GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

176. What's On Your Mind- Adolescent Journeys: Finding Identity and Faith | The Power of Everyday Faith

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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When an unexpected moment on a bus ride reignites your faith, you know there's a powerful story to be shared. Anne's candid email opens a window into her spiritual journey, a narrative that this What's On Your Mind explores deeply.

This memorable segment features a heartfelt letter from Anne about her struggles with depression and a newfound sense of God's presence. Jerry and Scott offer insightful reflections on spiritual discernment, surrendering to divine guidance, and nurturing daily connections with the divine. 

They explore the complexities of adolescence, the search for identity, and the profound experience of feeling God's presence. 

What emerges is a compelling conversation that delves into the heart of adolescence, identity, and the profound role spiritual encounters play in our lives.

Explore the transformative power of prayer, the wisdom gained from embracing life's challenges, and the insights drawn from each individual's spiritual journey.

Tune in for an inspiring discussion that will leave you feeling uplifted and enlightened. Stay connected and join the conversation as we explore the depths of spirituality and the journey toward spiritual fulfillment.


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Scott Langdon 00:17: This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.

Scott Langdon 01:07: Hello and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and it's time once again for Jerry and I to seek another answer to one of our favorite questions: what's on your mind? This week, Jerry and I break down an email from a young lady named Anne, who writes in to us with a very heartfelt and beautifully articulated story about her experiences with God. Even at a young age, she is aware of a connection and Anne's reflection on what that connection feels like is wonderful, brave and inspiring. If you'd like to ask a question or share your story of God, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com. We always love to hear from you. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Scott Langdon 02:00: Welcome back, everybody to another edition of What's On Your Mind. I'm Scott Langdon, I'm here with Jerry Martin and this week we have an email from Anne. We're recording this on Good Friday, 2024, and she has a Christian perspective. But what she deals with and what she's digging into in this email and the things that she talks about in relationship to God, in relationship to others and so forth, is something that I just think is so universal. The questions that she has, the struggles that she's dealing with and the kind of experience that she goes through anybody anywhere, I think, can relate to it. Jerry, what do you think about Anne's email?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:40: Well, I think Anne has an extraordinary story that she's shared with us, with ups and downs, because that's the nature of life. And you know, it's such a blessing when people like Anne do share their stories. But some of the emails we get are from people much shorter and maybe they haven't had a big illumination. You know they're drifting. Or I remember one from a young man who says he's trying to find the voice of God or the divine presence, and everywhere he looks, just nothing, nothing, nothing. Well, that's interesting too. That was well worth sharing because that's part of the human experience. So I think it’s such a blessing when people share, whether they're stories of divine illumination or stories of despair or stories as most of them are, somewhere in between those two difficult journeys through life and somehow in tandem with the divine, at least in the background. And anyway, Anne's report is, I think, really gripping.

Scott Langdon 03:44: It is very gripping and we'd love to share it with you right now. So let me read to you what Anne has to say. Anne writes in and says this:

Letter from Anne 03:51: I am 18 years old and I grew up as a Christian. I went to church every Sunday as a child with my siblings and my mother. Though I went to church, I felt it was just something people did and there was nothing else to it. I did not really understand it, so I lived most of my life not understanding who God really was. Growing up, my home started becoming broken. I went from having this energetic, crazy, incredible personality to becoming this empty, unfulfilled, and unhappy child who thought “This is just what getting older is like.” But now I realize it's the opposite.

Letter from Anne 04:34: I had been diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety at the age of 12 and I never thought anything of it. I had very few friends, no hobbies, and no desire to do practically anything. Though I didn’t understand God, I was still involved with my Church’s youth group. We all went to this weekend ‘summit’ for young Christians in our area. I went with one of my best friends and we went because of the activities that were offered there (ice skating, hiking, rock climbing), I had no interest in the worship part of the trip. But at one point during these times of worship (they had a band and a speaker come) the speaker decided to “invite” the Holy Spirit into the room. I had no idea what that meant but I just went with it. The band started playing a song with the lyrics “Holy Spirit you are welcome here, come flood this place and fill the atmosphere.” – “Let us become more aware of your presence.” When I heard these lyrics, something happened. I was immediately filled with this powerful warmth and pressure in my chest, and I started bawling crying. I had no idea what was going on (there were others who had the same thing happen to them at the same time as me). There was a woman who came over to me and she automatically knew what was happening to me and she put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Thank you, Lord Jesus, for her.” The Holy Spirit filled me and I had intense feelings of peace and absolute joy. This was my awakening to God. 

