Am I Under Attack—or Just Overwhelmed? Spiritual Warfare and Personal Responsibility with Joel Muddamalle
Episode Notes
Have you ever wondered if there’s something spiritual happening beneath what you’re carrying?
You’re doing the work.
You’re praying.
You’re going to therapy.
You’re trying to take responsibility.
And still… something feels off.
In this episode, Dr. Alison sits down with Theologian Joel Muddamalle to explore spiritual warfare — not through fear or sensationalism, but through clarity and discernment.
Together, they examine:
- How the enemy works through systems, structures, and misaligned desires
- The difference between personal responsibility and spiritual opposition
- Why obsession with darkness is just as unhelpful as dismissing it
- How to stay grounded in Christ’s victory rather than panic
This conversation reframes spiritual warfare as something far more ordinary — and far more hopeful — than we often imagine.
Not demon hunting.
Not blame shifting.
But cultivating wholeness.
Because the center of the Christian story is not darkness.
It’s restoration.
If you’ve ever felt confused about this topic — or unsure how to integrate faith, mental health, and spiritual reality — this episode offers grounded wisdom for everyday life.
More Resources:
Follow Dr. Alison on Instagram @dralisoncook
Join the 80,000+ soul menders in our email community and receive weekly reflections and gentle practices here.
Learn more about Joel Muddamalle’s work.
Order The Unseen Battle.
If you liked this episode, then you’ll love:
Episode 144: Healing the Soul Through Encounters with Jesus Featuring John Eldredge
Episode 122: Navigating Anxiety, Therapy, and Spiritual Formation—Balancing Mental, Emotional, & Spiritual Health with John Mark Comer
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
Don't forget to browse this week's sponsors, who make it possible for me to bring you these resources for free + provide you with additional discounts!
- Quince - How you dress affects your mood and you can trust that Quince has you covered in every day sustainable wardrobe staples. Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- Cozy Earth - Cozy up in every day luxury bedding and their bamboo pajamas and physically feel your nervous system take a breath. Head to Cozyearth.com and use my code BESTOFYOU for up to 20% off.
*Some of the links above are Amazon affiliate links. If you choose to purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.
Transcript:
I actually want us to frame spiritual warfare within the context of household
rebellion, of household conflict, of dysfunction, and relationship challenges.
Enemy loves to work in systems and structures, loves to work through neutral things
that can become ultimate things in order to misalign your affections.
Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's deep dive episode of the Best of You
podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me this week and every week. I love hearing
from you. I love getting your feedback. Today's episode came directly out of so many
questions I've heard from so many of you these past few years. Have you ever
wondered whether there's something spiritual going on underneath what you're carrying?
Like you're doing the work. You're praying, you're trying to take responsibility for
your choices, you're trying to regulate your nervous system, get enough sleep, have
the hard conversation, set boundaries, go to therapy. Maybe you're doing all the
right things and still something feels off. Maybe it's anxiety that spikes out of
nowhere. Maybe it's a pull toward isolation, like you just want to disappear. Maybe
it's discouragement that doesn't match the moment. Maybe it's a kind of internal fog
or oppression that makes it hard to access hope. And then you wonder, is this just
me? Is this my brain? Is this my body? Or is something else happening here?
Today, we're going to talk about something that can get sensationalized really fast
or sometimes dismissed. entirely. And that's spiritual warfare, what my guest today
calls the unseen battle. And I want to say this up front. My goal in this
conversation is not to make you afraid and it's not to make us hyper -focus on
darkness. That has never been my goal. If anything, I err toward the other extreme.
Because for many people, spiritual warfare has been taught in ways that create panic,
superstition, and shame. And for others, it's been dismissed so thoroughly that you
have no framework for naming the very real reality. of evil, whether it's relational,
whether it's systemic, whether it's spiritual and how it impacts our lives. So what
I'm aiming for today is clarity, groundedness, and discernment. We're not after demon
hunting, you know, where everything is a demon. We're not after this other extreme
that nothing is spiritual, right? We're looking for a wise middle. ground.
Together, we're going to approach some of the following questions. When is it helpful
to consider spiritual warfare as part of what you are facing? And when is it not
helpful? When does spiritual warfare language become a way to bypass grief or bypass
accountability or even bypass mental health care or even to blame shift like the
devil made me do it instead of owning our choices and doing the work that is ours
to do? And we're going to talk about practices that are simple. and biblical,
nothing weird, nothing performative, but ways to engage spiritual resilience that
actually help you on a Tuesday afternoon when your brain is spiraling and your heart
feels tired. One of the things I hope you'll hear throughout this conversation is
this. The center of the Christian story is not darkness. It's Jesus.
It's not fear. It's not obsession. It's not hype. It's the steady reality of
Christ's victory over death and the invitation to live from that place with wisdom
and courage. Now, I am so thrilled to introduce you to my guest today. It's Joel
Muddle Molly. He's a theologian, a Bible teacher, and the author of a new book
called The Unseen Battle, Spiritual Warfare, The Three Rebellions, and Christ's Victory
Over Dark Powers. Joel serves as the director of theology and research at Proverbs
31 Ministries, and he's also the theology in residence for Haven Place Ministries.
You can find him online. He's always giving really thoughtful and careful biblical
scholarship, and he helps Christians make sense of big theological questions in a way
that's accessible. and grounded. In The Unseen Battle, Joel offers a framework for
understanding spiritual warfare that's rooted in Scripture, tracing themes through
Genesis, Deuteronomy, and into the New Testament, while also cutting through the noise
of modern sensationalism. He talks about the spiritual story behind fragmentation and
division and why the Spirit of God relentlessly pursues. connection. And that piece
matters to me deeply because as you know, if you've been here for a while, so much
of my own work is about healing disconnection. Disconnection from ourselves,
disconnection from God, and disconnection from each other. And if there's an unseen
battle at all, one of the most consistent themes you'll see is that the forces of
darkness want to isolate you while God moves toward us in love through truth,
through connection, and through a steady invitation back into wholeness. So today,
we're going to explore spiritual warfare in a way that's biblical, responsible, and
emotionally honest. And it's also really practical. So if you've ever felt confused
about this topic, if you've ever been harmed by the way it was taught, if you've
ever wondered whether you're fighting the right battle, if you're simply trying to
make sense of evil and suffering without losing your grounding, this conversation has
something for you. I'm so thrilled to bring you my conversation with Joel Matamali.
