Hey everyone, it's Brian Brown.

I've got something a little bit different for you today.

I was recently on the Beauty Through Faith podcast with Gustav Hoyer and Benjamin Harding, who are mission partners at the Callos Arts Foundation, So you can check them out at callosarts.org.

I'm going to be speaking this weekend, weekend of September 26th, 27th up in Fort Collins with them, and we wanted to be able to share our entire conversation both with their audience and with ours.

The first part of the conversation, the one you're about to hear, is them mostly interviewing me on the topic of beauty and faith.

And honestly, it gave me a chance to tell some stories and explain some things that went into the founding of the Anselm Society and have added up to who we are over the years.

They're stories that some of our inner circle know, but not always stories that I tell a lot at a podium or on the podcast.

So some good stuff in there.

And the second part of the conversation, which will be the episode that I post right after this, will, I flipped the script and interviewed them about their work and their organization.

Both are well worth your time.

I hope and I hope you enjoy them.

Welcome to Beauty Through Faith.

I'm your host, Benjamin Harding, and today I'm really excited to sit down with Brian Brown, the executive director of the Anselm Society.

Brians not only a good friend of our work, he's also going to be one of our featured speakers at our upcoming Rocky Mountain Callous Beauty Through Faith Conference on September 26th and 27th.

Now, if you haven't grabbed your tickets yet, you'll want to because we've put together such a rich lineup.

We'll kick things off Friday

night, September 26th, at 7:30 with a plenary session led by Doctor Junius Johnson.

He's going to help us think more clearly about the nature and the reward of encountering beauty right alongside his words.

We'll get to hear the artistry of Doctor Paul Barnes.

Then Saturday is packed with variety.

You're not going to want to miss it.

And of course, included in our incredible speakers list is Brian Brown.

And if you're in the Colorado Springs area, the weekend before this weekend, September 19th and 20th, the and some society is hosting a long expected feast to celebrate the birthdays of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins.

It's going to be a weekend of learning, feasting and those moments where you meet someone.

And thank you too.

I thought I was the only one.

You can find all the details at Ensem Society dot.

Org there's.

So much happening in the world of beauty right now.

Let's jump in.

Brian Brown, welcome to Beauty Through Faith.

Thank you very much.

It's fun to be with you.

And we are joined by our Executive Director, Gustav Hoyer.

Hi, Gustav.

Hey, Benjamin, Brian, it's a pleasure to have you on.

Really looking forward to hearing from you today.

What's caused some trouble?

That's the spirit.

And so the first question to cause trouble is, hey, what has been your pursuit of beauty in your life?

What does that mean to you?

So I have to it.

It's funny.

This is so incarnational for me because I'll just tell you a story.

I was in in 2007.

I was doing a post grad program in theology and I was doing daily prayer at the Anglican church across the street, this beautiful 1925 Gothic Revival church with a lovely little side Chapel like a lot of those more ancient churches and the churches that were built in that style have.

And I walk over there and the chapel's beautifully lit and there's this absolutely gorgeous girl kneeling at the front of the Chapel with golden hair and the lights falling on it just right.

And I've never seen her before.

And I ended up found out later her name was Christina.

I ended up chasing her for everything that I was worth and we've been married for 15 years now and and we we sang in the in the church choir that week together.

And I, I remember writing to her in in a letter while we were dating long distance that she was beauty to me.

She was this incarnation of it as well as someone that revealed it to me.

And so like my whole life, that's, that's an encapsulation of, of, of my whole life of chasing beauty.

I wasn't, I wasn't conscious until I was pursuing her of a phrase like that.

I'd been raised with a love of great books and great music, and I was very fortunate to, to have that in my my childhood art history.

And a lot of it was, was sort of high end are the sorts of things that that you sort of only get as a child if you have a very attentive parent or teacher or school.

But I also there there were also the the bits of it that were just kind of folded in with the rest of of life.

My brothers and sisters and I would read or watch a wonderful story and then we would charge outside with costumes and swords and things to act it out.