Letter from Anne 06:15: Years passed and I had kept my relationship with God, but over time it seemed to be incredibly distant. I stopped thinking about Him for a while. The past two years, I completely, and unknowingly, separated myself from God. It was possibly the worst two years of my life. I am in my Senior Year of high school now and I had another awakening. This winter has been especially hard for me academically, socially, and mentally. I was back to feeling incredibly empty and just sad, I didn’t want to continue living thinking that it was going to be this way all the time.

Letter from Anne 06:57: About three days ago, I was on a bus going to my school’s ski team practice and I decided to listen to some worship songs I used to listen to a couple years ago. The song that I pressed (not to mention by accident) was the song that the band had played that significant night. I started to feel that warm feeling in my chest again. It was a really cloudy day and I was just looking out of the window enjoying the song. We then took a turn onto this road on a hillside and I saw the sun peaking through the clouds with sun rays beaming all across the mountain, and in that cloud, I saw a shape of a man’s face.

Letter from Anne 07:43: I had this overwhelming sensation run through my ENTIRE body and it felt like I was floating. My chest became so warm and I was so overjoyed that my toes were tingling. That very second I knew that the face I saw was Him. Since then, all I could think about was Him. I am now able to hear Him in my own thoughts and I can feel in my chest whether something is right or not. I physically feel him with me all the time. Jerry, what do you think God is telling me by making me physically feel him constantly now? 

Scott Langdon 08:23: Now, that was from Anne.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:25: Isn't that extraordinary? Isn't that extraordinary? Life contains extraordinary experiences and we need to pause over them and reflect on them. And she was good enough to share it with us. And my response at the time I wrote back:

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:43: It sounds to me as if God is reminding you of the divine presence. God is with us whether or not we are aware of it. Sometimes we have to open our hearts. Sometimes, as in your first case, the divine spirit just comes in without an invitation. Our lives have many ups and downs. It is difficult, but then most important, to be aware during the dismal times that God is with us, loves us, and is available to guide us. You are receiving direct guidance and here a further challenge comes in — the challenge of spiritual discernment. It takes careful attention to recognize and correctly interpret the divine signals. It sounds as if you are doing a good job of that. Bless you! And bless us all. I mean she has blessed us all with this sharing and I noticed as I read this in some ways I thought well, this is fairly generic, but I think everything I said is true and applies to her experience. Generic in part, by my awareness.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:05: I do not know these people personally. I only know about their lives what they shared, and so I kind of hold back a little. I don't try to, you might say, invade their lives and start directing it. And it was only as we've prepared for this program that I noticed she ended with a very specific question, which I answered in a rather general way: what do you think God is telling me? We might revisit that later, but I think the first significant thing here is simply that event where she goes and with no interest in the worship part of the program, goes and the speaker invites the Holy Spirit and of course she doesn't know what that is and very much you know, as a lifelong agnostic, when I had my experience I didn't know what any of these terms meant. You might say these experiences people would describe, but invite the Holy Spirit okay, lots of religions have spirit in them. That's almost foundational.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:07: And then that it comes to her in a song, that's interesting. Music is powerful, but here it's the lyrics, particularly she's responding to, and the lyric is, “Let us become more aware of your presence.” And at that moment, whammo, something happens, that she feels in her chest- warmth and starts crying, which is often accompaniment to deep experiences of religious and otherwise. Even though you don't… what am I crying about? Why am I crying? It's because you know you're just flooded and overflowing and crying is the only thing to do at such a moment. Wow, sometimes it's a kind of crying with joy, but the person would have to speak to that and well, maybe I'll just stop there, because you know what do you make of—that's the actual key, pivotal experience in her life, though there's another very important experience, but this is the one that lets her know that God is present and that that is not just an abstract proposition, but God can enter her heart or her chest and there's more as the story goes on but God is there and she now knows that.

