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

239. What's On Our Mind- What Is God’s Story?

Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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What Is God’s Story? Ongoing Revelation, Personal Experience, and the Language of Story

In the newest What's On Our Mind, Scott Langdon and Jerry L. Martin explore how God’s story is dynamic and evolving, not a fixed account from the past. They reflect on how revelation continues today and how personal experience shapes our understanding of the divine.

Jerry discusses why God grows through interaction with humanity and how reading ancient texts reveals an ongoing conversation between God and humankind. They consider Swedenborg’s insights about continuous revelation and the role of modern spiritual messengers.

The conversation also explores empathy as a path to understanding God, trusting your own experiences of the sacred, and recognizing how your life becomes a chapter in God’s autobiography. 

Discover why spiritual growth is always personal, and why God’s story is still unfolding.

Related Episodes:

238. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Ray Silverman on Swedenborg, Modern Revelation, and Eternal Love

237. Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue - How A Radically Personal God Works In Real Lives

236. From God to Jerry To You- How To Hear God’s Call In Your Own Life

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

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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. Episode 239. 

Scott Langdon 01:08: Hello and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and on this week's episode, Jerry Martin and I bring you What's On Our Mind. We focus our conversation around the last three episodes 236, 237, and 238, and zero in on the language of story. Jerry was charged by God with reading the ancient scriptures from various religious traditions and then asking God what God was up to in these communications. How was God developing and changing as humankind developed and changed? Also, God makes it clear that God isn't finished with us yet. There's always more work to do and more to say. Both for us and for God. Here now are Jerry and me. I hope you enjoy the episode. 

Scott Langdon 02:02: Welcome back everybody to What's on Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon with Jerry Martin. We're happy to be back and talking this week about some of the episodes that have just recently passed. We had episode 238 where we talked. Actually, Jerry talked with Ray Silverman and we heard What's Your Spiritual Story. Just before that, in episode 237, Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue their second session there. That was a really wonderful one. I really enjoyed putting that one together. And just before that, episode 236, From God To Jerry To You, and all three of those episodes were so wonderful, so rich in content, I thought, and putting them together was such a joy to do and one of the great themes that kind of came out of it was this idea of story. And it all starts with God asking you, in terms of your mission, to tell God's story. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:57: Yeah, and at the time God told me that it made no sense to me at all. The standard theological view of the high classic theological tradition is that God is unchanging. God is eternal, unchanging, unmoving, and God has a story. Think of what that implies that God starts here and then does this and then moves to the next thing. Stories have changed and tend to have, development, some kind of sense of direction, up and down and so forth, of some sense of purpose achieved or frustrated, and you know, obstacles to overcome or succumb to, and that God has a story. And then the whole book goes on from there. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:50: What is the God story? And a lot of God's story is really God's interaction with us. That sort of is God's story. I mean that God had an interaction with the atoms and stuff before there were human beings or any kind of life at all in the universe. But the story goes on. God is mainly interacting and developing, growing as a person, the way we all grow, and interacting with each other. God is growing in much that same way, discovering facets of the divine nature, because we respond to God's different facets. And God said, oh, wow, that's something. My new book is named Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

Dr. Jerry L Martin 04:37: But God too is radically personal in this sense of having a story and developing it through interacting with people. That sort of blew my mind. I could at least follow the instruction. If God's story is through interacting with people, then the next command did make sense to go read the ancient texts, not the isms of this body of religious belief and that, but the ancient revelations, enlightenments and so forth themselves. And so, okay, that's the human reaction, that's the human side of the story. And then I'm praying to God you know, what were you up to in these revelations or enlightenments? What were you up to? And that's of course in a way God's story. And then what God learns from the interaction, or how God develops through the interaction. So that's all quite amazing that God is also… we live radically personal lives, and that's not so surprising. But God also in a way, lives a radically personal life. 

Scott Langdon 05:51: And those ancient texts, as you mentioned, tell man's side of the story, in a sense the human aspect, and God has asked you to read through these. Read them and pray about them, pray over them, and then listen to what I have to say about that. God is saying. Listen to what I have to say, and I want to come back to that in just a second. 

