Living On Common Ground
Does it feel like every part of your life is divided? Every scenario? Every environment? Your church, your school, your work, your friends. Left, right. Conservative, liberal. Religious, secular. From parenting styles to school choice, denominational choice to governing preference, it seems you're always being asked to take a side.
This is a conversation between a progressive Christian and a conservative atheist who happen to be great friends. Welcome to Living on Common Ground.
Living On Common Ground
Reflections from the Beach
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The most dangerous current in your life might not feel like danger at all. Jeff opens a new series, “Reflections from the Beach,” with the story behind the stories: a community tornado that revealed what people can become for each other, a pandemic that turned everyday choices into tribal tests, and a church season where United Methodist disaffiliation fights and LGBTQ inclusion debates left real emotional scars.
From there, we move from crisis to recovery without pretending it’s neat. Jeff shares why a solo Appalachian Trail sabbatical mattered, what it did to his sense of identity beyond “Pastor,” and how his faith has shifted from defending doctrines to paying attention to what gives life. Along the way, he names the thinkers and frameworks that shaped his language, from Stoicism and resilience to Paul Tillich’s “ground of being,” John’s logos, and the idea of a divine current oriented toward connection, love, and radical hospitality.
The beach becomes a surprisingly sharp teacher. A rip current safety sign turns into a metaphor for spiritual formation, political polarization, and relationships: the calm channel between waves can be the thing that pulls you out to sea. We also explain how the series will work each week, why Jeff reads each reflection straight through before the conversation starts, and how our show lives in the tension of a progressive Christian and a conservative atheist choosing curiosity over winning.
Subscribe, share the show with a friend who needs a better kind of conversation, and leave a review if it helps. Then tell us what came up for you: what “easy path” in your life has been more dangerous than it looked?
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https://livingoncommonground.buzzsprout.com
https://www.jeffreystreszoff.com/
jeffrey.streszoff@gmail.com
Does it feel like every part of your life is divided? Every scenario, every environment, your church, your school, your work, your friends, left, right, conservative, liberal, religious, secular. It seems you always have to take a side. This is a conversation between a progressive Christian and a conservative atheist who happen to be great friends. Welcome to Living on Common Ground. Do you think if we met today, we would still be friends?
SPEAKER_01I don't know. But we're friends now.
SPEAKER_00A mom is known as a mom because they are living in a dog. Man, so well, we want a few games. Y'all fools think that's something? Man, that ain't nothing, y'all. And you know what else? We ain't nothing either. Yeah, we came together in camp. Cool. But then we're right back here, and the world tells us that they don't want us to be together. We fall apart like we ain't a damn bit of nothing, man.
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SPEAKER_01Welcome to Living on Common Ground.
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SPEAKER_01I'm Jeff. Lucas isn't here today. And I want to acknowledge that right away because if you're a regular listener, you're
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SPEAKER_01probably used to hearing
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SPEAKER_01his voice coming in about 30 seconds after mine to disagree with something. It's kind of our thing, a progressive Christian with a conservative atheist sitting across from each other week after week, trying to find common ground that we actually share. That's the premise, and that's always been the premise. But today, Lucas has asked me to record alone, which feels strange and appropriate at the same time, because what I'm introducing today is something that started alone. It was written alone. And in some ways, it was wrestled with alone, or at least with whatever company you find when you're sitting at the edge of the ocean before anyone else is awake. This episode is the beginning of a new series that uh Lucas and I are going to be doing, and we're calling it Reflections from the Beach. And so over the next several weeks, he and I are going to work our way through a collection of short pieces that I wrote during a couple trips to the beach. So each episode, I'll read one of the reflections aloud, and then we'll talk about it. And then we'll follow the thread wherever it leads. You'll hear Lucas bring his angle and I'll bring mine. And somewhere in the middle, or sometimes on completely opposite sides, we'll try to find what's worth saying. But first, I need to tell you how we got here, because the beach didn't come out of nowhere. Nothing ever does, really. So I need to take you back a few years, not to set up some dramatic arc, but because you can't understand what I was doing sitting on that beach writing about rip currents and sand, unless you know something about what came before. Now, a lot of you know that in March 3rd, 2020, if you're from Mount Juliet, Tennessee, that date really doesn't need much explanation. It's the day that a tornado came through in the early morning hours before anyone was at school, thank God. And it was the kind of destruction that doesn't leave you unchanged. Stoner Creek Elementary, West Wilson Middle School, entire neighborhoods were gone overnight. Families left sifting through what used to be their houses, trying to find things that mattered in piles of