Scott Langdon 12:33: One of the things that struck me straight away in that paragraph there that you referenced, she said, “I had no idea what that meant,” meaning when the speaker invited the Holy Spirit into the room. “I had no idea what that meant but I just went with it.” 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin: Good point. 

Scott Langdon: That really stuck out to me when I think of in terms of how I like to talk about acting and so forth in a rehearsal, there are so many different sort of… 

Scott Langdon 13:02: One of the things I love about acting is the rehearsal process, because you get a scene, a moment in life here and you get to work on it several times. You know exactly what's being said, you know exactly what's coming back to you, you know as this character and you kind of try things differently. You know, this feels right. That doesn't quite feel like the truth, this feels more like the truth. That's what we're going for. That creating this world that really seems like the truth, right, we play make-believe is how you could describe it. Well, one of the ways that you kind of know that it works better this way than the other way is that you investigate this way, that feels this way. You investigate you try it, you say I'm going to go with it.

Scott Langdon 13:54: You know, you play the scene out and you get this feeling that yeah, this is the way to go. This isn't the way to go. But you first have to go with it. You have to be brave to try to experience. And when she gets this idea, she doesn't just ignore it and say, listen, we're only here for the skating and the hiking and whatever. But she's there and open for the experience and she went with it. So there's something about you know, what do we control? What does God control? Do we have control- all of those kinds of sort of philosophical, maybe existential, questions? It seems as if that's the attunement with God that we're looking for is God's showing us by feeling and direction which way to go, and this one feels more right than the other. But we have to take that step and go with it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 14:48: Yeah, I'm glad you pick up on that, Scott, because that is so much part of an open spiritual life. You've got to keep your soul open even to things that don't quite make sense to you and you constantly find in God: An Autobiography, those first 44 episodes or in the book, that God is telling me to do things and I just say that didn't make sense to me but I just went with it. We're about to do a life wisdom discussion of episode 16, which is creation, where we revisit the initial creation of the world. And I remember I was told in that, “Enter into Me.” God says to me: enter into Me. What? I think this makes no sense. How on earth would I do that? But okay, I just go with it, just do my best.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:54: You may not know how to do it, you know I just try to lend myself to the experience and more often than not that kind of works. Sometimes one of the... I have the disability, you might say, of being a philosopher and you can't conduct an inquisition in advance. You know of being a philosopher, you can't conduct an inquisition in advance, just cross-examine. If you do that, that's not an open soul. There you're just trusting your own prior belief set and so forth, and your own idea of logicality. I'm often told think more, both and and less, either, or. So you have to relax some of these categories you bring to experience in order just to be open to the experience and let the spirit in this case, let the spirit guide you. You just be open, let it take you. And it took Anne very far, and I know you mentioned at the end, Scott, that Anne ends up feeling not only that, the Divine is present, to where...

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:00: Here, I'm jumping a little bit to the second story of her after lapsing because of problems in her life, she comes back and has the experience again and then she says and now she's taking it in more fully, it's not just, oh, a single event, zap, oh, huh, and now I move on and maybe relapse or forget about God, which seems to be what happened to Anne, how easy it is for that to happen in one's life. But now she's able to hear God in her own thoughts and so it's internalized, it's part of her natural mental apparatus and I know most people, religious people often talk about hearing God in my mind. And of course, I'm told in the book, I'm told about the many ways God comes to us, intuition, aesthetic response even, and one is in thoughts that seem like your own, but it's God thinking through us, you might say.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:12: And other times people say, God said to me in my mind, because sometimes it's like a different voice and you can tell it. Usually you can tell the difference between did I think this up or is this, I prayed, I put a question to God in my mind and I received an answer, you know, like God speaking to me, and is that just me thinking? Well, that's where spiritual discernment comes in. You need to pay close attention and not just let your own thinking run away with the divine input, and that the divine input just requires, you might say, great relaxation and openness and just letting be. There's that nice Beatles song, let it be, let it be, isn't that a Beatles song? 

Scott Langdon: That's it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:59: You know, just let it be. Let it be.