Scott Langdon 06:20: I also wanted to mention that God, His story, is ongoing. That's something that you and Ray Silverman talk about. When you're talking a little bit about Ray's story, that God didn't stop at the end of the Bible, and then okay, I'm out, I'm on vacation for whenever in the meantime, you know you're on your own and we've been conditioned, I think, to feel that way, and yet it's not that way. God makes it clear. Here's an ongoing thing. I'm continuing to have a story. I'm continuing to develop as human beings are, as you, the individual person, so me, Scott, you, Jerry, all of us individually continuing to grow. God is doing the same. In a sense it's ongoing. So I haven't stopped the revelation. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:10: And God has more to say. God has more to say. Ray is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg was a brilliant guy, a polymath, highly accomplished in a half dozen fields of endeavor, and had these remarkable kind of visions or something. I don't know exactly how they came to him, something I didn't realize. I knew the Swedenborgians think the world of Swedenborg and he was told Swedenborg received the instruction to start a church and it's called the New Church and you could visit it right here in Bucks County, one of the key places of this whole movement. But he also said and I didn't realize this before Ray told me that Swedenborg believed, or this tradition believes, there are many revelators. In other words, revelation goes on, even though Swedenborg's a Christian. But he thinks you don't understand the Christian revelation yet either. So you have to keep advancing understanding of that and reading the text differently over different time in terms of different levels of understanding that emerge. And I don't know the ins and outs of that, but it is clear that for Ray. But it was clear that for Ray I would be in the category of one of these revelators and one of a series or several. 

Dr. Jerry L Martin 08:32 Who knows? And I was told something similar to that in God: An Autobiography, that there's not time for one big revelation, like to start a whole new world religion. It's time for the different divine messengers, and obviously I was one of them and I have no idea if somebody asked me at a public talk who are the others. I haven't the foggiest you know, and people can speculate or test their own spiritual discernment against that question. In other words, you come across somebody you think, hey, this person kind of seems like a revelator. Well then, pay attention. Do they have the other traits that you would expect in a revelator? And one of the main ones is a kind of modesty. You know that if they think they're imperial and lords of the universe, then they probably are not a revelator. If they have a kind of humility about their task, that's a good sign. 

Scott Langdon 09:38: And your particular task. A friend of yours referred to it as a revelation about revelations. So there's a specificity there in the task and God puts it once again. I want you to tell My story, so in this revelation of revelations, what God was up to in this group, this culture, this development, but not only in the social structure as a whole, but also right down to the individual person, how God relates to different people in different ways, your particular talent, your particular role that you're being called to play in your life, in your relationship with other people, whether it be family members or a job or whatever. So right down to the personal level. And so when I think about stories, I think about a story has a point of view. And so when God is saying I want you to tell My story, and He's asking you to read these ancient texts and find out what mankind, what humans, were thinking and looking for and going after, here's my point of view God says. 

Scott Langdon 11:07: So it's an autobiography in the sense that I'm telling you what's going on and you're going to kind of write it down. I think of that sometimes like an old, maybe an old noir movie about an old, you know actor or actress in their you know late years and they have a young writer that they have over for you know a week at their you know country house and they're telling them about their life story. I first came up doing ballet and I was noticed by a great teacher and next thing I knew I was on Broadway and you know that kind of a thing, right. And here's my story kid, write it down. But God is saying to you. Here's what I was responding to when humankind was searching and looking and noticing. I'm not in this alone. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:03: Yeah, and God's not in it alone, and God has more than at least these two aspects. One is God is affected by what we do and, in fact, how we interact with the divine reality and what aspects of the divine reality we pick up on and actualize in our own response to the divine reality. The other aspect is God has work for us to do. There are a lot of things in the world that need to be done, and I usually use theistic language because that's my own experience. But there are religions that, when I sometimes say divine reality, that have a different view of the ultimate reality, but they all have work to do. They're things tasked in the world and the world itself is complex. God is complex and has these many aspects that each religion can pick up on certain ones, but God also gives each religion certain tasks, and that's made explicit once about giving the people of Israel the covenant and so forth, the people of India the task of relating the Atman to the Brahman, and both are and remain valid tasks. So all of that goes on and there are no doubt new tasks developing all the time, and so there's both our reception of the different aspects of God and you might say what bigger picture, if you put those all together, you have. And there's then our multiplicity of tasks in the world. And when I talk about radically personal, the point is that you have to figure out in your language here, Scott, the language of story: what is my story and what should I be trying to do, and what is the way I can best a) relate to God, connect with the divine in the most intimate, direct, fulsome way, deep way, and what does the divine reality want of me? What is my role? And it may be to—when this was all new for me, I turned on flipping channels. Here was a religious station and some guy saying I was asked, I received in prayer, to be a gospel singer. I'd never sung in my life. Now he's a well-known gospel singer. 