I was just so thrilled that you wrote about this topic because A, you're so
biblically literate and so scholarly and yet so accessible.
So that's already hard. And then again, and you set the book up with the opening
quote with exactly what I think so many of us who want to talk about this topic
with what our concern is. And I want to read it to anchor our conversation because
it's a quote from C .S. Lewis. I think it's from the Screwtape Letters. Is that
right? It is. Yes. And it's exactly, I think, why this can be, it's such an
important topic to tackle, but why it can be hard because not that many people are
doing it well. So here's what Lewis says. There are two equal and opposite errors
into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their
existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest
in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors. And I love this.
This is so classic Lewis. And hell, a materialist or a magician with the same
delight. Yeah. I mean, that's such a perfect. And then your book is really trying
to thread that needle. Yeah. Absolutely. It really is kind of, and what Lewis was
observing, I think we're seeing in full kind of fruition today, you know? And so
like, for me, it's like, wait a minute, there is at times this obsessive tendency
to be so consumed by the things of the supernatural realm and kind of hidden
knowledge and all of that. And then at other times, it's almost like, hey,
we're super great. with everything to do with the cosmic Christ, but we don't want
anything else beyond that. Any other parts of the mystery and the spiritual reality
of the Christian life is almost, the big technical term is demythologized. We want
to demythologize that, and yet I think we find ourselves in a place of
vulnerability, and that vulnerability is what is so terrifying, and the enemy loves.
absolutely loves both our obsession and our neglect. And so really, Allison, this
book was just kind of something that I felt it's a byproduct of my PhD
dissertation. So I spent, you know, six years really studying and researching, but
really a deep conviction that this is a topic that matters. It shouldn't be held
exclusively for the ivory towers of academia. This is something that matters for the
mom who is in the carpool. you know, um, for the dad who's trying to make sense
of, um, you know, I'm, I'm, this is my life. Like I've got teenage sons, you know,
and we're trying to navigate so much, uh, of just their life and their culture and
the music and, um, the things that, you know, they are drawn to and yet asking
this question. is this actually going to be good for your soul over the long haul?
It might be immediately pleasant for you, but if it's destructive over the long
haul, then we want to be aware of that. And so this book was kind of aimed at
both of those things, really to retrieve awareness and a healthy perspective of the
reality of a cosmic war that we're all a part of. So, Joel,
you're kind of touching on... That's immediately what I want to start off with. I
want to get in later in the episode into some practical ways we can delineate.
Because in my work, and I know you're very familiar with this, with your own work
on the Therapy and Theology podcast and in other veins, but sort of what's my
responsibility versus what's spiritual warfare? So we're going to get into that for
the listener. Because I think sometimes there's both two things going on.
I know that in my work as a therapist, especially in really traumatized populations
where there's just been incredible evil that is very overt,
right? That's where it's like you have to name something as evil. There's no
pretending, right? And I think that's something that some of my listeners,
a lot of the therapists who are listening, a lot of folks in ministry, like, no,
we... know, there's no kind of sugarcoating some of these realities,
right? And there is also a process of healing that requires human agency and human
choices that I have to make, right? It wasn't my fault, but it is now my
responsibility. That's kind of the needle I want to thread. But before we get into
those practicalities, what do you mean by spiritual warfare and what do you not
mean? Yeah, that's such a great question. I kind of am a story guy. So in my area
of kind of theological study, it's a study called biblical theology. And so I really
care deeply about the Old Testament and the New Testament, the relationship to each
other. And so I think it's a real tragedy when it's like, let's skip past the Old
Testament passages. Let's just get to the red letters of Jesus. And then it's like,
wait a minute, we do know that Jesus is actually reliving the story of Israel. of
the Old Testament throughout the, I mean, that's the whole point of the Gospels is
that Jesus is faithful in all the ways that Israel is faithless. And so like in
this vein of biblical theology, I think I want to start with what is the story of
Scripture? You know, like what is that kind of one sentence? And this is a quote
from Jim Cress, who we both know and, you know, are friends with. And Jim has this
idea that Something can be simplistic, but far from, something can be simple, but
far from simplistic. So this is a simple statement, but it's far from simplistic.
And so the story of scripture is simply about a good father who happens to be the
cosmic king of heaven and earth, who's determined to have his family back together.
A good dad, who's the king of heaven and earth. who's determined to have his family
back together. And then this is all the parts that are far from simplistic or far
from simple. It's like, okay, we've got a father who's also like a royal king of
the cosmos. And then how did the family get divided? Like how did the family first
get lost and separate from each other? And so in that, I actually want us to frame
spiritual warfare within the context of... rebellion, of household conflict,
of dysfunction, and relationship challenges. And so what we find throughout Scripture,
really, I think, is that spiritual warfare is presented in kind of three categories.
And this gets into a little bit of nerdy Greek and Hebrew stuff, but the term for
household in the Old Testament is bayith. And the term for it in the New Testament
is oikos. And Paul uses oikos terminology all the way throughout Ephesians to talk
about the household. And so this is Ephesians 2, 18 through 22. But both of these
words in the original languages have what's called three domains, kind of three
categories that they are working in. And it is one is a kingly idea that there's a
royal kingship and kingdom that's connected to it. Second is priestly.
It has to do with the temple. And third, the nuclear family. It has to do with
like moms and dads and children and extended family. Like in the West,
I think at times we can be a bit disconnected. from the concept of extended family.
I'm Indian. For us, the extended family is incredibly important. My first cousins,
I don't refer to them as first cousins. I refer to them as my siblings. They're my
younger brothers and my younger sisters. And that's kind of like the nuclear family
that we're thinking about. And what's so fascinating to me is that the enemy loves
to work in these three domains to create deception. in order to divide, which
ultimately leads us perfectly into a place of destruction. And oftentimes, it's self
-destruction. And so if you think about it, it's like our priestly vocation.
People who follow Jesus, what does it mean to be a church, you know, the part of
the church? And you think about it from a kingly standpoint, like our vocation and
responsibility on earth, you know, whether it be from a standpoint of what we do as
our jobs or how we engage with the community at large. And then from a nuclear
family standpoint, you know, like the amount of broken families, broken relationships,
deception, deceit, divorce, and we can go through all of it. These are all evidences
of a real enemy who's working in and through systems and structures to create chaos.