debris. And what happened in the aftermath is still one of the most remarkable things I've ever witnessed. People who had never swung a hammer showed up and swung hammers, and food appeared on doorsteps, and strangers became family. A community discovered that its greatest strength wasn't in what it owned, but in what it was willing to share labor, time, presence, hope. And I saw it happen and I got to be part of it. And then a few days later, the world press paused, and that was when COVID-19 arrived and everything stopped. And to be honest with you, um what I hoped for in those first weeks of the pandemic, um well, I I was serving and I currently serve a United Methodist congregation, and the denomination at that point had been tearing itself apart for um well for decades over human sexuality. And um, well, at least um four years into the formation in 1968, if you want to be precise on that, every general conference has been more painful than the last, and sanctuaries at that point had become battlegrounds, pastors had become casualties, and I had been living in the crossfire of that for years. And so when COVID hit, I thought, I genuinely thought that maybe a global pandemic would remind us that there were bigger things that are than our theological turf wars. And I thought of what Mount Juliet had just done in the rubble, and I thought maybe this is our chance to discover what actually matters. But in retrospect, it turns out I was spectacularly wrong. COVID didn't heal our divisions, it actually weaponized them. We would we we had to face like all kinds of questions, right? Like, would we require masks of worship? Uh, were vaccines a gift from God or a government conspiracy? Should we stream services or insist on gathering in person? Every single decision became a referendum on deeper tribal loyalties. And um I had a man uh join actually our we put together a COVID task force to try to determine like what was the best way for us to proceed. And and we were doing that on Zoom, and one of the guys actually um joined the Zoom call wearing a military-grade gas mask. And obviously he wasn't doing it for protection, but as a statement. Um, you know, and and I received emails accusing me of choosing politics over Jesus because we had followed the CDC guidelines. And all of that, you know, is going on the same the same day, even. Um the pattern was almost like an algorithm. It was so precise. People in our congregation who supported LGBTQ plus inclusion tended to take the pandemic seriously, and those who opposed it tended to view precautions as government overreach. It wasn't universal, but it was unmistakable. And what it told me was that the pandemic hadn't created these divisions. It had simply revealed what had always been there, or at least what had been bubbling just under the surface, waiting to show up and to sort of disrupt the Sunday morning politeness. And in the meantime, the denomination created a window for congregations to disaffiliate, to sever ties with the larger church. And in our congregation, traditionalists threatened to leave if we didn't disaffiliate. Progressives threatened to leave if we did. The exhausted middle, good people who just wanted to worship God and love their neighbors, held on desperately, hoping somehow it could all work out. And then two weeks before all of this sort of imploded, I went on my Appalachian Trail sabbatical in early 2023. And um, our leadership had made the decision to remain United Methodist. And um, and the exodus began immediately. Over 30 people walked away from the church that um I and our leadership team had spent eight years trying to hold together. And just talking about it still makes me um a little uncomfortable, but but I want to be completely honest. When it happened, it was like ripping off a band-aid, and I and I kind of felt a little bit of relief because underneath the grief and the anxiety about our uncertain future, there was genuine relief that the constant threats that I had been facing were finally over. Because for eight years, ministry had felt like living in a minefield. Every sermon was scrutinized, every decision was contested, my phone had become an instrument of dread. Um, every ring, every notification sent my heart racing. Um I'm still dealing with some of that, and it's the reason that I um am so thankful for people that I can talk to about it. But I existed in a near constant state of fight or flight, and I had been called the devil incarnate for staffing decisions, screamed at for welcoming LGBTQ members too openly, screamed at for not being vocal enough in my support of those same members, and both from different people, sometimes um in the same season. And so when the SPRC, that's the Staff Parish Relations Committee, if you're not United Methodist, um, think of it kind of as the loving HR department for clergy, when they sat me down and gently, insistently told me I needed to take time off, they were right. I was running on fumes, and something in me was close to breaking. So I planned a solo hike on the Appalachian Trail, which was a little over 100 miles from I-40 to a place called Uncle Johnny's Hostel in Irwin, Tennessee. Um so it was supposed to be two weeks alone in the wilderness with my thoughts and my God and whatever the mountains had to teach me. Now, I've written about that hike separately in something that I called Reflections from the Appalachian Trail. And um, and it changed me more than I knew at the time. But the full story of those two weeks is for another day. What matters for right now is what the trail left behind and how it eventually found its way to the beach. So I came off that trail different. I don't mean that in a dramatic way. I wasn't transformed overnight into some kind of serene mountain sage. I still had the same church waiting for me, um, still had the same fractured