Dr. Jerry L Martin 14:32: Okay, you can just be called to do something or you can divine it in some other way, and one of the things we always urge people to do is to pay attention to everything going on, because you never know which parts are telling you precisely what it is. That your part of the divine story is today, at this moment, because it's often very particular. It's not one big life project, though it can include that if you're called to the ministry or to be a religious singer or something, but it can just be the moment-to-moment. What is your job here, over breakfast with your wife or something? What are you called upon to do? 

Dr. Jerry L Martin 15:20: And one of the things I know I say in this week's the most recent From God to Jerry to You is our stories are like individual chapters in God's story and that's about right. You know that's what is God's story. Well, He's not off somewhere living a different story, unrelated to us. He's living in part through us. There are things we do that God can't do, and God is, but God is also, we're God infused, all of us and so God is also living our stories as if they're different chapters or aspects of the big story that includes God and us. 

Scott Langdon 16:07: I have thought this on a couple of different occasions relatively recently in my career and we've talked about it a little bit on this program. But just being aware, to start to think this way to begin with, that there are things that Scott Langdon has learned because of being this particular character that I played right, that I would not have, something wouldn't have clicked in a way that it clicked for me until I saw it through the eyes of this person that I was inhabiting in the circumstances that they were in. Now they're imaginary circumstances and it's a play. I understand that and at the same time, the lesson whatever it would be that I learned, I think I talked a little bit before about playing a father of a daughter and this character made a really wonderful decision and the father character that I played was very proud and at the same time it made me think of my children in a different way, maybe just slightly, whatever, but I had an experience that changed the way I am in the world because I played that character. So in a sense I can kind of relate to what you're saying. Where God is, the only way that God can know what it's like to be me is to be me you know, and the only way that you can know what it's like to be me is to have an experience of otherness. So to know what it's like to be Jerry. So both of us are having this first person perspective at the same time. So God's just having all kinds of fun doing this all over the place with every single one who's ever lived. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:53: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this one author I quote in Radically Personal is a very smart Catholic theologian who was invited to give a distinguished lecture series, the Aquinas Lectures at Marquette University, and gave them, on the topic Omni-Subjectivity, a New Divine Attribute, and she argues that for God to be God and she takes the traditional idea of God's omniscience and makes the point you just made, Scott, that for God to know what it's like to be us, what it's like to be in pain you know God has His own kind of suffering, but not like a stubbed toe, you know and to have, you know, the teenage falling in love and so forth, all of these experiences we have, the disappointment that you just had in a casting play. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:55:  We all have those moments where, uh-oh, someone else grabbed my parking space or got in front of me at the line or something. Those are experiences that God can't just have as God's self but has via us, through God's participation in us, which is vivid and vibrant. It's not just the metaphysical claim God is everything, but that God is actually entering into it as a personal deity. You know, the personal aspect of God is entering into this personal aspect of our lives and having the experiences of disappointment, excitement, swooning, whatever they might be. God is having those too.

