. Like I I hate going to the grocery store and I still do end up there like usually once or twice. But by and large I get it all dropped on my doorstep. I'm like this is amazing. So do I love that? Yes. But but there's a very big difference from going like man this really helps serve the the the vision that I have and the mission that I'm on as opposed to like man this just makes it easy for me.

16:29 Yeah. Like just because something is available to us doesn't mean that it's good for us. Right. So it's pumped into us all the time. So, so we have selfishness and it's pumped into us cuz cuz we want it to be. I mean, that's the thing about It feels great, dude. Yeah. That's the thing to me about and that's that's what am I responsible for. That's the thing to me about talking about like social media algorithms and and all that stuff is these algorithms are uh we we communicate as if this stuff was built with malicious intent, right? To uh take advantage of us. all all we if you live in a capitalist society the idea behind capitalism is we're going to create a solution to a problem that you're saying that you have and then we're going to monetize that solution. So the we want the algorithm to be the way that it is like our our habits on social media are what are creating the algorithm that we go well that algorithm is our enemy. Right.

17:30 Right. And yeah, people are like, "Oh, we're all on echo chambers." It's like, do you want to sit there and listen to people you disagree with all day and get there's a reason why you don't watch whatever news channel you know has the opposite view. And so, like I was saying, like people have always tried to build echo chambers, but now we live in a world where it's easier than ever to do that. But then when stuff goes, let's not say stuff goes bad, but when stuff doesn't go the right way, we blame it on culture or the algorithm or whatever, whatever. When really this stuff has been constructed to meet some kind of need that we're saying that we have. And what I mean practically by that is we we approach life and we don't readily admit our selfishness. Right? So we're talking about selfishness. We don't readily admit our selfishness. The whole idea of like original sin in the Garden of Eden was us thinking that we knew better than God.

18:26 And that I think that right there cuz I've heard you say this before and I think it's so profound. That right there is what is causing our ruin is that we're we we don't realize how little we know because we want to put ourselves on the throne. And so I it's funny. I I knew we were going to talk something about this and I feel like we're going to a different place which is what we always do and I love it. I was talking with Ren about this this morning because I was I was realizing another friend that I've known since high school is getting divorced, right? And here's what I think we're terrible at doing. When we put ourselves on the throne, we work out our circumstances and we go, "Well, I'm going to do this because this is what it's going to lead to." And we are always wrong and yet we don't realize it. So like hookup culture, people are starting to realize that hookup culture brought a lot of unintended consequences with it. But like from a logical standpoint of I like sex, I like women. And like, wouldn't it be great if we could both just have a great time, enjoy each other, and then if it starts to get to the point where it's like the unpleasant stuff, like, you know what, we're not really going to we don't want to be together forever. We're just having fun right now. Like, let's just both go our separate ways. Logically, that sounds awesome, except for the fact that we didn't design sex and we didn't design relationships. So, what you find now is you find all these people that are going down the line, and there's people who are much more qualified than I am that talk about it. Well, you know what they we don't talk about a lot is is how difficult divorce is. I've walked through with some of my best friends.

19:44 They've gone through divorce. It's brutal. Oh, it's horrible. It's horrible forever. Yeah. And I've watched people who have gotten remarried like especially if you have kids. I mean, your kids, you know, you can say whatever you want to say. Like a person can justify it however, but a everybody I knew who was a child of divorce, people that I'm watching grow up in divorced families, their life is objectively worse. Yeah. And that's exactly like and there'll always be that person, well you my divorce was like there's people who have divorce parties and I'm like look man this is not and this what I mean we we are doing the things wrong that are causing us more pain and we don't even realize it. We're horrible at relating the effects to the cause because we're putting ourselves on the throne. And that's Eve. Hey fruit is good for I saw it was good for it was pleasing to the eye and good for for food and it would give me wisdom because you know why wouldn't I want to have more wisdom and know things like God? That's a good thing. Oh, whoops. You know, actually, it wasn't what you thought at all. And like, it doesn't get covered, man. Like, people have talked, there has been some coverage on like abortion where they'll actually talk to the women and you hear how brutal it is for the women emotionally and like and all those things. But I don't think we go in and go like, "Hey, what's the actual net result of divorce?" Because all the people who are going like, "Hey, I just want to be happy." Are you are you actually net happier after your divorce?

21:00 Like sure, maybe in the moment it felt good because that, you know, because they just wouldn't do this or oh, I don't have to deal with that anymore. You gave up one pain to go subscribe to a much worse one. That's typically what I've seen. Yeah. I have this thought process or like a belief. It's it's in a virtuous society, you don't worry about invasion. And and what I mean by that is so like I go back to you know you look at current events like right now in in places like Minnesota like there's all this discussion on people coming from Somalia and not integrating with American culture. You have places like Dearborn Michigan which are pretty much majority Muslim at this point. There's all these different there's you have you know what's happening in New York all that stuff. And so people are like we've been invaded like we've been our country is uh you know falling apart at the seams because we're having all these outside external influences come in. And it's not that I don't take these things seriously.