We actually just showed the Prince of Persia to my kids last night.

And my 9 year old son's first reaction was daddy, I need someone to sword fight with.

And there's a proper reaction to that.

So.

But I was never aware of this as a conscious thing.

It was just the way that I live.

And then I start chasing this girl and all of a sudden I start getting a vocabulary for it, both in the sense that I'm experiencing it in, in life and she's unpacking it for me because she's just further along in, in that journey.

The, the, the reason that I brought up chasing a girl was not to look impressive by referencing Dante, although I could, but because I think the, the pursuit of beauty is ultimately the pursuit of God.

You're, you're looking simultaneously at this material earthly thing that you can't quite explain, but that wants to draw you in and wants to draw this response from you.

And a lot of the time we don't have a vocabulary for it, but romantic love is one of those things, things that is, is, is most powerful in that, that way.

And as I got further into my theological journey, I start reading people like Alexander Schmeman who are unpacking this idea that the, the whole earth was designed to be a place of communion with God.

You start to give a a vocabulary and a a structure to oh, that's what this is this idea that goodness and truth and beauty are are inseparable aspects of one thing of one God, and it's ultimately him that we're pursuing not in AI don't need this other stuff.

I only need God sort of way, but precisely the opposite of that.

My my pursuit of this other stuff is is the direct path to pursuing him.

If it's if it if it's done right, if I'm listening for his voice.

So for me, it chasing a girl was the encapsulation of that and sort of my doorway into the the deeper realm.

Yeah.

And, and let's talk about that deeper realm, so to speak.

You've been pursuing beauty for many years into that deeper realm.

Talk to us a little bit about the Anselm society.

You're the executive director of this.

This is such a a passion project for you.

Talk to us about the Ansem Society and what it means to you in that pursuit of beauty.

Well, I wish I could say it was a strategically master planned effort.

I love thinking 10 steps ahead.

I love planning things.

I'm quite good at it.

Ansem was never that.

Dana and I moved to Colorado Springs in 2009.

There there are cities in the world where you can go to usually not the whole city, but some portion of the city, and you'll just be assaulted by the sort of aggressive ugliness.

You'll see those brutalist concrete buildings that were built in the 60s or 70s.

Colorado Springs is not that Colorado Springs is has less of an aggressive ugliness than an aggressive banality.

There's just a lot of asphalt and concrete and cars and strip malls and whataburgers and things.

James Howard comes to calls places like that place is not worth caring about.

Like no one, no one put love into a lot of the square footage in this city, even though for the last 40 years it's been a Mecca of evangelical ministries.

There was almost this, this sense of there's this beautiful 14,000 foot mountain right next to it.

Well, I guess God's done the work.

I guess we don't have to do anything on a material level so focused on the next life that we're not putting an investment into the, the here and now.

And honestly, those those incessant encounters with with mundanity desensitize you to high beauty, both your need for it and your response to it when you encounter it, when you're just kind of used to Everything around me is is mass produced.

Everything around me did not have love put into it.

Everything around me was not somebody trying to build something that would last for people they cared about.

And Christina and I felt like, are we the only ones that feel this way?

We spent a couple years honestly whining a lot and trying to get away.

And eventually we realized, OK, this, this seems to be where we are planted, at least for now.

We need an attitude change.

We're not capable of that attitude change.

Let's start praying.

And almost immediately we start praying for God to change our attitudes, and we find ourselves in a small church and we start meeting people in that church.

And I talked to my pastor about how I can do some good in the congregation.

And we cook up this idea for a lecture series.

Let's beef up the life of the mind in the congregation.

OK, great.

We'll do 4 lectures over the course of the next year.

We'll bring in speakers from the outside who can challenge us and help get us to think more deeply and that sort of thing.

Well, we bring in a guy named Michael Ward who talks about CS Lewis and his faith without imagination dead.

And we bring in a a guy from a classical architecture background.

He talks about principles of Christian urbanism in this asphalt and concrete city that I just described.