relationships, the same anxious tendencies that had gotten me into trouble in the first place, the same work of rebuilding what the divisions had damaged. But something had shifted in how I was seeing things. Out there, stripped of everything familiar, no chair rows, no hymnal pages, no committee meetings, no emails, no denominational politics, I had started to experience God differently, not as a distant deity sitting in judgment, not as the tribal guardian of whatever theological position my side had staked out. Something more immediate than that. Something woven into the exhaustion and the beauty and the kindness of strangers appearing exactly when I needed them. Something that felt less like a cosmic accountant tallying my failures and more like a current running through everything, oriented toward life and connection and love. I also came off the trail with a clearer sense of who I am. The trail has a tradition. Every hiker gets a trail name. You don't choose it yourself. It finds you, usually through some moment of triumph or failure or absurdity that other hikers witness. Mine was just Jeff, because when people asked my name, I kept saying, My name is just Jeff. It's a reflex I've developed over years of people calling me Pastor Jeff and me wanting to reduce, uh, to resist that by um I resist being reduced by it to a job title. So um I thought I was being humble. What the trail helped me to see was something truer, that I was trying to protect the ordinary, the person underneath the role, the guy who existed before anyone ever asked him to be anything other than himself. And out there surrounded by people who had shed their old identities and were figuring out who they were on the mountain, just um, that's a like quote, just started to feel like the most honest thing I could say. Not in a diminishing way, but kind of as a celebration, a declaration that being fully simply human was enough. And I carried that back with me. And eventually it followed me to the beach. So the reflections that you're going to hear in this series were written during a couple trips to the ocean, early mornings before anyone else was awake, coffee in hand, watching the Atlantic do what it's always done. And I want to tell you what I was actually doing there because it matters. I wasn't trying to write essays. I wasn't trying to produce content or meet a deadline. I was trying to think, really think slowly and carefully about some things that had been circling in my mind since the trail, about God, about what it means to belong to something, about how danger presents itself, about the difference between what looks safe and what actually holds you. And the ocean turned out to be a remarkably good thinking partner for all of that. It started with a sign. There's a laminated card tacked to the lifeguard post at the beach access point. It's sunbleached, salt warped, the kind of thing that you've probably walked past a hundred times without really stopping to read it. It has a diagram showing the channels where the water moves differently, where the surface looks almost calm between the churning rows of surf, the rip current. And the card says, if you find yourself in one, do not swim against it, swim parallel to the shore, let it carry you past its edge, then come in. And I stood there reading that card for a long time, and then something started to unlock. Because we spend so much energy, so much of our collective energy, the human energy, teaching each other to recognize danger that presents itself as danger. We build systems for it, we post signs, we whitewash the things that will contaminate us and say, here, this is uh here, stay back. And most of the time, those systems work well enough. But what the systems are not built for is the danger that presents itself as calm, as the easier path, as the safe passage between two breaking waves. The rip current doesn't announce itself. It doesn't need to. It's patient. It has the whole ocean behind it. The wave that crashes on the shore almost never kills anyone. I wrote that down, and then I kept writing about the sand, how the pale, bright sand up near the dunes looks clean and inviting and postcard perfect, but it's soft because it hasn't been tested. How the dark sand at the waterline, the sand that looks like something has happened to it, is firm because the water has moved through it, compacted it, revealed what it's actually made of. How we've built whole systems for reading the world by its color. Bright means good, dark means trouble. Soft and warm our yielding means safe. And how the beach doesn't know any of that. It's all the same sand, it's all the same ocean. What changes is where you're standing in relation to the water and whether the water has reached you yet. About what it means to go ten miles offshore, out where the ocean owns you completely, where there's no horizon to fix your eyes on, where you've gotten the distance wrong from something you love. And about what it means to come back to shore where the same water meets you instead of overwhelming you, where it offers you something, where there's a right distance that isn't about safety in any absolute sense, but about relationship, about being close enough to feel the thing without being consumed by the thing. These are the reflections. They're short. And uh some of them are only a page or two, but I hope they're the kind of short that opens up into something larger, uh the kind of small door that leads into a big room. So when Lucas um when I gave Lucas these things to read, when when he when he read them, they were on he he he's been reading them on um my Substack account. And to be honest with you, not just Lucas, but anyone, I'm I'm genuinely not sure what what you, if you're reading them or what Lucas was gonna make of them. You know, we even though the Lucas and I have a lot in common, we are also