And my basic belief, Allison, is that the Bible has the most coherent answer to all
of these challenges that are present. Like there's a path not to avoid all of this,
but to get through it and really to recover wholeness. And you know this, the Greek
word therapio. It has in mind, and this is the word that's used of Jesus all
throughout the New Testament of his healing ministry. It has in mind recovering
wholeness. And what does it mean to be a whole human? I would categorize into kind
of three areas. It is your emotional well -being. It is your spiritual well -being
and it's your physical well -being. Your emotional, spiritual, and physical well -being.
And spiritual warfare often happens emotionally. It happens spiritually. That's right.
And it happens physically. And so that's why I think it's kind of important to have
a framework in kind of those categories to see how the enemy is kind of being
deceptive in those places. It flows throughout all of it.
This episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth. I wanna talk about something we don't
always connect to our healing journey. or sleep. If you've been around here for a
while, you know I talk often about becoming the best version of yourself. Not the
exhausted, burnt out, running on empty version of you, but the grounded, present,
emotionally regulated version. And one of the most overlooked foundations of that
version of you is rest. I love refreshing our bedding with Cozy Earth, and I'm not
exaggerating when I say a good set of cozy can change how your body feels at the
end of the day. Their sheets are so incredibly soft, made from premium viscose from
bamboo, and they have this breathable temperature. your regulating quality that
genuinely helps your nervous system settle. It feels like a cue to my body. You're
safe and you can exhale. Kaze Earth has amazing matching bedding sets, sheets, duvet
cover, quilt, coverlet, because there's something about climbing into a beautifully
made bed that signals intentionality. When we talk about caring for the best of you,
it's not indulgent, it's foundational. Small, intentional steps like this can create
rhythms of safety and restoration. Cozy Earth also offers a 100 -night sleep trial
and a 10 -year warranty, which tells me they stand behind what they make. That kind
of confidence matters. If becoming the best of you this year includes honoring your
need for rest, real, restorative sleep, this is a beautiful place to start. Head to
CozyEarth .com and use my code BESTOVY for up to 20%. if you see the post -purchase
survey, let them know you heard about Cozy Earth here at The Best of You. Because
sometimes becoming the best version of yourself starts with something as simple and
as powerful as better sheets and a better night's sleep.
As someone who firmly knows there is a spiritual battle,
there's spiritual warfare. And also as someone who spends a lot of time trying to
help people find their own responsibility within their challenges. What wisdom do you
have for us in terms of figuring out how we discern what is spiritual warfare?
Maybe, you know, what is spiritual warfare? What isn't? And what is helpful to me?
Because sort of one extreme is the there's a devil hiding around every corner.
There's a devil hovering over my kids at my marriage. And to put all of our
attention on that. back to the C .S. Lewis quote, to kind of be looking for the
devils everywhere, which can lead to a sort of paranoia, which can lead to stuff I
don't have control over, right? That can be not helpful, which can also lead,
and we'll get into this, to an abdication of my own responsibility. Maybe some of
this is I'm not taking care of my body or I'm not doing what I need to do,
right? All the way to the other extreme, which we also see in the materialistic,
scientific of... I see in psychology and what prompted me to kind of blend just,
just to your point, you and I are two sides of the same coin. I left a. a
secular psychology program and added a joint PhD with psychology and religion because
I was like, this is not all just science. Like this is not just all changing your
thoughts and becoming a better robot. Like there's other stuff going on here,
right? Two things can be true. And so, but so the other extreme being like, it's
all just reductive. It's all just behavior modification. It's all just changing our
thoughts. It's changing our patterns. Like what's the healthy middle ground as people
of faith who, understand there's a spiritual realm and also are increasingly
understanding, and I know you share this with me, that there's a lot of our own
kind of what we're learning about the nervous system and learning about how we care
for our own souls and how we tend to our own lives and our own families that is
ours to focus on. Does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. You know,
I'm a bit obsessed. We can blame our dear friend Lisa Turkers for this. I'm a bit
obsessed with the Eden story. And really, you know, this is an interesting thing,
Allison. I think that our anthropology has to have a starting spot. So anthropology
comes with the Greek word anthropos, which just means humanity. And so it's like,
where do we get our understanding of humanity? And in some kind of Christian
religious traditions, Often I think functionally what ends up happening is our
anthropology starts with Genesis 3, which is the fall, right? And I actually don't
think this is the right place to start. In fact, we should start where the Bible
starts. And the Bible starts in Genesis 1 and 2. It starts with the ideal of
humanity. It starts with the vocation of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and how
they were supposed to work and function and live in this Edenic garden. And then
when we understand the ideal of humanity, we can actually rightfully make sense of
the tragedy of what happens with the fall. And so I kind of... a little bit from
traditional systematic theologians when they refer to the image of God being broken
at the fall. I don't believe that the image of God was broken at the fall. I'm
following a theological bioethicist, a guy named Dr. John Kilner, who wrote a great
book on this. And what Kilner kind of suggests, which I follow, is this idea
that... the fall, the image of God is not broken. Humanity is broken. And the image
of God is a gracious gift that is bestowed upon us. And that gift comes with a
status and a standard. So the status is irrevocable. If you're a human,
if you're born, you have the status of an image bearer of God. That status requires
a standard that we are to live up to. Now, because humanity is broken, we can no
longer live up to that standard, which is why it's necessary for Jesus to come, the
empowerment of the Holy Spirit. This is the story that we're kind of being told. So
when we go back to the Garden of Eden and we look at Adam and Eve, who are made
in the likeness and the image of God, those two Hebrew words, likeness and image,
are demut and shalem, and they're used throughout ancient Near Eastern literature to
refer to children of royalty, which I think is such a fascinating... indication that
prior to adam and eve ever doing anything they receive a gracious gift from the
lord which is the image of god as an indication that they are royal children of
the great king of heaven and earth now how do we determine what is our own agency
versus spiritual warfare and all this it all actually all goes back to the garden
of eden in this god gives adam and eve the boundaries it's like you know a word
that we love like hey you can do everything, all of this, you can eat of all the
fruit, this one fruit you must not eat. And then, by the way, you're to have
creativity. I don't know if we've ever really thought about the vocation of Adam and
Eve in Eden. They were to be creative. They're supposed to not just build a
monastic society with walls. They're supposed to go out and into the world, spreading
the image of God out. And in light of all of this, They were to be aware.