We bring in Peter Lighthart, who could have talked about anything.

The guy's written, what, 80 books on a million different subjects.

Well, he wants to talk about Dostoyevsky.

OK Well, now we've just done CS Lewis, Dostoyevsky, architecture and urbanism.

And what we find is people are coming out of the woodwork not just from our church, but from churches all over.

And the thing we're hearing over and over and over is AI didn't know this sort of thing had a place in the Kingdom of God.

And I love this stuff.

I love great stories.

I love great music.

My church has no explanation for why this thing that matters so much to me matters at all.

And 1 by 1, they're all meeting each other and saying you too.

I thought I was the only one.

And we're saying that right, because we thought we were the only ones.

This has been the thing that has been the center point for the Ansem society ever since it was.

It's never been.

We've been around for 12 years now and it's never been a master planned thing.

Every time I try to get too far ahead with the master planning, God sort of slaps me on the wrist and some great dream sort of shatters and something doesn't work out.

And OK, now it's just being small and faithful to that next little thing and to the people that are right in front of us.

And the people right in front of us at this point are hundreds of of local people that are very involved, thousands of people that are sort of more peripherally involved.

Who all had that conversation?

You 2.

I thought I was the only one.

The stories that matter the most to me, the songs and music and art and architecture and nature, all these things that my soul tells me matter deeply, not only matter at all in the Kingdom of God, they matter more in the Kingdom of God.

And now I'm surrounded by people who feel the same way.

And we are encouraging each other in the going deeper and deeper into that beauty and creating more and more as a response to it and then dialogue with it.

Gustav, you have met Bryant.

You both live in Colorado.

Brian, you know, after that just beautiful explanation of what the Anselm Society is doing and has come from, I kind of want to run through a wall right now.

So, Gustav, could you take it from here?

And ask.

Sure, there's there's so much you just shared with us Brian, that we can talk for hours about going back earlier to your own journey.

I've been fascinated as I've been engaging thinkers in this space more comprehensively in recent with with Kalos and becoming aware of Ansong as a as a community as well.

This nature of the connection of Eros, of of love, of desiring to the experience of beauty.

I.

Really like how you.

Touched that and the sense that that.

Is.

Too passionately pursue beauty is in itself the holy expression of Eros.

As opposed to.

An erotic culture, a culture that has debased that which should be exalted and and made sex a replacement of of genuine proper.

Eros is not derivative of but supplanting and then connecting that passion that really ultimately the experience of the aesthetic wants to not possess but commune with.

And we think of the wrong distorted end of Eros is to commandeer and own.

And what you describe is knowing fact, as that leads ultimately to the.

To the.

Aesthetic glories of God himself.

We couldn't possibly arrogate ourselves to even consider such a thing, but to commune with that beauty.

Is.

Ultimately, underneath the aesthetic impulse and and you describe then that passion is fused with that aesthetic craving.

There is an an Eros in that.

Would you just elaborate?

I'd I'd love to hear your thoughts are really compelling.

So take that and run with it.

Yeah, well, I mean, go back to the the parking lot and the Whataburger.

The there's so much in our world that people don't say this out loud usually, but so much on in our world as we experience is built this way that there is a, a division between matter and spirit, between stuff, physical stuff and the things that quote UN quote really matter.

And a lot of us come from church backgrounds where that was implicitly or explicitly even even stated that that the Kingdom of God was entirely spiritual.

The sort of an implication that we're going to be all disembodied souls in in some sort of cloud someday.

That's not the story of Scripture.

And I've seen so many situations where good but under catechized Christians are surprised by that.

Where did you where do you get this story?

Where, where God where the future is God coming back to heal his creation as opposed to disappearing us out of our clothes and and turning us into spirits somewhere?

Literally the Book of Revelation.

It's not like Revelations really complicated and hard because it's apocalyptic literature.

That part.

It's not hard.

That part it's quite clear and that so much of life is this way.

Nothing matters.

It's it's nihilistic and the church kind of buys into it.

