GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
235. What's On Our Mind- Love That Transforms
Romantic Awakening, Divine Listening, and the Inner Self
What does it mean to fall in love, not just with a person, but with the mystery of life itself?
In this heartfelt and thought-provoking episode of What's On Our Mind, Jerry and Scott reflect on the deep emotional and spiritual themes raised in recent episodes and discuss two new series: Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, and What's Your Spiritual Story?
From romantic love and divine connection to shadow work and self-integration, they explore how transformation often begins with listening—really listening—to our hearts, our partners, and the quiet whisper of God.
Scott shares personal growth from theater, marriage, and divine interruptions. Jerry opens up about his "real conversion" which was not to religion, but to love itself.
Together, they trace the difference between merging and mutuality, between fantasy and devotion, and between reaction and responsibility.
This episode is for anyone who’s ever asked: Can I really be known, and loved, as a whole person?
Related Episodes:
234. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Mark Groleau on God, Process, and Change
233. Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue | Philosophers Answer: What Is Love
Other Series on the Podcast:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, and now includes several unique series:
- The Life Wisdom Project: How to live a wiser, happier, and more meaningful life with special guests.
- From God To Jerry To You: Calling for the attention of spiritual seekers everywhere, featuring breakthroughs, pathways, and illuminations.
- Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: Sit in on a dialogue between philosophers about God and the questions we all have.
- What’s On Our Mind: Connect the dots with Jerry and Scott over the most recent series of episodes.
- Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: A personal, philosophical, and spiritual conversation between soulmates.
- What’s On Your Mind: What are readers and listeners saying? What is God saying?
- What’s Your Spiritual Story: Submit your spiritual experience and hear it explored on the podcast.
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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 01:14: Hello and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and this week Jerry Martin and I return to you with What's On Our Mind. I really enjoy doing this series with Jerry and getting his perspective on a life and a walk with God that is centered and grounded in love. We talked this week about romantic love and the discussion Jerry and Abigail had in episode 233. But we also expand on the idea, exploring what love looks like in so many areas of our lives. Thanks so much for joining us for What's On Our Mind. You can always find more over at our website site godanautobiography.com Here’s Jerry and me, I hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Langdon 02:02: Welcome back everybody. This is What's On Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon. I'm with Jerry Martin. How are you this week, Jerry?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:12: Well, I'm very good. Been through a lot, as you know, but we're still singing.
Scott Langdon 02:13: Yay, good, good, good. What's On Our Mind is one of my favorite things that we do, and it's almost entirely because I get to talk with you.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:24: Yeah, we get to talk about what's on our minds.
Scott Langdon 02:27: Yeah, we get to share about what we're thinking, what we're going through, and we've both had quite a bit going on and it's an interesting time for both of our lives in the stages that we're in and this particular episode, I wanted to talk about this unit that we've started some new series with you and Abigail. Last week we had an episode with Mark Groleau where he told us his story of his journey with God and also his journey with the book, and you interviewed him for episode 134 in one of our early Life Wisdom Project episodes and we had him back here and talking to you about his story and how coming across God: An Autobiography really shaped the way he sees the world, the way he sees God, the way he sees God interacting with us, and he's up in Toronto and doing a lot of great work there. It was really fun to work on that episode and to listen to you and Mark talk.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:42: Mark Groleau is a wonderful guy, a remarkable guy, and now I think he's moving a little out of our orbit doing other good things of his own. That's how life goes on. But he was one of the first people, he had a radio program, interviewed people, and he always interviewed people right in Toronto, brought them into the studio, usually theology professors and so forth. But he saw this book and he didn't know what to make of it. Guy who claims God spoke to him and told him all this stuff and he thought that, well, is this guy just a fruitcake? You know? But he noticed that I raised that question myself and went through due diligence.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:28: You might say I'm a philosopher and an epistemologist. How do we know what we think we know, and natural to me. But he thought, well, a guy who wonders whether he's a fruitcake probably is not one. You know, the real fruitcakes are quite certain of everything. And so he did the interview with me and it was the beginning of a wonderful friendship, long distance as one has these days. You have good friends who maybe you've never laid eyes on, but you have a rapport, and so it was with the amazing Mark Groleau.