This is where discernment comes involved, especially with spiritual warfare. They're to
be aware of what was given to them in a holy vocation to accomplish,
but then also to understand what was not within their control, what was not given
to them. And spiritual warfare often comes in the place of compromised discernment.
It is a suggestion that we have to take for ourselves. because of a deep -rooted
distrust that maybe God won't provide for us, or maybe the world is not going to
work out the way that we want it to, and so now I have to lean into my own
power, my own ambition, my own ability, and I have to take for myself.
This gets theological. In Genesis 3, 6, and elsewhere,
you find a repeated pattern, and the pattern is this.
desire, and take. In Hebrew, every time you see the two phrases of see desire,
which can sometimes be synonymous as one, combined with the verb to take, it's
almost always negative. It's almost always negative. Adam and Eve, see of the fruit,
they desire of the fruit, and they take. of the fruit. In Genesis 6,
you've got this odd passage of the sons of God who I believe were angelic beings.
And in the book, you can go through the three rebellions and I give the footnotes
and kind of all the reasons for that. But you have these sons of God that see the
daughters of men. They desire these women and they take them for themselves.
This is what produces these giant beings called the Nephilim, which is kind of
necessitates the flood and all this other stuff. And by the way, exact same phrase
that's used of King David. David sees Bathsheba. He desires Bathsheba.
And so he takes her for himself. And so really spiritual warfare in this context is
about a lot of what is already. What are you seeing? What are you desiring? And in
what ways are you being tempted to take for yourself versus being aware of what God
has given to you or what you have agency over? What is your area of responsibility
that you are to steward? And yet you're being invited to kind of transgress
boundaries in order to take and secure something for yourself that actually was not
given to you in the first place. Okay. So that is such... Great.
Teaching and examples. Because even if we look at that Genesis 3 moment,
when Eve... So it sounds like to me there's at least two things going on, maybe
three, where between agency and the work of the spiritual realm.
So the serpent shows her something that she could take.
Yep. That's sort of what's around us. Or if we apply this to our families, right?
You talked about being a dad. You know your boys. There's all sorts of stuff out
there that's going to allure them to take. The agency is on the taking. We don't
get to say, I don't get to say what Eve did, essentially, which is the serpent
made me do it or the serpent. I mean, I'm saying a lot of things here, but when
I think, let's go to the Genesis 3 story. I've thought a lot about that in the
context of blame shifting. I actually have a devotional coming up on that in the
daily podcast for my listeners. We're going to talk about blame shifting in the
context of Genesis 3, which is Adam says, she made me do it.
She says, the serpent made me do it. God gives consequences to all three of them.
That's right. The serpent gets consequences. Eve gets consequences. Adam. So in a
sense, it's not that technically they were right. You know, Eve presented the option
to Adam, the serpent presented, but they were each responsible for their own choices.
David, same thing, right? He was obviously held accountable for his own choice there
in a very vivid way. And also there was stuff going on around him that was trying
to tempt him. Am I hearing you correctly? A hundred percent. Now let's go back to
the Genesis three because I think the agency piece is so important. Agency is both
about what you do and what of your own volition and kind of moral compass,
ethical understanding you refrain from doing. So I think sometimes we think about
agencies like I've got to do, I've got to do, what can I do? I actually also
think, and you're the psychologist, so you tell me if I'm wrong on this, but I
think that agency also has to do about exercising your ability,
your right to also withdraw and to say I won't participate in this action. 100%.
So here's where I think in Genesis 3 is so fascinating. There's a little detail. In
Genesis chapter 3, that I think is not a throwaway sentence, it says that it was
routine for Yahweh to walk with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening breeze.
So why the cool of the evening breeze? Because it's the end of the day. Now,
here's the thing. Adam and Eve have... stewardship responsibility there to work the
garden to keep the garden adam specifically we're told he's got a responsibility to
name the animals you know and i don't know about you allison like i am not a uh
walker for fun or a runner for no reason drives me crazy i just i play basketball
on tuesday nights and i can do that kind of running but the thought of just
running like for no like it just drives me crazy but my wife uh we've been here
for 16 years that girl she loves to walk for no reason she loves like that's just
her am, you know? So for 16, I've had to learn that I show my love to my wife
by just going on walks with her. Now, what's fascinating is when we go on a walk,
usually I have an idea of a destination. I'm like, we're going to do a couple laps
and be done because I honestly don't like going on walks. And typically we'll do
that and I'll look at her like, hey babe, are we done? And she'll look back at me
and she'll be like, no. And I'm confused and annoyed. I'm like, we've done what
we're supposed to do. We've done the two laps and we should be done. I'm like,
when are we done? And she'll be like, I don't know. And what's so fascinating about
that is that the aim and the ambition, for me, the goal of the walk is a
destination. But for her, the goal of the walk is not a destination. It's about the
quality of time and the relationship that's being developed from the starting point
to the end point. What's so fascinating about this idea of God walking in the cool
of the evening breeze with Adam and Eve is that that Hebrew word for walk, it has
no destination in mind. It is a leisurely walk. So now we're left wondering,
what would God do with his two children on a walk? Well,
what do you do with your friends on a walk? You talk. You process life. What was
interesting? What was creative? What was challenging? I think sometimes we think of
Eden as perfect. I don't think perfect is the right word for Eden. I know some
people are like, wait a minute, I've always thought about it. Perfection has in mind
completion. Eden is not complete. Eden is the perfect building blocks,
the material in order to get to completion. God sets them up for success, right? So
I always wonder here, when the serpent suggests to Eve and Adam,
who's right with her, hey, why don't you eat of the tree? What would have happened
if Eve exercised her agency, her wisdom, her discernment, her understanding and said,
You know what time it is? You feel that? Serpent, Nakash? It's the cool of the
evening breeze. Why don't we just wait around for God to come? We can ask him this
question. Right? What would have happened? I mean, the serpent's going to run for
its dang life. It's not going to stick around there. And yet this is part of
spiritual warfare. It's part of the deception. It is this sense that we can't be
patient. We can't wait. We've got to take. We've got to have it for ourselves. And
again, deeply rooted in that is distrust. And so when we're thinking about agency,
we're thinking about both. For me, what we do that we should do rightly, but also
what we with holy restraint withdraw from. And we say, like, actually, I'm not going
to participate in that because it's unbecoming of me. It actually diminishes my
dignity as an image bearer of God. Like, I don't want to participate in that. Yeah.