21:56 Um the unfortunate thing is that we are not a virtuous society like you know I mean I because I I believe if you if you are a person so to go back to what we're responsible for if I'm a person of virtue and I'm a virtuous person and I make decisions with the right criteria like I have the right philosophy and I'm really trying to make all the decisions I can in my life in accordance with truth and do the right thing even when it's the harder thing. I'm not going to deal with the kind of things that other people have to deal with. I'm not going to deal with people wouldn't even if America quote unquote if America was strong quote unquote people wouldn't come in and take advantage of our weakness right because we would be so strong virtuously. And so people go and I this isn't about you know people go well Donald Trump is working to restore that.

22:50 I don't think some people say that. With all Yeah. With all due respect for me, I'm not a political person, so it's not whatever. I don't think that it's it's getting better. I don't I in in my opinion, I think we're moving the needle a certain direction. Uh I think the pendulum is swinging, but the the fix I disagree on the fix being a political fix. I think I think the fix is uh when we as people as individuals like individual families, individual men, individual women, when we make a decision to live virtuously, the country goes in that direction. Yeah. And the problem that we have is there's a there's generations now, and we're one of these generations. So there's generations now of people who have not taken this seriously enough and they've taken for granted the uh the the privileges that we've had to live in a society that was built by virtuous people. I mean I think the founding of the western world on Judeo-Christian principles all that different kind of stuff these people fought and they they fought for that and we forsaken those principles. We for we for we forsake those principles a long time ago. It wasn't like we just now slipped a little bit and stuff happened. It's we have not worked in my opinion, we as individuals, okay? And I could say we have not worked to build a virtuous society, but that's not on me. That's not on me as an individual to build a virtuous society.

24:17 But what it is on me to do is for me to live out of a a virtuous life. And we live in a country where half the marriage is in in divorce, where people have divorce parties, where people's approach to life is just generally nonvirtuous and it's about comfort and it's about convenience and it's about what I like and what I want. When we when we create a world like that and we have these things are the side effects and consequences of a root cause and we can we can spend our life you know what what people try to do is they spend their life trying to treat the symptoms. Yeah. So they go okay well America is under threat and we have to pass all these all these anti-Islam laws. I'm not against that. I think that, you know, I think it's funny to even think that you would have to like in Texas they ban Sharia law, which is funny to say that because like we already have laws, so why would we need to ban other laws that aren't the laws that we already have? I get why we're doing it. It's just interesting.

25:19 We're going to ban these other laws. It's not the most logical thing, but at the same time, it does. But like, you think about places like Japan, which are very like Japan is has become notoriously anti-Islam. like they banned uh they banned burkas. Oh wow. Uh throughout their whole country, restaurants aren't allowed to serve uh non-halal they're not allowed to serve halal food which is like allowed for Muslims to eat. So that all that's one one way to handle the problem. But to me like if we're going to talk specifically about loving our neighbor and how do we love our neighbor really well? Well, we have to start with really living according to the truth that we claim to believe. And and my challenge to everybody listening to this, it's so easy to get focused on culture. Like it's so easy to get focused on the country, on the bigness of things, on whose fault is this, on how do we fix how do we fix what's happening in America, you know, how do we fix what's happening in the world?

26:18 And that's ultimately to me that's ultimately God's responsibility. My responsibility is me. Mhm. me like how am I in my marriage? Yeah. How am I with my children? How am I with living out the things that I claim to live according to truth on? And if enough people do that, like if I love my neighbor enough, like if I love you as my neighbor enough to not just to to walk in this balance of grace and truth where like I'm going to be graceful to you, but I'm also going to be truthful. like you know like if you if if you know we're friends and you come to me and say man I'm thinking about leaving Rian it's like well no Nick you can't do that man right and I'm going to be truthful with you no matter what the dynamic is and you would do the same thing for me in my marriage is you're going to be truth the truthful with me because you care about you care about me as an individual but you don't you don't put yourself in this position where you become so empathetic that you allow me to go down a really dark road yeah and the reason that works is because you and I both subs subscribed to the same beliefs and source of truth which is the word of God. So like when I listen to you talk about like you know I call I would I would kind of phrase as like the enemy within aka like what's actually invading us is our own lack of um integrity I guess you could say that we're not willing to we're not we're not building virtuously our our lack of desire to do that hard.

27:41 It's hard. I mean you like we've talked about you live in a culture that we have created that has that has made us comfortable that that exists to make us comfortable that is just non-stop kind of creating this echo chamber type world where hey you know what you only have to hear what you want to hear and you don't ever have to interact with anything that's challenging for you but the way that I live out uh greatness the way that I live out virtue is intentionally go interact with things that challenge me. I didn't mean to cut you off. No, it's okay. I was just going to say to me, I think this all boils back down to the breakdown of the family. Yeah. You look at how God designed the world. He puts man and woman together to do the work he's given man to do. He gives him a helper and a woman. And then when you look at throughout the Old Testament, he says, "Talk about these things when you're at your table, when you're coming, when you're going." AKA, the parents are meant to be the ones that teach the kids. If you oversimplify this, and I and I think that this is oversimplifying it, but it is 100% true.