Scott Langdon 05:06: Yeah, I really loved working on that episode and, Mark, if you're listening to this one, we wish you well in whatever it is you're doing. We also introduced a new series, Jerry and Abigail in Intimate Dialogue, and it's been really great to have Abigail on the fringes of this work all the time. I say on the fringes because she voiced her own voice in the audio adaptation and then has come back for some subsequent interviews. I interviewed her one time, You've interviewed her a couple of times and now, to have this sort of regular series is really terrific.
Scott Langdon 05:42: And in episode 233, just two episodes ago, in that debut episode, we brought it back to you, brought it back to the two of you really talked about the love story, because that's where it begins, with the two of you that Abigail was a professor at Brooklyn College and the new administration was trying to change the curriculum up and Abigail and another professor said we got to stop this, called you at your office in DC with what you were doing, said, yes, that's what we do, I can help you. And then, over time and distance, as one does these days, you had, you know, a different kind of distance. You know, I think, over the phone right Instead of Zoom, which wasn't there.
Scott Langdon 06:22: You know a different kind of distance, you know, I think, over the phone, right, instead of Zoom, which wasn't there, you know fell in love, this romantic love, and you know, I've thought about this and I bet Abigail has thought about a similar idea of this. In you know, years gone by, centuries gone by, let's say, this was, you know, 1825, right, maybe that relationship would be by letter
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: Yes, that's a good point.
Scott Langdon: You know, which would take, maybe even overseas. You know how long did you not get my last letter? Well, it was a year ago. You know. It got dropped, you know, in the ocean, somewhere by a you know a wave gone wrong, who knows? Right, how much um connection did we miss, right? How much more connection are we able to have today?
Scott Langdon 07:13: That's maybe another conversation, but, what was really interesting, I thought, among many other things in in the conversation that you had, was that you, when you fell in love, you never had believed in romantic love and you thought, okay, I gotta, I gotta check this out. Like, what's going on here, what do I? I don't know about this? You check the experts and they all thought, you know, there's something wrong with you. And so you thought, well, what do the… what do women do? What are they? Maybe romance novels? And so you read a romance novel and you thought, okay, I can see what's going on here and that makes some sense. And then you kind of gave yourself over to that after a while. Abigail, on the other hand, always believed in romantic love, that it existed, that at least, and talks about that specifically with the way that she learned about love, a European influence from her mother and mother's friends, and how she sat, as Abigail says, as an acolyte at their feet soaking these things up, and she talks about how she understood this romantic love.
Scott Langdon 08:29: I want to play just a little bit from episode 233, and then we'll talk about it.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 08:31: Well, my mother was European and her women friends were European, and I sat like a little acolyte at their feet and drank in their wisdom and put it together like puzzle pieces with some of the literature, I'd read, I guess in French class, the Romance of Tristan and Isault, which comes magically and suddenly it's called the Stroke of Lightning in French parlance. The only problem with it is either in the medieval story where they drink a magic potion and fall hopelessly and instantly in passionate mutual love, they can't live it. It's outside the boundaries of the social structure, so they live as outlaws and then they both die, which comes to the same thing modernized and updated. What the French believed is that it lasts a given span of time, after which point it's over. So they were of limited use, but at least they had the fact of something not exactly in the empirical stream of data, but something that interrupts that ordinary flow of experience.