You know?
Yeah. I love that. I love that. I'm working on a project right now, an attachment.
And I love that idea, even with our kids. It's not that they have to go fight the
enemy in what you're saying there. It's almost like a... want to reconnect to what
is good. So I'm going to bow out to connect with my parent or with this healthy
thing that I know is bedrock. We don't always have to have in the moment the
perfect answer or the perfect resistance. It's just something in me, something in my
nervous system is saying, reconnect. before doing anything. And I love that image.
Let me go back to God because that's my source. I love what you're saying about
Eden. I know you've been deeply shaped by N .T. Wright, as I have, and I hear a
lot of that in kind of what he's saying with the new heavens. We will still be
working out our creativity, our vocation, our relationships. It will just be without
this contaminant. Is that... And that's kind of the essence of spiritual warfare is
that contaminant that is constantly trying to derail us. That's absolutely right.
I think it was N .T. Red who once said that sin is essentially undoing our humanity
in such a way that it is leading us into animalistic tendencies. Like sin wants us
to neglect, abdicate. our humanity in order to take up animalistic like desires.
I think this is what things like alcoholism, pornography, you know, even addiction to
things like the gym. Look, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. I've
always been so fascinated about like CrossFit culture and there's something good about
it. But then there's also this obsessiveness about it where I've had people like
they're like, man, I'm just so ugly or I'm so and I'm like. you got like a 12
pack. You're like, you're walking around with like 7 % body fat. Like this is wild
that, you know, and yet there is this. There is this self -perception that has been
deeply compromised because they don't see themselves as what God sees them. And they
think that if I can just achieve this particular look or whatever it might be,
then I can find fulfillment. All of this is spiritual warfare. It is to disconnect
you from the sufficiency of God. I like to talk about it in the context of an
exchange of dependency. It is to pursue self -dependency versus God -dependency. And to
be dependent on God does not abdicate your responsibility. It actually frames your
responsibility. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Yeah, like being dependent on God reminds us
of what we can do, what we can't do, right? It reminds us of what we ought to
do, what we should not do, you know? And back to like the spiritual warfare idea,
I think this is the obsessive nature of it. Sometimes people are like, oh, I gotta
be demon hunters now. We're looking for the demons across, right? Fascinating.
Throughout the New Testament, I mean, you have this one scene where Jesus tells his
disciples to kind of go out and to deal with the demonic reality. But this is very
much prior to the cross. And there's something else that's going on with that story.
After that, you never find any instance of any of the New Testament authors telling
us to be exorcists or to go out and be demon hunters or to go, right? Actually,
it's quite opposite. What the biblical passage and what Jesus himself says in the
Great Commission is, Go make disciples. Yeah. Go make disciples of all nations. Well,
why make disciples? To recover your humanity. To retrieve what it means to be
spiritually whole, emotionally whole, and physically whole. And guess what? When you
do that, you will absolutely encounter dark forces. Like,
you don't need to go after the dark force. This is Ephesians 6. Ephesians 6
presents us as passive participants of a divine action.
The Spirit of God strengthens us so that we might put on the full armor of God.
And to be able to withstand the fiery enemies, the fiery darts of the enemy.
Why? Because we advance the gospel. And as the gospel is advanced, the enemy is
going to absolutely fight back because the enemy hates the good news. Because the
good news is about the restoration of the nations back into the family of God. It
goes back to the household idea. Okay, this is so good. So a couple things I'm
hearing you say that I want to underscore. Number one, we don't have to go looking
for the spiritual warfare. It's everywhere. I mean, and even in, you're saying it in
a couple different ways, I think. Let me see, because the first thought when I was
thinking to myself, we don't have to go looking for it because literally we can
open up our Instagram app and find it. Literally, we can walk into, it's, we don't
have to fixate. And I know what you're saying about CrossFit. You could insert a
million other different things where anything that's pulling us to subtly replace our,
you know, as Augustine and Aquinas talked about, disordered loves, right? Even good
things, when they keep us from ordering our love first with God, are going to pull
us subtly. So it's there. We don't have to focus on it. And then I also...
I want to see if—I think you were kind of alluding to this, Joel, but I want to
see if I'm hearing you correctly. Our most important act of resistance is to align
ourselves with goodness, with truth, with the gospel, with, I think, I would argue
in my field as with healing, so -so, with the work of becoming whole.
Whole. That if I focus on that, sure, a byproduct of that will be, you know,
there will be some—
some members of the spiritual realm that won't be happy, but I am therefore then
aligning myself with God's goodness, God's truth, the spiritual armor. That's my best
and most fruitful act. In the book, you talk about... And I think this is what
we're getting at. You talk about focusing on Jesus's victory as the center versus an
obsession with darkness. And so I think that's some of what I'm hearing in you. The
practical thing we can do if we're worried about the spiritual realm is not to go
looking for it. It's to focus on what is good and focus on Jesus. Am I hearing
you correctly? And how do you talk about that? Yeah, absolutely. I would want to
also bring just some clarifications on what the enemy is and what the enemy isn't.
I think sometimes, you know, there's a famous poet, I think, who said, you know,
the... maybe it's a poet or it's Jim or Jim got this from a poet. I hate messing
up citations and footnotes, but it's from one of those people. The idea is like the
words we use build the worlds that we live in. I think it was a poet. The words
we use build the worlds that we live in. And so I think that we ought to care
deeply about the words that we use to kind of frame our reality. And so one of
the things that happens is we'll say stuff like, well, the enemy made me do it.
Yeah. The devil, like the devil did it or the, right. And I'm like, well, you
know, The enemy, dark forces, are not equivalent in like ontology,
in realness with God. God is the uncreated creator of all things. Everything starts
with God. God created it all. Dark spiritual beings that have gone into rebellion
are created beings, which means that the incommunicable attributes of God, these are
things like his omniscience. He knows all things, his omnipresence, he's in all
places, his omnipotence, he's all powerful, right? Those things are exclusive to God.
So we should not attribute those things to an enemy who is limited and finite.
Do they have deceptive powers? Absolutely. Can they work in spiritual ways?