Scott Langdon 19:41: The late Stephen Sondheim, one of the great composers in musical theater, American musical theater history, wrote the lyrics and the music to his pieces and in a wonderful musical called Into the Woods, one of the characters has a great line in a song she sings. The baker's wife, she sings a song and in it she has the lyric, “Oh, if life were only moments. Moments even now, and then a bad one. But if life were only moments, then you'd never know you had one,” and I loved that line. I've contemplated it for hours over the years. Um, no, I disagree with that. Everything's a moment. Well, well, wait a minute. Is it one big moment? All of those things.

Scott Langdon 20:32: But the idea, I think, relates here in this idea of these sort of mountaintop experiences that we would have described them as in religious summer camps that I grew up in, you know, to be aware of this mountaintop experience. Camp for a week is beautiful in nature and we're all focused on, you know, God in a certain way, and we all have this feeling of, yes, God is here and God is present, and I believe God was, God is in those things. And then we go home to our high schools and our regular every days and where is God? And in a situation very similar to one I've had, many of my friends have had. I know many young people have this experience of having this experience of God in this way and then getting back to sort of the day-to-day and having it fall off and seeming, as she says, over time it seemed to be incredibly distant as the years passed and I highlight that paragraph as we were preparing, because what came to my heart and mind and here's to your point, did I think of this? Or is this God and I thinking together? Is this God thinking? But the thought came and this sentence came out. I don't even know how much sense it makes, but the sentence came to me.

Scott Langdon 21:51: The salvation is not the experience, the experience is your salvation, and what I mean by that is we look often for the salvation is in that experience. I have to get that high mountain feeling all the time and keep it. What I found is that I have often thought that I want to be high. I want to be high in the experience, but what I really want is to be free, and what I am feeling in that moment is the freedom, is the connection, is this oneness with God that I want to keep. But it is the mountaintop experience that we sometimes idolize. It becomes an idol that we pursue and so we think in these times of struggle or just plain times, just ordinary day to day, that God isn't with us, because we're looking at the experience instead of the accompanying peace and knowing of direction that comes with this union with God.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:58: Yeah, I think that's a very important point, Scott. It's a challenge, particularly for those religious traditions inside and outside Christianity that emphasize a kind of ecstatic moment, ecstatic experience where whoa and my Jewish wife and I listened to country gospel in the mornings and it's full of these songs. I saw the light. I saw the light and I went there to fight. But, Lord, what a night. Something took hold of me. I guess is that lyric, but you have those moments and we have those moments. But the point of those moments and I often think sorry to mention and break in with another example, but it's a very different kind of example, a woman of Catholic tradition, Doris Grumbach, a noted writer and essayist, one time in her tub.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:58: She's soaking in the bathtub and a kind of mystical experience comes upon her where she feels totally loved and here's the divine presence just flooding her. And as she wrote her memoir about this, she spent the whole rest of her life trying to have that experience again and I remember I thought, oh, poor Doris, that experience was a gift that let you know the vibrancy of the divine presence. The point isn't to revisit the experience. You know the very point you were making, Scott. The key isn't, whoa wowee experience. The key is something thankfully gets your attention and a static experience certainly does that and so you experience in the most vivid possible way the divine presence. But then what you need to do is okay, now you know it. Take that with you. Now you have a kind of ability to tune into the divine that you didn't have before, because you wouldn't even know where to look or how to do that or what it meant even, which is what Anne says at the beginning. What does this mean, Spirit coming in. Well, now, Anne knows and Anne drifted away because… and I've reported this about myself that my very best days are those in which I pray my way through the day, almost asking at each point what am I to do now? What am I to do now? And following the leads that I get. But most days I don't do that. I start off with a to-do list, because we all live, you know, the grocery shopping has to be done and there's a leak in the basement, and or I'm trying to get this piece of writing done or an event organized, and so those things and the mentality comes in, and then, after I get my own to-do list done, then if there's time left over in the day, maybe I'll have some quiet time spent with the divine. But that is so natural.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:09: But one thing I admire it's a story from the Hindu tradition, but it would apply to any religious tradition that there are rituals for opening your shop in the morning.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:21: You're a shopkeeper and you do a little prayer because you're selling used, reconditioned typewriters or something and you pray not just to make more money that day, not for that, but that you're doing this in a way that's in service to the divine. And so each thing you do, there's a sense in which you should do it, you might say prayerfully, or you know in the light of your sense that you're not just a person on two legs walking through the world, making a living or whatever but there's way more to you as a person. There is the divine presence in you and in everybody else, the shopkeeper and the customers who are coming in. You're serving the divine when you serve those customers. And of course, Jesus says things very much like that. I can't remember the lines, I'm not very good at remembering scripture, but you know what I'm referring to, Scott.