Scott Langdon: And that was you and Abigail from episode 233. Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, a new series that we're doing. Abigail talks about here in this clip that we just played, that, the romances Tristan and Iseult, Romeo and Juliet in these passionate young people. You know romances, there’s something very significant there and yet they can't live it out. There's just it has a finite point and then it changes, it dies, they die. But the point is that kind of early romantic love it alters eventually and, getting past that place that it seems to do that with, every couple gets to this finite early stage. I don't know, but there's something past that. Can you talk a little bit about how the two of you, with these sort of different entry points into what romantic love is when you came together, how you have formed your relationship now in terms of understanding what romantic love is.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:30: Yeah, she totally believed in romantic love and her first love was in Paris, when she's a graduate student there on a Fulbright grant with other graduate students in the same mode. He turned out to be a Greek national, but he's now a professor at the University of Paris. But it turned out he was also a philosophy student in Paris. That did not turn out well and yet it had a lasting imprint. And one of the things that she always talks about is a love affair that doesn't go where you'd hoped it would go, maybe, and she saw from the beginning this is impossible. He's not worthy actually of my love. I could not quite really live a life with this guy and nevertheless the love is there and I always feel it's one of God's great blessings to the structure of the world that women fall in love with men not worthy of them, because that's our salvation often. But she did not become cynical. She said women often become cynical. All men are cads, you know that kind of thing. And then you've closed a door and so she kept the door open through decades. Really, in that French context she became acutely aware that a lot of the problem is it is a stroke of lightning, as the French call it. It starts with a magic potion. In other words, it's not in the real world, the world in which we live empirically, day to day. It comes in like a zap and then it doesn't quite have the legs, if you think of it like the news stories. They have legs or they don't. It doesn't have the momentum, the fixation, the fixity on reality that a love needs to endure and flourish and grow. It was a magic thing that zapped in and then whoops, it's out again, and that characterizes the French... Nobody's more erotic than the French, but this characterizes the French erotic culture to this day. So they're always running around having romances, oh, but then it's fleeting. It's always assumed it'll be fleeting. From the beginning you assume it'll be fleeting and oh, you just swoon, and so on. Well, that's really no good, in spite of its excitement.
Dr. Jerry L Martin 12:31: In my case, I just lived a naturalistic worldview. It's not that I had studied the question, I had never read anything on it. I just was a common sense kind of person and thought well, what you need is a practical relationship where you have shared interest and values and hobbies and whatever, and then you'll have a good life together. And when people got into bolts of lightning and swooning and everything, I thought, oh well, that sounds like teenagers. You know that it's a kind of immature emotional reaction and nothing I was interested in having, you know. So I just didn't trust this kind of head over heels love until it happened to me. And then I thought, wow, this is real. This is real One of the things I sometimes say my real conversion…
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:28: I wasn't converted to theism, to believing in God. That happened later. My real conversion was to romantic love and that's what shaped my life from then on, and I give myself credit. In fact, in my own book, Radically Personal, I talk about your need and epistemics of trust. When an experience comes to you, don't think, oh, this is impossible and that's an experience of God, an experience of romantic love, an experience of some other kind of strange beauty or whatever it might be mystical visions, tarot cards, whatever it might be. Don't dismiss it in advance. Take in each experience, probe it for what reality it offers to you. It might be limited in its validity, but don't walk away until you learn whatever it has to teach you. And so the experience of romantic love, the experience of a divine voice or a sense of divine presence or providential intervention. Take it in and see what you can make of it.
Scott Langdon 14:38: That's so interesting. It keeps coming up time and time again this idea of taking it in.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 14:45: Yes.
Scott Langdon 14:46: God tells that to you many different times through the course of preparing you to tell His story. So many times you'll start something and He will say can you just listen for a minute? Right? And God's just like can you hang on and just wait? Hang on? Well, I don't see you anywhere. God, you're never here. You see me all the time I'm buzzing down the highway getting ready to my job in DC and there's a little buzzing by my ear. Listen, listen. And you're. Oh, oh God, was that you like a little gnat in my?... You pay attention to the little things and listen. We just opened last night. We're recording on May the 30th, on a Friday. Last night, May 29th, we opened the play Alibi, an Agatha Christie story, at the Bristol Riverside Theater right here in the town where I live, and it's a really lovely production because it's a pro-am pros and amateurs right. So the main characters of the story are played by the professionals like me, I'm one of the characters and then the townspeople who have a line or two here or there are made up of community members who tried out. Some of them are retired. I thought maybe I'd like to see what a theater would be like, you know, and then some young people to want to maybe get into the theater professionally later, who knows? But we're all together to put on this, this show, and so there's sort of different levels of experience and there's different levels of you know, especially a lot of the community members, are taking in a lot of information about you know what to do and it's all new to them and and so I've spent a lot of time sort of seeing and being aware of what, paying attention and listening how important that is in all aspects of our lives.
Scott Langdon 17:08: But as it pertains to you know the theater and how I see the world, sort of at large, through the lenses of theater and working as an actor, I can see that part of the difficulty is being in one's head and thinking about this, that and the other in the future, and what if I mess up?