Absolutely. But they are not on par with the Lord. And so in light of that, I
think we need to be aware of their schemes. They love to work in systems and
structures because they're all about mass -producing sin. They're all about scaling
sinful tendencies. This is Paul's language of the vices of the flesh,
right? And so, like, I think we ought to be serious about these things. I had a
conversation with somebody the other day. And we do these retreats called Haven Place
Retreats at Lisa's house. And they're like healing retreats. And Jim brings therapy.
I bring theology. Lisa brings such great biblical wisdom. And we're having this
conversation with somebody. And they talked about the transition between a single
glass of bourbon at night to becoming full -blown alcoholism.
And it started with a thought. And the thought was, I'm just taking the edge off
of it. It's a stressful day. Right. Like, like I deserve just a single glass of
bourbon until the single glass turned to multiple glasses, which turned into multiple
bottles, which turned into getting into credit card debt in order to get the
bottles, which then turned into full on lying about him, having bottles hidden in
different places, which ultimately led to a deal. I mean, you could go to go into
all these things and it's like, it was a singular thought. Right. And it was even
like, man, you know, is alcohol in and of itself bad, evil? No. Of course not.
But you can take anything that becomes an ultimate thing and that thing will become
an idolatrous thing. And so I think there's two parts to this. One, don't give the
enemy too much power. Don't give them too much ability. And also be very aware of
how the enemy loves to work. The enemy loves to work in systems and structures,
loves to work through neutral things that can become ultimate things in order to
misalign your affections. That's really helpful because I do think, I like that word
scale because I do think in our modern era, I'm sure this was true in different
eras of history, but it's always easiest to think of our own era. It does feel
like that scale word. There are things that almost feel like, man, I think about it
for our kids. I think about when I was growing up, The things that would tempt me
or entice me, they were bad, but there was almost an innocence to them compared to
what we see today. Even if you think about pornography, like you had to go buy a
magazine at a store. It's a little bit harder. There's some more barriers to entry.
It's harder to just get it mainlined into your system. Whereas today, it's just, and
it doesn't remove human. accountability and responsibility. We still have to, but boy,
I have so much compassion for folks. That's such a good way to put it,
that spiritual warfare at work, figuring out how to use systems to sort of make it
just super hard doesn't mean we're not still responsible. We still have to do our
part, but there's... There's a lot in what you're saying there of really, really all
the more needing to remember. First of all, God is ultimately powerful. These systems
will not overtake us. But yeah, they are potentially at the level at which maybe
let's use technology, for example, at the level at which it is scaling good in the
sense of cures for cancer, et cetera, et cetera. It's also scaling evil. Is that?
Yeah. So just a little vulnerable moment. I remember being,
gosh, how old was I? 11 or 12 and i used to ride a bike you know i'm at that
age now allison where they do those fun memes on instagram where it's like you're
this age and it's like blockbuster was around every corner or you told your parents
that you're going on a bike ride but you really like went to abandoned houses and
you probably did like 25 miles on your bike in a matter of four you know four
hours or whatever and it was like the good old days well i remember my kids get
so annoyed with me when i say stuff like that um i remember riding my bike to the
white hen pantry there's live in the chicagoland area there's a white hen pantry and
to your point i remember my first introduction to pornography was actually the family
member but after that it opened my eyes to the curiosity of this thing and i would
go to the white hen pantry and in the back corner they had the magazines but then
it would be like the you know the naughty ones or whatever the bad ones would be
hovered at the top kind of hidden but still there Right. And if you went back
there, you would have the owner of the white hand. If you were back there too far,
he would come. Hey, what are you guys doing? You know? And I remember just thinking
about that of like, there's something about the, even the moral fabric of our
society that recognized for an 11 year old to see that is inappropriate, not good.
That's at least like as a society, let's protect the innocence, you know, to now
it's like, man. none of that nothing like in fact intentional algorithms and ads
that are aimed in all of our spaces in order to compromise innocence of the least
of these you know the youngest in order to cultivate a mind to be prone to it,
you know? And so I think you're absolutely right about that. And again, there's
nothing new underneath the sun. This is why passages like Genesis 6, I think, are
really important. It's like, a lot of times it's like, man, how did evil spread
throughout the world? You know, what necessitated the flood? Well, there's a story in
Second Temple literature in a book called The Book of Enoch. And it's not canon.
It's not like you shouldn't view it that way. But it tells the background story of
the Genesis 6 verses 1 through 4 kind of story. And in it, angelic beings give
wisdom and knowledge. And it's kind of fascinating. Part of it is the cutting of
plants. The Greek word is pharmakeia, which is where we get pharmaceutical from
today. But what's interesting about it is, and you mentioned this already, you can
have the cutting of plants as a really good thing. It can heal wounds. It can be
disinfectant, right? But you can also use the cutting of plants in order to create
ayahuasca, DMT, some inebriative kind of elements in order to compromise your mind.
to intoxicate you, to actually move you away from agency, to make you lose your own
self -agency. And then another one is metallurgy. You know, of all the things that
are taught around this time period, the one thing that I think is fascinating is
that swords have a singular purpose, to kill. Swords have a singular purpose.
And so look at the mass kind of scaling of sin. It's like,
hey, you can take good things or neutral things and you can leverage them in ways
that are 100 % self -destructive. And this is the age -old strategy of the enemy,
but we just are seeing it now in really mass market movements. I want to ask a
practical question to close, but I have to ask you this question. And it's a little
bit of a Pandora's box right here at the end to shift gears a little bit. How do
you see, because I get this question a lot. So I'm going to ask you, I'm going to
take this opportunity. How do you see, we've talked a lot about. spiritual warfare
in the context of things that are like you're saying there there's some good but
also real opportunity for evil i don't think there's any good in pornography but but
right there's yeah there's um but they're that's acting on it pornography is a
perversion of the of the good right right it's a perversion of it so it's like
when did we get to like i can see a woman and say, oh, she's beautiful and move
on to then seeing a woman and saying, oh, that's an object for me to, right? Or
like, and I think that's like, it's a perversion of like, well, no, God wants us
to acknowledge beauty. Like we would eat something good. We would see a beautiful
piece of art, but it doesn't mean you can steal it. It doesn't mean you can take
it, you know? And yet, so I think that, you know, you're onto something with that.