Scott Langdon 27:25: If you do this for the least of these you do it for me. Yeah, I've thought about that. It's not that you're doing it as if it were me. I feel like we don't take it literally enough. You know, we talk about…

Scott Langdon 27:44: I used to have a really hard time with the literalist Christians, but actually I don't know that we're even literal enough. I mean, if God really is everything and everyone, there is only God, the Alpha and the Omega, everything. So I would do that morning prayer. The intention, as you're explaining, is to be of service to the divine. Well, the customer that comes in is the divine right there, manifested in this individual going through their version of what I'm going through. You know whatever it is, and you know, and it's especially tricky if that person is giving us a hard time. You sell a used typewriter and they come back and want their money back, and why? Is there something wrong with it? No, I just it's. I don't, you know, and they give you a hard time or whatever, and you go okay, God, how do I serve you here? You know it's challenging, it's tricky, it's not always roses and sweet smelling things.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:41: No, sometimes it's by pushing back, because you know we may be God, but we're particularizations of the divine and embodied, and with our own empirical stories and personalities, and so sometimes you help a person by placing limits, by saying, no, you know, I have rights. You might say, and there are ethics here, there are ethical norms, and you're violating them, you know, just out of greed or something. Well then they have a chance to learn something about themselves and to become better people and better particularizations of the divine. If you put it that way, because you can be better or worse at that, the stories of the great saints and seers is the story of people particularly good at that, you might say, and are human icons of the divine. You know that the divine shows much more clearly through them, but the divine showing is very clearly, I think, through Anne's story here.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:12: Talking beforehand about Anne’s piece Scott, you mentioned that you've taught high school and you call my attention, I knew it of course, she starts off, I'm 18 years old and we know at 12 years old she was diagnosed with clinical depression. And something I had thought was worth noting is you know what was going on in her life? Well, my home started becoming broken. Everything was falling apart at home and you know you're just a child.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:42: She starts off energetic, crazy, incredible personality. She's full of life and you watch sometimes these little, you know three-year-olds and everything and they're just amazing. They run everywhere and look into everything and jump on everything and they almost think they can fly. You know, children are extraordinarily vulnerable and their support system is the home. And it starts, who knows, falling apart in some way, conflict-ridden perhaps, and maybe you know drugs or something, but we don't know what, but it's falling apart and now it's so sad to think about it- becomes this empty, unfulfilled, unhappy child, she says, who thought, and this is what I'm finding sad, said this is just what getting older is like. She just thinks, oh, you can be happy when you're a three-year-old, it's downhill after that.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:42: And I knew one young man who came from a very broken home circumstance and asked him what was the happiest point in his life age, in his life. Two, he said. Well, that's an awfully early age at which to peak, you might say. But here, to her it just seems, you know, the child has very little perspective. They often think it's their fault if the home is falling apart. That's one of the challenges. They kind of think everything must be their fault and they carry that burden.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:15: And anyway, this dismal prospect oh, this is what being grown up is. So that stretches interminably into the future and has no sense at this point of there being anything else, and so there's no purpose for living, basically, and nothing is fun, no interest, no sense of I want to be. You know, Abigail, when she was a kid, wanted to be a deer. Well, okay, that's at least a purpose. You got a reason to go forward, but poor Anne didn't even have a kind of mythological desire. And then what struck you, Scott, as having taught high school, I guess, here she is, 18-year-old, been through again, I guess, two of the worst years of her life, and you have a sense of what kids are going through at that point. I was talking about the early stage of life, but there's this teenage stage that nobody, when I talk to people, nobody would want to relive their adolescence. This is a hard period.