Scott Langdon 20:00: When it comes to acting, I'm not interested in being that person, so I don't want to turn into that person. I want to experience what it is like to be that person in their circumstances. So there is that, as you mentioned, sort of a duality there where I'm maintaining the aspect of myself and I have to do for technical reasons. Are you in your light? Are you loud enough to be heard and understood? All of those technical things, right. Also, in that sense that when the show is over, I take my costume off, take off my makeup and go home to my wife and I don't, you know, I'm not like, oh to be or not to be, you're done for the evening. And not that God can ever leave us in that sense there is a distinction. If there's not a step separation, there's definitely this distinction where God is still God's self and fully with me, fully present as me. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:21: We have that, I think, in our human relations. You don't have to be an actor to, you might say, enter into the experience of another person. I have a big section in Radically Personal on empathy. Empathy seems to be a most remarkable human trait and understudied, you might say. It's usually not made the center piece of anybody's worldview or anything, and yet it's absolutely crucial. Empathy is our capacity to understand at a feeling level what it's like to be another person, what they're going through, and of course we don't feel it fully, but we can feel it an awful lot sometimes that they're going through a grieving and we really know what it is they're going through. Or they're an excitement, new opportunity, and our hearts thrill also at their new opportunity. And it doesn't have to be that you're always on their side. You have empathy because it's really a feature of understanding. You can understand the other person's feelings, sometimes when you don't admire them, the person who grew up poor can't help but steal, and you may not think this is a best solution to this person's problems and you may not have a desire to steal yourself. But you have the empathy to understand, not just analytically but at a feeling level, what it would be like to be kind of desperately poor and everything glitters and you want to just grab it, put it in your pocket and run. You can understand that and that's why we read literature, we see plays, we see movies and they enable us to occupy, you might say, these different points of view, because each point of view isn't just a location on the world's big map, it's being a certain kind of person standing at a certain location, having certain experiences. The point of view isn't just with your eyes, it's with your whole body and your whole social context that you carry with you. All of that is part of your point of view, and points of view are often people emphasize that they're narrow and biased and so forth, but I'd rather emphasize the opposite. The point of view enables you to see something. You can't see anything without a point of view, and it makes entirely good sense to say of the Washington Monument or something you have a better, the best view from here. You can have a good view of the monument, or you can have an obstructed view or too distant, or it's foggy on that side often. So it's through these locations that we have the different pairs of eyes, the different bodies, the different social locations that we come to see these different aspects of the world that you couldn't see from any other point of view. And you can't see anything from zero point of view, what they sometimes call the view from nowhere. There is no view from nowhere. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:40: People talk about their God's eye point of view. There is no God's eye point of view. God also, I mean, is talked about as if it doesn't have location, doesn't have limitations. But no, it may not have the same limitations we have, because God can occupy quickly a more or less infinite number of points of view. But God also has a God task, you might say, and a God story, and is seeing, understanding, even as God enters into what Jerry is up to. God is entering into it in terms of God's story and not just losing God's self into Jerry's. You know, and that's what it is to have empathy with a friend or your wife or an enemy, where you understand also what they're up to the rat. But you might understand, yeah, they have a resentment about such and such and they're out to get me or something like that. And so these are all parts of the complexity of having different stories based in part on different points of view, and the world plays out very interestingly because of that diversity.

Scott Langdon 26:03: In your new book, Radically Personal, you talk about an epistemics of trust, and you and Abigail talked a little bit about this in the episode 237. Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue. Trust is such an important word, I think, because everything that I know about the word is about an agreement between two that if there's trust, then there's someone you're trusting or something you're trusting. There's a truster and a trusted. And so when we think about our everyday lives and being in tune with God, as we've talked about before, asking God, for example, every day, getting up and saying God, what do you want me to do today? And you know saying that with the most, how does one say that in the most sincere way, except to just be there? That's here. I am offering this to you. And then the trust part, I guess, is that was your part offering, and God's part is it'll fill in along the way. So well, what do I do now? Well, you listen and pay attention. 