28:42 If every single family was really really great at teaching, at taking care of their own, we wouldn't need a government, we wouldn't need uh like we wouldn't need public services because every family would be looking after itself and be tied in with other families. Now, that that's obviously hasn't worked out because there's all sorts of broken people and that's that's what sin does. But if you look at it from if you look at it from a real base level, like Adam and Eve's sin then trickles down to their kids. one kid kills another and it's like we've we've not put God in his rightful place. We're terrible at correlating cause and effect. And so then you have people celebrating like non-nuclear families and making it out to be like, oh, you know, that was an old way of thinking. No, that was God's way of thinking. It doesn't change just because you don't like it or because you know, oh, I know this person and they're really, you know, they're actually doing a great job and they're they're on their single mother or they're, you know, a gay couple or what, whatever. insert whatever exception to the rule that now you think undoes anybody's argument.

29:38 Dude, God's on the throne. We're terrible at what at at at knowing what's actually good for us. And if from a simple level, if we could all have that belief like what you said, so like if Josh is going through hard times, he's got me, he's got Garrett, he's got other friends like, "Dude, here's what you need to do and we're going to tell you something that you're probably not going to like and we're going to help you walk through it." Man, society would be way different. Yeah. Well, there's that one saying, and I think it's really cliche at this point, but it's like uh I love a good cliche. Soft times create Yeah. Good good times create uh or no, strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Hard times create good create strong men. And so when you see that historically, I think it's just this shows you the fallen state of humanity, you know, and I and I think one of the things we have to like really admit to ourselves, you know, people go, "Oh, it's always getting worse." Like people for generations have been saying, "Oh, it's the next generation. Everything's so much worse. Everything's so much worse."

30:37 People keep saying that. Like there was a a thing I saw recently where it was it started in like the 1200s and it was all these different thoughts that older generations had about younger generations and they were all the same thing you know they've lost their morality they've lost blah blah blah. So I think we always have this thought process that it's getting worse and that things are you know things are trending more towards entropy. Um that's f that's a fine belief to have if you don't believe in God. You know, when you believe that God really does hold things together and everything's up to God at the end of the day, then you go, "Okay, what am I really responsible for?" And I think it's it's such a simple it's a simple thought and it can be over overly simplistic to be like, "Hey, we have a responsibility." Jesus said, "You have a responsibility to love your neighbor and bless those who curse you." Mhm. I think that's actually really hard to do. I think it's really hard to do in a in a cultural way. It's really hard to do when you're confronted with the issues that we're confronted with in culture. And I didn't want to leave that conversation just there because I think the challenge is if you want to look at the problem and the cure. So the problem is that this issue or these issues that we're talking about were created over a really long period of time and we're not going to solve them instantaneously.

31:50 We're not going to solve them with a policy change. We're not going to solve these are the pro the the the problems that we're seeing in society and the problems that we've always seen in society are the problems of the human heart. Mhm. You know, it's Jeremiah 17. The Bible says the human heart is desperately wicked. So, how do we fix it, right? How do we practically learn to love our neighbor really well? We've got to understand, and I'll just we'll just end with this. We've got to understand the dynamic that we have with God that we don't deserve God's love, right? God God loves us anyway. His his his love is extravagant. His love is immeasurable. Um there's nothing we can do to escape from his love. God loves us in spite of ourselves, but he also invites us into a life of transformation. So then there's a responsibility that we have to journey well in life to not justify poor decisions. You know, when you look at culture, when you look at young people in the streets who are confused and you know, the Bible talks about how Jesus saw Jesus when they walked into Jerusalem, he looked at all these people who were lost and confused and upset and Bible says he had compassion on them. And the word the word compassion means he suffered alongside them, right?

33:03 So when I look at when I look at people like that, I go, man, like where are these people's parents at? because it's usually a one-to-one issue. I'm not saying it's like that all the time. So, how do I how do I I can't fix it for that person. What I can make sure is it's fixed for my kids, right? What I can make sure is it's fixed for the people in my life that I don't give myself, no matter what culture says, I don't let myself off the hook of living virtuously, of believing in virtue. And then there is a tension. There is a when you decide to really embrace God's love and try to love people the way God loves them, you live your life in this tension that you don't really know the answer to. Like what's the right amount? What's the right way to balance this? How do I approach this situation? But the goal should be how can I be a how can I be a good neighbor? How can I love someone the way that God loves me? And if you are living, if you're seeking to do your best to live that out in your own life, the odds are over a long period of time, problems like this get solved because you're inviting other people into a life that is way beyond and it's challenging and it's it can be costly, but it's produces fruit and it takes a lot it takes a while to produce fruit and the what we have now in culture is a product of what we've sown for generations. And if we want the future to look better, we've we've got to start sowing different.

34:37 Thank you for listening to The Dialog. Make sure to like, share, and subscribe. And also, if you think someone else would enjoy this, please send it to them. If you want to get in touch or learn more about me, what I think, speak, and write, you can go to joshuacraft.com, or you can also follow Nick and I on Instagram. Our handles are in the show notes. We'll see you next time.