Scott Langdon 17:26: And all of this and not being in the present moment is some language that is used across different religious traditions. Be here now, be in the present moment, be you know, a way that God tells you about the same idea is listen and pay attention. When it comes to love, and specifically romantic love, I find and have found that over the years, I feel that maybe I've gotten a little bit better at it because I've been able to learn how to listen and pay attention to my partner, to my wife Sarah, but also to me, to myself, listening to what do I, what do I do in this situation, and then sort of being present and taking in. Well, here's what you did last time and that didn't work out well. Maybe you could try this instead, being aware and open to receiving an answer to: what do I do? All of that seems to be connected to listen and pay attention.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:37: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm thinking. My challenge is paying attention to my own feelings. I'm a sort of intellectual type, so I have a stream of thoughts all the time, and often philosophical and whatever big thoughts. But what's actually going on? You know, and I think I'm a pretty good listener, but what's going on with me?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:11: And your feelings are highly informative. And what I mean by highly informative is they're cognitive. They pick up elements of reality that your senses and intellect by themselves don't pick up nuances of reality and depths of reality. Those other things tend to work pretty much at the surface of reality, whereas feelings often respond to the level beyond that. That is also showing itself through it in an interaction or a reaction to events. And I have to do this by an effort. Stop and thinking huh, I notice I'm feeling this way.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:57: Why am I feeling this way? Why did this moment? I suddenly feel depressed by it, or suddenly I feel kind of anger or agitation. What did that? What event provoked that and what was I picking up? And you might have to correct the feeling, of course, because they're not like infallible or anything, but they're picking up something. They're like an emotional sensorium, so they're picking up some. That's data, you might say, and you've got to see. What is this telling me? And that's a challenge for me, and I guess, with an awful lot of these religious, moral, aesthetic, you know, the life is made up of these dimensions of value and qualitative experiences and you've got to pay very careful attention to them or you kind of miss out on what's going on.
Scott Langdon 22:50: One of the things I think about when I think about love and, over the years, the experiences that I've had and now sort of reflecting on them and thinking about how I want to love better going forward, I think about how, when I turn myself over to thinking and listening and paying attention to what you mentioned about earlier yourself, your feelings, sort of what's going on here, experience with making choices, and later thinking, why would I do something like that? That doesn't seem like something I would, it's not something I would do, and yet I know it's sort of a Jekyll and Hyde kind of thing almost, where you know the, you sort of in a sense, wake up and and I did this, did I do all this? And it's not an unconscious thing, that's an extreme, you know, in this story. But I think he was really pointing to this idea of this doesn't seem like me, and when I turn the spotlight onto myself and I ask myself those questions that you ask, why would I do something like this? I would often fall into sort of blame and beating myself up because you did this, because you're an idiot. You did this because you stink. You're irredeemable. No wonder God isn't coming to you. All of that it's not worthiness. You're unworthy.
Scott Langdon 24:30: One of the things that I discovered when I started working on characters as an actor is that when I'm playing a character that makes decisions that are going to cause suffering, when I spend time with that character in preparation, as I'm trying to figure out in rehearsals and in my own study how to bring him to life, I ask him questions just like that why would you do that? Why would you make this decision? And within the text, within the script, when the writing is good and well done, those answers are almost always there. There are some gaps that you fill in, like we do in our own lives, though, right, and what I have come to find out through that process and I think it's been revealed to me by God is God saying to me that's what I do, in one sense, with you. I'm constantly asking you why would you do this? You know, as you're getting ready to maybe do it, because when I look back, when Scott looks back on some of these things that Scott has done to.
Scott Langdon 25:00: I'm going to talk about myself in the third person just to illustrate, if you don't mind, that, as the character, in a sense, that I knew this wasn't going to turn out right, almost like a little the gnat in my ear that you said, like if you do this, this is not going to go well, and and then? But doing it anyway, right. And so it's not about blame, it's just, but being aware that that's typically always there. And so now, when things happen and there's a crossroads, somebody's hurt my feelings, maybe my wife has said, or whatever, and I get my back up and I'm going to respond, maybe in a certain way, and I realized, ooh, I need to take a little time to think about this that I can fill in that space and ask myself these, you know these questions hey, are you sure you want to take this road? Do you want to go this other road?