Scott Langdon 27:31: I think we've kind of narrowed that down a little bit. You know and God has reinforced that with you the little gnat in your ear, the little you know, different examples to say are you paying attention? Are you listening, even when I whisper? So we hear all kinds of things in our heads, different kinds of thoughts. We have stimuli from all kinds of things on the outside and we process these stimuli and we come to conclusions about what direction we think we should go in. And I know I often get caught in the hesitation of is this the right way? Is it the wrong way? Well, you're not going to know until you do, and then you find out, and the consequences they're too much. Are they? I mean, you don't know. So the trust is a way of being. Is it a way of showing up in the world? Is it a way of being in relation to God? Is it all of those things? What does it look like to have an epistemics of trust? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:31: Yeah, let me make sure I return to those precise questions. But I first want to just put that discussion of epistemics of trust, in a context. In Radically Personal, I argue that the way we know there's a divine reality is because we experience it. Or more precisely, we encounter it, which means you need a certain concept of experience, not experience as pure subjectivity, subjective impulses and impressions, but more like what happens when you stand on the floor. You know you're encountering a reality, or when you slip and you hit the floor and you're encountering a reality and we encounter, a better concept of experience is that experience is our openness to what is outside us and we encounter other people, physical objects. Then there's the question of all these odd experiences. It's easy to understand stuff that's verified in a laboratory, but most of human life is not in fact like that. Our impressions of people, our notions of character, our norms, you know ethical, aesthetic and so forth, they're not testable in a lab. You have to figure out what kind of evidences of those things, impressions of them, intuitions of them, whatever it is, are you going to trust. And I know part of what I'm doing is self-serving, you might say I'm providing you know I was an epistemologist, the first thing I do with the God voice it's too real to doubt, but I know anybody could doubt it. And so my question is what reasons do I have to trust this God voice? And so what I'm really doing is an elaborate argument, with some care, for why I trust it. I have trusted the God voice, and one chapter late in the book is what do I trust? But each person has to answer that question for themselves. But in that context, back to your question what does trust—philosophers of my tradition, mainly Anglo-American tradition tend to be kind of narrow in the following sense that we think belief is belief in a proposition that such and such is the case, like Paris is the capital of France or water is H2O. It's very cognitive and might say detached Trust would normally be fit in that category of the things it's trustworthy to believe, that it's okay to believe, reasonable to believe. But I think your questions really do open a deeper dimension that I don't think I ever explored in the book. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:40: But I think it's very important that, just as I was talking about empathy and knowledge and so forth, you trust with your whole being. After all, what does it mean to say I trust the law of gravity. It's not. I accept Newton's, whatever it is, proposition first, second and third propositions. It's that I trust that I'm standing on the ground and I trust that that tells me which way is up and which way is down. You know, what does the law of gravity mean to me? I know no physics. It doesn't mean anything in the context of abstract knowledge, a propositional knowledge, but behaviorally and existentially it means everything. My orientation to the world is in terms of up and down and that the floor will hold me, that I won't fall through. But I dare not just walk off the balcony into free air. All these kinds of trust, especially, get to more complex things. What does it mean to trust a religious belief, a whole philosophy or ideology? What does it mean to trust a way of life? What does it mean to trust a way of life, you know, that kind of certain kind of middle of life that seems way of life, seems fine. Trust yourself, your own of how to be living, of occupation, your own sense as an actor. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 33:24: A thing Ray brings up in that interesting interview is the context of his life. We come out of a context. Father adamantly atheist, aggressively atheist, parents not getting along, not communicating. Well, they often communicate through him. You know, tell your father blah, blah, blah, because they don't talk directly. He was never an atheist, he just always thought there was a God. He marries his lovely wife, Star, and this is love. And I go through the same thing in God: An Autobiography. I said love, what is this thing that somehow takes over your life? And, as I put, it goes from black and white to technicolor. And he had an experience with Star that, if anything goes beyond that, because it struck both of them right away that this is eternal, this is not a fleeting phenomenon. And they were looking rather, both seekers, you know where can one find spiritual wisdom? And they're looking around with this thought in mind and what they find is Swedenborg. And Swedenborg says when you're married, you're married for all eternity and in the afterlife you continue in your true love. And they thought this is it. And that's how he became a Swedenborgian. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:45: Well, there are two things he had to trust here, at least two. One is the initial love, and that's often hard to happen, hard for people to trust. Maybe the parent's model wasn't a good model, maybe there was a fake appearance of love and then you later see it wasn't love at all. And then you can't trust love. Or, oh, there are many, many reasons that you can come to doubt. You may not feel lovable and so you don't trust that she loves me because I'm no good, and so on. There can be all these reasons to doubt. And also doubt often seems safer. Whereas you give yourself to love, give yourself to any belief, any trust in a way of life, in a group institution, you trust the legal system or whatever you know. Oops, now you're vulnerable, it can disappoint you, it can turn on you. But to trust means you give yourself to it in whole and then live out that trust. And then their second trust was finding Swedenborg, and trusting Swedenborg as a revelator. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 35:59: That's what happens to people with religious belief or some kind of philosophical worldview, kind of conversion, often that, wow, this just seems like the truest thing I've ever found. I know Ray uses the expression what I believe in my heart of hearts, and there's some things they just come to you and you believe them in your heart of hearts. And it's funny the epistemologists would say well, that's not trustworthy. What kind of evidence is your heart of hearts? Well, we know there's no certainty there. Nevertheless, I guess I would commend Ray for trusting what he knows in his heart of hearts. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:40: And that's something important for us to do, because not all knowledge we philosophers seem to think every bit of knowledge is ratiocinated, you know has to go through articulate reasoning systems, but there's also emotion. Emotion has knowledge also, has cognitive capacity also, and sometimes your reasoning says nothing's wrong here and your emotions say something is wrong. And your emotions are right because your whole being is picking up more than your articulate side of your reasoning. And I think it was Pascal who said the heart has reasons reason knows not of. And there is more, even though he was a great logician. But was also more than just articulated reasons. And you got to trust your whole self, including your feelings, and not just your feelings, because that sounds like there are little serendipity elements within you, you know, popping up randomly, but no, they're part of your whole being, your life being, and that's what you've got to trust and that God is at work in that. 