Yeah, so we've got that category, and I want to circle back to that with just
everyday practices, but I want to just touch on this category of how are we to
think about spiritual warfare in the context of illness,
mental illness, and particularly the question I get is, because the field of modern
psychology and psychiatry and even medicine as it exists now is different than how
it was when Jesus walked the earth, how much of some of what he was dealing with
was, I'm going to use poor words here because this is your area of expertise, so
forgive me, I'm fumbling here, but was exclusively spiritual, such as possession,
and how much of it was what we might think of as today a mental illness that is
is biochemical, is biological, is even trauma -related, but we're labeling it
differently. How do you look at that, Joel, kind of both theologically, but also
then we can go to the practical of what's helpful? Yeah, 100%. So I think one of
the challenges that we have at times is we try to read into the Bible things that
the Bible itself or the biblical authors themselves are not keen on answering. Like
for instance, Genesis 1 through 3 is not aimed at answering our scientific questions.
We have a lot of science questions, right? And then we end up trying to force the
biblical text to say things that... They just weren't interested. Actually, Genesis 1
through 11, I like to add 12, it's a polemic. It's an argument against the creation
myths of the time that we're trying to deceive a whole bunch of people. You know,
it's like, no, this is the one true story. And so I would just give us a little
bit of a word of caution of like looking at the biblical passages in the New
Testament particularly and trying to create. A clear A plus B always equals C.
I love it. And so one of the things that Jesus does, actually, Jesus, in the
Gospel of Luke, he says it this way. He says, if by the hand of God demons are
cast out, then you know that the kingdom of God has arrived. Well, guess what Jesus
does? He's casting out demons. Why? Because the Gospels are all about reminding us
that the point of the incarnation is where the kingdom of God begins to come back,
right? It's the renewal. It's the restoration. It's new heavens and new earth. So
you have that part of it. And in it, I think there's some principles that we can
draw out, particularly with Jesus' interaction with demon exorcism, with the sick,
with those that have ailment. One, there's this one famous story.
It's like, hey, this individual, did their parents sin? Is this why? And Jesus is
like, no, none of that. It's so that the glory of God might be shown and then
heals the person. So I think we have to be careful of trying to... read into
things, read into the biblical text, something that's not there. Science is really
beautiful and it's really amazing. And a lot of times it actually affirms to us so
much of what in ancient people were struggling to make sense of. So once again,
can you have the presence of both demonic oppression and in the case of non
-believers possession? Absolutely. And do you have the presence of frail?
human bodies and sin that has actually messed up our brain neurology to create
actual disorders like schizophrenia or legitimate NPD,
narcissistic personality disorder, things like that? Absolutely. Should we view it as
a one -for -one every time that a person who's maybe... diagnosed with a mental
health illness that we then have to demand that there is some spiritual influence or
some demonic i would be like that's both unwise and unhelpful yeah you know now i
would do some diagnostics though along the way has the person opened themselves up
to um uh, windows of demonic activity, whether it's, uh, it'd be Wiccan practices or
Ouija boards. I mean, there's all kinds of things that you would want to look at
and say, Hey, is, could there be the presence of that? And it's like, well, okay,
great. You'd want to deal with those things and have a both and approach to it.
Like we would want the best medical help, um, that. God has given us in common
grace in order to deal with neurological imbalances. And we want to submit that
thing to prayer. Because while all human physicians are limited at some point with
their knowledge... The physician, the great physician, Jesus, is unlimited in his
ability. And it's not up to us to determine if he acts or if he doesn't.
It's up to us to pray and to trust the Lord in his decision -making with that.
And so people might be like, well, that feels like a circular answer. You're kind
of like saying yes and no. I'm like, yeah, I kind of am. And I think this is
part of the mystery. This is part of the human mind that wants just perfect
answers. And like I said, I think there is some diagnostics that you would want to
do with what you've opened yourself up to. I think there's paths to demonic
oppression. And oftentimes it is pornography. It is alcoholism. It is opioid
addictions. 1 Peter 5 .8 says, be sober -minded. That Greek word sober -minded has an
antonym, the opposite of that word. It's a well -known Greek word that was used in
the temples in the Greco -Roman world, the temple of Delphi, the oracles.
They would use plants and hallucinatives in order to intoxicate the mind,
which I think is fascinating. Where Peter's like, by the way, don't be like that.
Be sober -minded. Have sobriety of mind that you might rightly know who God is. And
so we'd want to be careful of those things. I appreciate that. By the way, I think
Jesus often answered questions very similarly to how you are, right, refusing the
false dichotomy. And what I hear and what you're saying is both and. And I love
the word diagnostic because I think about that way as a clinician. You know, if I
think about the diagnostic manual, right, with all the diagnostic criteria, I do
think, I mean, it's not right now because we have this bifurcation between the
spiritual and the scientific in our medical model. But I think if we were to
integrate them, which you and I are both hands of, you would have a diagnostic
category for, you know, and it could be a combination. It could be nothing to do
with anything spiritual. It's just a, you know, or there could be, and for what
it's worth, for those of you listening and just for your curiosity, Joel, it's
interesting. I'm trained in a model of therapy that is part of why I wrote
Boundaries for Your Soul. Kim and I integrated it with the Christian theology is
that it's a very spiritual model that is not Christian. And in that model, early on
in my training, I think they've changed this, but they accounted for what they
called unattached burdens, which are, you know, in the model, you're trying to find
the part of yourself that's wounded or broken or hurting and connect with that part
and heal that part. And in our adaptation of it, we invite... God to be with that
part, right? And there's a lot of neurobiology for this that is very, you know,
you're actually kind of, the body keeps the discourse of you're actually finding the
place in your body that's still embedded in your embodied world that maybe from
childhood that still lives there through memory and through consciousness and you're
actually kind of finding it. It's very profound and it works. But in this protocol,
apart from the Christian, the secular version of this, there is this idea that
sometimes you bump into a part that is not of you. Yeah. And I'm like,
and oftentimes they would say in those early trainings, they're called unattached
burdens, that these come in through things that you just named. They can come in
through ritual abuse. They can come in through, again, it's not your fault,
especially if you're the victim, right, in those cases. But there might have been
some exposure. It can come in through things we expose ourselves to. And they're
usually some of those big T traumatic things that just kind of...
is something going on there spiritually that evil, you know, and we're just naive to
not consider that in our own walks. Even to this day,
oftentimes, if I'm going through a hard time, I err. I think the psychologist in me
errs toward what's concrete, what's real, what can I see? But if I'm going through
a hard struggle or someone in my family is kind of running the diagnostic Rolodex,
I wonder what this is. Is this... They're not sleeping well. Is this, we're not
getting the right, you know, have I eaten horribly the last couple of weeks? Is
this something I'm not taking?