Scott Langdon 26:30: And I don't know that you'll always have to look at it this way but what I have come to see and I've come to see a more personal relationship with God in my life, by understanding that God is also asking me the questions are you doing this. Are you doing that? The ones I ask the character and even though I see the character is going to go ahead and make these decisions anyway, in a sense right, because that's the story that they're in I still I am committed to loving them enough to allow them to fully be present. If Scott is involved at all in judging them, then they're not fully in the story that they're in and I understand. So I understand that God is sort of allowing me to make these decisions that cause suffering, allowing I don't know if that's the word I want, but I guess it is and at the same time, is never away from us, is fully with us in those moments.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 27:35: Yeah, yeah, part of what you're saying. You mentioned Jekyll and Hyde, for example. We all have these moments. You mentioned Jekyll and Hyde, for example. We all have these moments. Some people talk about, you know I was acting out of character. This isn't my character and you know I always tell the truth. But this one time I just couldn't help but lie. I couldn't stop myself. And you know, I'm in love with my wife, I'm faithful to her, but this moment, temptation just got the better of me. And well, that's what the concept of temptation is about. I'm always tempted to eat more because that's my big challenge in life. And there are times, of course, I know, oh, I shouldn't eat this, but I do. You know, here's a nice piece of chocolate, so I do. And then I pay for it, and then later I've gotten a little better because I think I know I'll be very unhappy five minutes later. I very much regret that I do that and that helps me forestall it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:41: But the strange thing about when we act out of character is that in some sense that is part of our character, and I think of Jekyll and Hyde, as I understand the story, the good Dr Jekyll. He's so good, it bothers him that he's not perfect, that he has these unruly sides. So he supposes ah well, I will purify myself by pushing my evil side away. And I don't remember quite how Mr Hyde comes about, but Mr Hyde represents Dr Jekyll's evil, just all the evil goes on to Mr Hyde. Well, that doesn't work very well, that bifurcation into two personalities and I know Jung talks about this. The great psychologist Carl Jung talks about it in terms of your persona. I guess he calls it the self you preferred to present the world, and your shadow self, that there's another side to you. And he believes that you're in trouble if, like Dr Jekyll, your shadow self becomes more and more independent of the rest of you, farther and farther from the persona. You're living a lie at that point with the persona and you know it. This is a fake you, and so you've got this whole shadow self. That's another side of you.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:17: And the Jungian solution that fits a lot with the language God uses talking to me is the key is integration. The key is integration, and I always think of orchestras. You just can't have the drums sounding too loud and drowning out everything else. I mean the parts have to be integrated and you have to be able to hear that part where the little triangle comes into play. You have to be able to hear the triangle when it has its moment in the production. And so you have to pay attention to your own self and not push away the parts you don't like, but rather you're going to tend to them.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:00: And you were talking about the language of love, Scott, that you do to a character when you're portraying them. You know they're not perfect, but you're trying to understand them and their life, not stand outside it and judge it. Understand them and so, with even your shadow self, the parts that you prefer not to look at, well, they're also you and they're sort of telling you something too. You know they're expressing some kind of other need and I know, with my eating I can relate it very easily by psychoanalytic analysis to childhood experiences. Okay, that kind of helps.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:30: You know, I came to understand a little better and it, you know, childhood left me with a problem that eating was the only available solution to. You might say, okay, you come to understand that, then you got a better chance of integrating that and not having it run amok. You know that, oh, okay, let's draw it into the fold, let's see if we can find a more acceptable role for meeting that need and have some nice food but not overdue it. You need to come up with some acknowledgement with you shadow aspects and see if you can live life a little more as a whole being rather than bifurcated being and give due acknowledgement and even loving care to your lesser side, the side that you're more intended to regret and denounce, even well, no, that's not so helpful. Draw it in, rather.
Scott Langdon 32:40: When we talk about love in the context of romantic love and we find that the problem early on is, you know it doesn't last as that. You know Abigail talks about Tristan and Iseult and you know it's given by a potion, as we talked, talked about, you know, and there's a, there's an expiration date on this, really full and rich and exciting, and there's imagination is running wild and all of the you know, not to mention you know, just biologically, all of the, everything is primed for procreation, I mean all of the reasons that it happens that the initial attraction maybe turns into this romantic love. You can't wait to see the person again, by whatever means. Maybe it's just a phone call before the internet, before Zoom, now we can FaceTime, all that. Gotta get in their presence as often as possible. There's a part of me that feels like it's missing unless I'm around that person. And I got to get that missing part, you know.