Scott Langdon 37:57: We seem to. Well, I guess this is true in different cultures, I guess. But in our Western culture, especially in America, we tend to say things like you know, I don't make decisions emotionally, I have to think on them, you know. So, putting the emphasis there on I'm going to think it through, I'm going to make a logical thing, and then in the end we go with our gut. You know, it's almost, you know, so we can go, we go through these rational things, but it is worth looking at all of the aspects of it, like you said, that one may not necessarily be better than the other. One aspect may be more appropriate in this situation to lean on than in another situation. Maybe you know you're too close to the people involved emotionally, so maybe you need to think more logically and understand that you have a different role here. Or you know who knows what. But, being open to, as I like to say, what role am I being asked to play here you know in virtually every situation because it doesn't call for me to be a different um core person. It just asks you know a different character. It just asks my character to show up in this scene in a different way, because when I think about it, when I think it through and we think about perspective, I'm always the lead person in my own story. Everybody says that, and so if I'm just thinking about how everybody shows up to me and how you're a secondary character, oh, you're only a day player. Or you know my wife, Sarah, would be, you know, a main character in my everyday story. 

Scott Langdon 39:43: And people come in and out of our lives and sort of have different. You know, as our seasons go on like maybe a series of TV series, right, as seasons go on, this character kind of falls away and we get a new character in this season, that kind of thing. But it's important to understand or at least be, have a, have a sense of how you show up in someone else's life, and I've I've had to wrestle with that a little bit sometimes, like I might think I show up much more importantly in someone else's life than I actually do to them, or other way around. I may play a bigger role in their story than I even know. And it's, you know, sometimes you can get racked. You rack yourself with guilt oh, I should have known I should have been here for them in this way or whatever. And it's paying attention and being aware of and listening to how do I fit in your story, which would mean what do you need from me? How can I be available for your story. You know, I think that's important. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 40:50: Yeah. 

Scott Langdon 40:51: Yeah, well, it's always great to talk to you, Jerry. Thanks for this time.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 40:55: Well, thank you, Scott. Good to see you. 

Scott Langdon 41:10: 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.