different. Um and um and and so um you know, we this isn't just something that we perform for a podcast. Uh a lot of people think that um that we really are very similar. And in a lot of ways we are, but in a lot of ways we're not. And so um after he read them, he texted me and he said, uh, we need to actually do this as a series. He said, I got I got a lot of thoughts about it. And um I've been I've been thinking about why. And I think it's because the reflections aren't really about faith. At least not in the way that usually can divide us. They're about paying attention, about the difference between what looks true and what is, about what it means to be at the right distance from the things that matter most to you, about how the same beach looks completely different depending on where you're standing and in relation to the water. These are just human questions. They don't require particular theology to be able to begin to feel the weight of the questions. And I think I'm hoping that Lucas saw himself in them, even though he doesn't share my faith. And and if he has then that tells me something important about what I've actually written. And so um I want to say something here about Lucas. Um because people sometimes ask me how we do this, how how a progressive Christian and a conservative atheist manage to have honest, respectful, um substantive conversations week after week without either of them performing tolerance they don't actually feel. And I I think, and Lucas can correct me if I'm wrong, because well that's what we do, but I think that the answer is that Lucas brings things to our conversation that I genuinely don't have on my own. Um he's not sentimental about belief. Not really. Um he doesn't give ideas a pass because they sound spiritual or because they come from a tradition he respects. When I when I say something that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, he tells me. But he's not unkind. He's he can be he's just clear. And that discipline has made me a better thinker. Um it's made me say things I actually mean rather than things that sound right in a sermon. He also has a way of finding the human thing in any argument. The thing underneath the position, the real question that's driving the stated question. And I think that's an extraordinary gift in a conversation partner, maybe especially for someone like me who has spent years learning how to talk about meaning without always saying what he actually means. And so I think this series is gonna be some of the most interesting conversation that we've had on this show. Because the material isn't abstract, it comes from specific mornings, specific images, specific experiences of sitting in the presence of something larger than myself and trying to figure out what to do with that. In and I hope that Lucas is gonna push on all of it. And if he does, which I'm I'm assuming he will, then I'll be glad that he does. Because I want to be transparent with you about the intellectual and spiritual currents that were running through me when I wrote these pieces that are still running through me. Nothing comes from nowhere, and I'd rather name my influences to pretend I arrived at these ideas on my own. On the Appalachian Trail, I read the Stoic philosophers Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca. I'd encountered them before, but out there in the cold and the mud, their ideas landed differently. Marcus Aurelius writing about the um impediment to action, advancing action, what stands in the way becomes the way. Epictetus on the only person you need to be better than being the person you were yesterday. And these weren't abstractions when you're out there. Um recently I I took uh another, you know, several hikes and paddling, and and and again, the these aren't instructions for how to keep moving when everything in you wants you to stop. That's exactly what they are. I'd also been sitting with thinkers who were pushing me to reimagine what I thought I knew about God. Paul Tillich's concept of God as the ground of being, not a being among other beings, but the very fabric of existence itself, John's logos, the the organizing principle of the universe that became flesh, the idea drawn from Paul's letter to the Colossians that what we call Christ isn't just. A historical figure, but a cosmic reality, the one in whom all things hold together, the philosopher Peter Rollins and his concept of lack and the liberating possibility that peace comes not from certainty, but from the courage to live with what we can't know. Scott Stillman, whose book Wilderness I read on the trail, and who wrote something that kept circling back to me long after I finished it, that we get so lost in our own thinking that we miss what's already here, that the world isn't actually against us, but supporting us, loving us, guiding us along, that we just need to put down the gadgets, lose the baggage, and take a long walk, open our eyes to the wonder that is life. Peter Ens is another one that has just been so influential. And we've been fortunate enough to be able to talk with Peter Rollins and Peter Enns on this podcast. Thinking about that, I might reach out to Scott Stillman and see if we can if we can get him to come on. Justin Martyr is another one. Just I could go on and on and on, but I want to be careful, right? I'm not going to spend this series defending theological positions or propositions, even, or arguing for a particular doctrine, because that's not what the reflections are. They're observations from a beach, from a trail, from the specific texture of a life that has had more breaking in it than I would have chosen. But the thinking underneath them is real. And I want you to know where it comes from. What I came to believe, what I'm coming to believe, what the beach kept confirming in image after image is that there is something