Scott Langdon 32:45: And then, when you get there, if you get there, and it's true, it's right, you, you realize, no, this is right, I wasn't mistaken, this is romantic love, I for her, her for me. And you know, and here we are now, and then maybe you fall into Oscar Wilde saying the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting it. But the person's there and you do love them and you do want more. But it's now, what, now, what do I do? Now, what? And it seems like there's a place where, at least for me, the way I kind of have thought about my experiences is that it's me, me, me. She makes me feel like this, she makes me feel like I got to get to her so that I can continue to feel there, or feel more.
Scott Langdon 34:33: What's the next feel, feel, and then again, once you get there, and oh, you know, here we are, I still have that feel, she still makes me feel this way. But why do I still feel like there's something else? Well, what do you mean? Something else? What would that be? I don't know, it just feels incomplete. I don't, but you have everything you need in her? Yeah, I do, and yet. So there's a feeling of that's disjointing, of completeness and yet separate.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 35:15: And yet what?
Scott Langdon 35:16: And yet separate individual. Let's say. And you've talked about this a lot before that you didn't want to merge with Abigail. You're you, Abigail's Abigail, and Abigail is particularly Abigail. And I felt that way about my first wife, melissa. I feel that way about Sarah, my wife now. I didn't realize throughout the course of my first marriage how to sort of talk about that or wrestle with what we're talking about right now. But this idea, because I felt complete, I felt like I have everything I ever wanted and yet I still feel this sense of lack. That, it shouldn't feel like that, quote unquote, it shouldn't. I should feel complete all the time now because this is true love. So I guess it's not. I guess I don't haven't found true love yet. No, I know I have. You see that conundrum.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:12: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the person you're in love with meets an enormous life need of yourself. That's obvious. They're not to meet all of your life needs. You may still need to go hang out with the guys and watch a sports game. If she's not interested in sports, she's not going to fill your life, she's not going to meet all your needs. And when you start asking the person to do that, then you're placing an unreasonable demand on the relationships. There are some people who do that. Come, I want you to watch the football game with us, because what you don't want to, you don't love me? You know that's certainly a downward spiral. There's also something, and I was talking how with the shadow self, you need to almost have a loving regard for it. Why does it behave that way? Why do I want to eat when I shouldn't, and so forth? Why am I in love with this woman? But, gee, this one's awfully cute. Well, that's part of human nature. That side of yourself doesn't shut down because you're in love. But what I've noticed is that in a loving relationship, wives know us awfully well. Nobody knows us better than our wives, and the wives love all of us.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 37:36: When you love somebody, it's one difference between loving and liking. When you like somebody, you like this about them and you don't like that about them. So you hang out with them in the circumstances that they're good for, you might say, because they're fun at a party but not good in a partnership, business partnership. But when you're in love, you're in love with the whole person. But you still recognize the parts that aren't so good, that either aren't good from your point of view, because it's an incompatibility between the two of you and creates a natural friction.
Dr. Jerry L Martin 38:16: But friction is not an entirely bad thing. You know, you have the friction between the person who's super organized and the person who's not super organized. Well, each one can actually benefit a bit from the other. The super organized is often a bit hyper and doesn't know how to relax, you know, until everything is put away and the disorganized often can benefit from the sense of order brought by the other and that causes moments of friction. But friction can be creative and you can in fact lead to new lifestyles, new insights and so forth.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 38:57: But the person who knows you best loves the whole of you and knowing the whole of you is completely aware of your flaws, your bad habits, the bad tendencies of your shadow self, if you were, if you want to put it that way. The wife loves the whole of you, completely aware of that, and does what, that… I'm sorry I'm talking about wives, because I'm in that kind of relationship, but I don't know, women seem more perceptive often than men about this kind of thing, so I'll stick with wives. But they also take steps to try to make you a better man, and one reason for having a wife is they help you become a better person. You know, that's one of the things a good relationship does, hopefully for both parties, is they become a fuller, better person through the interaction and the mutual, both critical, appreciation you might call it, that each one gives to the other.
Scott Langdon 40:16: 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.