And is there something spiritual going on? That has nothing to do with us. We're
not doing anything. This isn't sin. This isn't, or this isn't, I'm, there's something
going on here. That is a diagnostic category that is important to consider. That's
my two cents on that. I want to, I guess now I want to flip it to you.
What are a few? simple, not kind of hokey, but biblical ways to engage spiritual
warfare, especially for people who don't lead us into either extreme of being overly
obsessed with it, but also not discounting it. What are some practical things we can
do? What do you do in your own family? How do we engage in a way that is not
naive, to use Jesus' words, where we're shrewd as a serpent, right? We're not naive,
but also innocent. Yeah, you know, I would just go back to that very first question
that you asked, Allison, of what is spiritual warfare? And it's this desire for God
to have his family back together. And so I would want to frame it in that way of
like, what are the things that we do? Well, I think Paul gives it to us in
Galatians chapter 5. And often I think we think of, I like to break it up into
what's normal. and non -normative and the non -normative things get the most highlight
reels, right? It's the demon exorcisms. It's the big, massive, you know, and power
encounters or deliverance ministries. And while I wouldn't say that those are wrong
by any means, I think that those are non -normative. Well, what is normative? Here
are the things that are normative. Galatians chapter five, the fruit of the spirit.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self -control. By the
way, we live in a world that does not want to buy into the beauty of the fruit
of the Spirit. They want to buy into the vices of the flesh. And there's a real
enemy who's, again, working in systems and structures in order to move us away from
the beauty of the kingdom of God into really the chaos of the kingdom of the world
and loves to use selfish ambition, vain conceit, all these things in order to
perpetuate that. And so a very practical thing that you and I get to do. is to
practice and cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in our lives, in our family, with
our loved ones, you know? I mean, so practical, but like on the road when somebody
cuts you off and you want to lose your mind, right? And like reminding yourself in
that moment, like I don't have to be led by my emotion. I'm feeling something, but
that feeling can be an indication that I got to return this feeling and this
emotion back to the foot of the cross, back to the Lord so that the Lord can
sanctify me and I can respond appropriately. And so I would just say, you know,
like the fruit of the spirit. And by the way, that is a winsome witness to the
world of the truth of who Jesus is. And when we get to participate in that,
and this is that whole. idea of communicating the truth of the gospel, both with
our words and with our works, this is all part of spiritual warfare. Our family
has, just the last year, we wrote up a family covenant, like, hey,
what do we believe as a family? Like, what do we stand for, you know? And where
in the Bible does it prove these things? Because we want to be like... say we're
Christians. We say we follow King Jesus. And so what does Jesus tell us to follow
these things out? And so it's like, hey, we're a family that's committed to the
Bible. We want to read the Bible together. We're committed to prayer. We're committed
to the fruit of the Spirit. We're committed to loving each other. We're committed to
forgiveness. We're going to forgive as quickly as we possibly can. We're committed to
our health. We want to be good stewards of the bodies that God has given us. And
so all of these things, I mean, some people are like, wait, I was not expecting
that at all for a conversation on spiritual warfare. And I'd be like, and that's
exactly why. Because the enemy wants you to not be thinking about any of that. But
a compromise spiritually, emotionally, and physically are perfect entry points for the
enemy to then snatch you up. I think often about Genesis 4,
Cain and Abel, and the Lord tells Cain, sin is crouching. At the door,
it's waiting to devour you. And I think about this enemy. This enemy is so patient
and so willing to wait for the perfect opportunity. And then the Lord says to Cain,
by the way, you must rule over it. You know, and there's a way out for this.
And so I think that that's why active participation in the fruit of the spirit,
in living out the truth of the gospel, and just like prayer, fasting,
loving Jesus, being a part of a community of faith, taking care of your mental
health, going to therapy, like using God's common grace given to us.
These are all acts of spiritual warfare because it's recovering holiness. That's a
word. That's great. Thank you. I love that. I love the, that's what we... can
control and it's good and it's powerful and it's not nothing. It's deep and true
and good. Tell us where, tell my listeners where they can find you and you're so
helpful online and this is a great book and you've got another book. Tell us a
little bit about where to find you and all that you're doing. Yeah. So I do a
bunch of my kind of conversations and stuff on Instagram. So it's just my last name
at Mudamali, M -U -D -D -A -M -A -L -L -E. Not many of us out there, so it should pop
up pretty quick. And then I do a lot. of my writing on Substack.
It's just called Humble Theology. If you look that up, that's a great place. The
book is available wherever books are sold. It's on discount right now on Amazon. And
then my first book I wrote is a book on humility. It's called The Hidden Peace.
And so I actually think these two books go really well together, you know,
cultivating humility, which is so necessary for the spiritual war that we find
ourselves in. And then if you are interested in like strange, weird, things about
the Bible. You're more interested about the Nephilim stuff and the sons of God.
We've got a podcast. podcast friend of ours, mine, Blurry Creatures and I,
we created a subset called Stranger Theology. And so Stranger Theology is like a
place to get like grounded theological scholarship and writing. But we talk about
weird stuff in the Bible. Like why in the world is Balaam's, you know, donkey? Like
what is going on with that? And is there a point to these stories? I love that. I
love that you have that outlet. Did you ever read the Madeline L 'Engle book called
Many Waters? No, I haven't. Do you know her work? Yeah. A little bit,
she's different, but some of her stuff kind of imaginative stuff. It's like science
fiction, but it's a little like Narnia. There's like spiritual undertones. And that
one is about the Nephilim. And I read it as a kid, and it just brought to life
that period of time that we don't often hear about, but it's part of the big story
that we always hear about. So she piqued my curiosity, so I love it that you're
bringing that up. You're bringing it back. Yeah, I am. Absolutely. Thanks for your
time, Joel. We went over today, but it's just so fascinating, so rich, and I so
appreciate you. Always. Appreciate you. Thank you for joining me for this week's
episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to
subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to or watch
podcasts and click the plus or follow button. That'll ensure you don't miss an
episode and it helps get the word out to others. While you're there, I'd love it
if you leave a five -star review. And be sure to join us each weekday for the best
of you every day, a brief daily reflection to help you start your mornings with a
steady dose of wisdom. Remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor
God, you heal others, and you stay true to your God -given self.