moving through everything. Something oriented. It's not neutral. It's pointed toward life, toward connection, toward love. Call it God, call it the logos, call it the organizing principle of the universe, call it energy. The name matters less than the recognition. And the recognition for me came not through argument, but through attention, through the quality of light on water at six in the morning, through what a rip current taught me about how danger works, through the sand. Lucas will have his own name for it, or maybe even no name at all. And I think that's what's going to make this conversation worth having. So let me walk you through the format so that you're going to know what to expect for the next several episodes. Each episode will begin with me reading the reflection aloud, the way it was written, straight through, without interruption or commentary. I recorded myself reading all of them, and I want you to hear them in full before Lucas and I start pulling them apart. There's something that gets lost when you paraphrase. So these pieces were written to be read as a whole. And I want you to have that experience before the conversation begins. Then after the reading, Lucas and I are going to talk. Obviously, there's no script. That's never been how we do this. We're just going to follow the thread. Some weeks the conversation will probably end up quite philosophical. Some weeks it might get personal. And knowing us at some point, you may hopefully even hear some genuine disagreement about things that matter to both of us. And we don't perform agreement for the sake of the podcast. If Lucas thinks I'm wrong, he'll say it. And I will, of course, extend the same courtesy to him. But here's the thing: I want you to understand about how Lucas and I work. We've learned, and it has taken time and sometimes I think effort to disagree without dismissing each other. We've learned to be curious about where the other person is coming from rather than simply waiting for our turn to root to have our rebuttal. Not because we've resolved our differences, but because we've decided that the conversation itself is worth more than winning it. We keep showing up to look for the ground that we actually share. And sometimes that ground is not where either of us expected to find it, which is, of course, why we call the show Living on Common Ground. Not because we found a comfortable middle position where nobody is challenged, but because we keep looking for it honestly, together in real time. All right, so the second part of the format is we're going to want to hear from you. So at the end of each episode, yeah, you're invited to share your response to that week's reflection. Not just whether you liked it. We want to know what it brought up for you, what it reminded you of, where maybe you push back the connection you didn't expect to make, the moment in your life that came to mind while you were listening. And you can you can make those comments on my Substack, Jeffrey Strezzoff. You can email me at Jeff underscore, let's see, no, do it this one, Jeffrey.strezov, S-T-R-E-S-Z-O-F-F at gmail.com. You can email me, and then um we're gonna go ahead and uh read, share the comments. We're gonna do that. All right, so let's see. Um the so the following week, then um, before I read the next reflection, I'll share some of what you sent. So we can hear the voices in the room because they matter. And so these reflections came out of my specific experiences, but the questions inside them belong to everyone. Rip currents, the difference between what looks safe and what actually holds you, what it means to be at the right distance from the things you love. You have your own versions of all of this, and we want to hear them. And then you'll find that we'll also put a link to share your responses in the show notes. Um, and we'll do that in every episode. I think that that might be helpful too. So what I hope for, what I I want, I want to tell you that I'm hoping for uh I actually have real hopes for this series. Not sort of vague aspirations, but but um but honest, an honest hope. If you don't know by now, um, I'm a peacemaker. And um it's it's not a role I choose so much as something that I recognize about myself. Sometimes I recognize it reluctantly after years of watching how I move through the world. Um, my deepest motivation, the thing underneath almost everything I do is a desire to bring peace to places that are fractured, to create spaces where people who have every reason to stay separate somehow end up choosing to sit around the same fire. I do this because I truly believe that's the way to make the world a better place. And I have a desire to make the world a better place. I saw this, um at least I saw what it looks like in the aftermath of the tornado, right? Strangers with hammers showing up to help neighbors that they'd never met. And I saw it on the trail, and I saw it at Uncle Johnny's hostel in Irwin, Tennessee on the night before I finished my hike. I sat around a fire that night with a Southern Baptist elder and his daughter, a Hasidic Jew, a high school dropout who asked better theological questions than most seminary graduates I'd met, and a lesbian couple from Colorado who radiated the easy confidence of people comfortable in their own skin. And it dawned on me that under any normal circumstances, these group of people might never occupy the same space. But the trail had stripped away pretense, and the fire brought them together, and something happened in that circle that I still find hard to name. Not agreement, not the resolution of their differences, but something else, a recognition of shared humanity underneath everything that divided them. A willingness to be present with each other anyway. I watched the hospital owner Terry, who had bought the place just a year before, welcome each of them