Scott Langdon 33:33: Yeah, in 2008, in the fall of 2008, I had been teaching the previous three years in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the year just prior to that, I had been teaching elementary music for the preschool age. I started out the 2008, 2009 school year in Elizabeth teaching preschool kids. I had done it the year before and there were a lot of things I liked about it, but it was, I traveled around to six different schools, we were always in the trailers where the preschool is separated from the main building and so forth. It's just me and my guitar and I kind of lived out of my car because, you know, I didn't really have a place. So it wasn't what I didn't...

Scott Langdon 34:12: I loved the kids, I loved what I was doing. But I wanted to change and got an opportunity to become closer to home, teaching at East Brunswick High School, and that job switched in October. So I'd already started the school year with the preschoolers. So on a Friday late in October I said goodbye to the preschoolers and on Monday I stepped into the classroom in my new position, teaching seniors in high school. So over the weekend I went in from these kids who are just coming into the public school system at four years old, going to turn five later. To these kids who are getting out, you know this is their last year over the course of a weekend.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:50: That's a tough audience.

Scott Langdon 34:51: It was quite a change and they had, this was a humanities class that you, it was an elective, you could sign up for it, and so the teacher who I was replacing was one of the reasons that many of them had signed up for the course to begin with and they didn't know he was going to be leaving, and so well, he never did come to the beginning of the school year there was just a substitute for eight weeks for these students who had been expecting this other teacher and so disappointed. So I walked in and it's like you know who are you, another sub kind of a feeling and I had to win them over time, it was you know, it was a wonderful experience.

Scott Langdon 35:26: The reason I bring it up is that there's so much concern and tumultuous time about identity searching at that level. Who am I? Why am I? What am I doing? What am I going to do now? Where did I come from? Like what's going on? What I'm really impressed with in Anne's email is that she wrote this email and that she is talking about these. She's seeing it. She's seeing this is what I was like and when I was young and my home became broken. You can see a lot of times when we're in these difficult situations, we don't know we're in them. But to be aware and to see it and to be able to know. I went to this summit because I was going with a best friend. I didn't really want to be involved, but then the speaker came out and there was a band and I just went with it. To be aware of that. That, to me, is the attunement with God when you're aware of it and you're in it, but your identity is not entangled with the experience.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:43: With my rather general, truthful and relevant but rather generic response, I think I somewhat overlooked the fact that Anne had posted a direct question to me by name. You know, Jerry, what do you think God is telling me by making me physically feel Him constantly now, and I somewhat skipped over, you know we referred to it, but this was right after she reported I'm now able to hear him in my own thoughts. We mentioned that, I can feel in my chest whether something is right or not, and most people don't talk about their chest at this point. But somewhere deep inside your body, in your gut, you feel, when you're kind of attuned to the divine, oh, the divine kind of lets you know at your deepest organic level, oh, here's what you should be doing, and moves you kind of upward, you know aspirationally upward. Or like the devil on the shoulder or the angel on the other shoulder, the angel's saying no, don't go there. Sometimes that in the pit of the… you have a temptation: Don't go there. Or maybe just a lapse. You know, laziness, neglect, no, don't go there, pay attention, pay attention. And so one has these feelings that she's gotten to where you don't have to have ecstatic experiences. You don't have to have the experience that first came to me,God suddenly speaking to you and then telling you a whole bunch of things in response to your questions. You can hear him in your thoughts, you can feel the divine nudge, the divine sense of direction in your chest or body. And she reports: I physically feel Him with me all the time. Well, that is accurate. That is accurate. God is with you all the time.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 38:53: But it's not always easy to feel that. And the feeling means, you know, sometimes religion is talked about as if it's a matter of belief. I now believe. I now believe. If you believe the right thing, you're home free. But it's not a matter of accepting doctrines. You know the Nicene Creed or you know some particular interpretation of the Bible or something like that. No, it's deeper. It's deeper than that. And to feel that physically is that kind of depth of union with the divine, not just your creedal component, saying, okay, I'll sign the dotted line now to a set of beliefs. You know you've got a set of beliefs. A lot of churches you go in and they got a set of beliefs right up front. You've got to accept these. But that's not where it's about. It's about getting God in your gut, you might say. Getting God in your gut.

Scott Langdon 40:09: Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time. Thank you.