without sorting them first, without running any kind of ideological background check. And I thought this is what church was supposed to be. Not a fortress protecting the righteous from contamination, but a fire where everyone can warm themselves. No questions asked about whether they deserve to be there. And in fact, I told Terry the next morning over coffee, you thought you bought a hostel, but in reality you bought a church. He smiled at me and he said, maybe, maybe. But what I hope for from this series is something like that, like that fire. I hope that these reflections give us all, Lucas and me and you, a place to sit together with questions that matter for longer than is comfortable, long enough to recognize something shared underneath all the differences. That's it. That's the whole hope. And I also do hope that you, in finding something, are willing to share it. To something as simple as just share the podcast with somebody. Or or maybe you'll have your own conversation. There's there's something I want to say before I close this episode. And it's been sitting with me a while, and I've been talking and and I don't want to leave it out. Two years had passed since I walked off that trail in Irwin um when all of this started happening, right? And I sat on the front porch of Uncle Johnny's, waiting for my wife Denise to come pick me up. It's been it's been three years now. But in that moment when I was sitting there, in that time since then, and the time since then, I guess, I I've been back to the woods many times and I've brought my son on a 24-mile trip of his own and watched him discover the particular satisfaction of earning his sleep under stars. I've walked other trails and I've done a lot of thinking. I've done a lot of thinking. And here's just one of the things that I've come to understand slowly and without well actually not without resistance. And every time I wrote, the trail taught me in my journal uh during those two weeks, I I could have actually written the word God. And not even maybe as a metaphor, not as a poetic substitution, but because I genuinely believe now that the trail was divine energy moving through rock and and weather and exhaustion and beauty, through the organizing principle that held the ecosystems together and kept bringing the right people to the same shelter at the same moment. The God I encountered on that trail and at the beaches and in the years since and the trails since is not the distant deity of my um early training, right, or my early Christianity, or the tribal guardian or of denominational battles. It's something far more immediate and all-encompassing. The logos that John tried to name, the Ruach, the breath, the spirit that animates everything, the ground of being that Tillich points toward, the Christ that, as Paul wrote, holds all things together, not separate from the world, looking down at it, woven through it, moving in it, oriented toward life. This is what I mean when I say I'm a progressive Christian. Not that I've swapped out old doctrines for new and more socially acceptable ones, but I'm trying to follow where the divine current seems to actually lead, which is toward connection, toward inclusion, toward the kind of radical hospitality I saw Terry practicing without any theological without any theology at all. Toward the recognition that we already belong to each other, not as aspiration, but as reality. Something the tornado knew and the trail knew, and the beach kept trying to show me. Now, Lucas may push back on that. In fact, I'm willing to bet he will, because it seems like he always does. At least that's his always, I think he'll even tell you that's like kind of his default. His first thing will always be to push back. But I'm actually glad he does. Like I'm genuinely glad that that's what he does because it makes me say things I mean. But I wanted you to hear it from me directly before the series begins so that you know where I'm standing. I'm taking I'm taking advantage of being the only one with a microphone today. The Beach Reflections were written by me, a man, who had been through a lot of breaking and was trying to figure out what holds. What the ocean kept teaching me over and over in different images was this: what holds is not what we accumulate, not the certainty that we claim. What holds is what we already share. What holds is each other. What holds is the thing that was there before our divisions and will remain when our arguments finally exhaust themselves. And maybe that's what you come to when you sit long enough at the edge of something large enough to make your problems feel appropriately small. All right, so next week Lucas is going to be back, and uh, we're gonna begin with the first reflection. It's called the rip current. And I'll read it at the top of the episode, and then we'll follow the thread wherever it goes. But between now and then, I want to leave you with a question, not a theological one, not even a particularly complex one, just this. What if your life has presented itself as the easier path? What has looked like the calm passage between two breaking waves? Sit with that. Notice where the answer lives in your body. And if something comes up that you want to share with us, the link is in the show notes, and we would genuinely love to hear from you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for caring enough about honest conversation to keep showing up for it because it matters more than you know. I'll see you next week.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for listening to Living on Common Ground. Please follow wherever you listen to your podcasts and share it with your friends. You can also find a link to our social in the description. The more people we have living on common ground, the better the world will be.
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