Yes, we will concede to you the idea that nothing really matters, but that's because there's this far off realm that has nothing to do with the here and now that we're going to escape to someday.

And The funny thing is, I think a lot of people end up, you kind of end up in 2 places.

One ultimately leads to the other.

You can either go full nihilist and go yet nothing matters, despair.

Or you can then go, well there's nothing, nothing really matters I guess except my own pleasure.

I'm going to define myself by my desires.

And ultimately, if you're really honest with yourself, sooner or later you end up looking in the mirror and going, I don't like what I see.

I don't like what I have built with my desires.

But The funny thing is our, our future as as, as Christians is, is actually one where our define, we're defined in a weird way by our desires.

Not because our desires are the end goal, and not because worshipping something in the creation for itself is the end goal, but because God is the one that put desires in us.

We were made for this longing for what is ultimately for Him.

And He didn't make a disembodied souls just waiting around for Him to fulfill that.

He put us as material beings in a material world and put His fingerprints everywhere and put communion with Him everywhere.

And once, once somebody says that out loud and you start to look at Scripture that way, you start to look at the world that way, all of a sudden you can't Unsee it.

Why is it that when Samson's hair was cut, he lost his power?

God, I mean, God didn't need to do it that way.

That's odd, but but he did.

There's a physical object that God has imbued with spiritual properties.

Why is it that there is a feast of red and wine?

At the centerpiece of the traditional Christian worship service.

That's weird.

Now, CS Lewis said that that seems rather crude and unspiritual to us.

But Lewis said God doesn't see it that way.

God put us in this world where the physicality of who we have made to be is actually, it's not something that you sort of surrender to and say, I'm going to just go where my desires lead.

But even thinking about cognitive science, the way our brains are made to work, we're made to be attracted to things.

And it's not just that following our desires gets us to God, but God made us with those desires, with things that draw us out of ourselves.

And that is supposed to be part of a journey toward him.

As Christians, we can't.

We can't fix the world by saying everybody blinders on, close your eyes, try not to look.

What we can say is there is a higher beauty still.

Go further up and further in it seems.

I.

Think has been the perspective of the ancient church, the church for 2000 years and in a way the end some society and organizations like Kalos are trying to reclaim that cosmological understanding that as you've mentioned, Father Alexander Schmemann, you are what you eat.

And how he turns that phrase on its head and says, yeah, the material world matters because it was made by God and he is called it good and beautiful.

It's one.

Of the things that fascinates me too, Brian, what you?

Say, is that this?

Pursuit of beauty is a form of satisfying our souls cravings even now and higher beauty brings us not to replace an understanding of God, but to augment and enrich.

And actually, it is a way of knowing God that as an former evangelical, I'm I'm in still in, in Protestantism.

But what you characterize is the left brainedness, the bibliocentricity to the exclusion of all other aspects of living that are common in evangelical traditions.

I think that's one of the things that Callus hopes to encourage our brothers and sisters, particularly in those traditions that your body is, is a gift and it is part of God's expression of who you are.

And the weeds outside your house are part of that expression.

And the sunshine falling, and the food and the and the joy.

So how do you take that embodied life?

And and pursue fully God.

You cannot fully pursue God if you are not pursuing beauty.

And I think you've said that.

Well, that's the good life.

Now shouldn't be surrendered and cut off in only a just simply a biblioscentricity.

That's a failure to live fully.

And I think you've said that, well, I think that's behind some of what Anselm is doing.

What we're trying to do is, is invite the church, our brothers and sisters to more fully live.

Any anything you would add to that, I'm hearing you bring that theme forward.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, if you've ever been in, most of us at some point in our lives have been in in one of those really beautiful old churches, maybe in the US, maybe in Europe.

One thing I noticed in those buildings, when you walk in, usually nobody has to tell you to whisper.

And I, I mean, I've been to churches in Europe where everybody's in tourist mode outside, right?

They've all got their backpacks and their water bottles and their cameras, and they're talking about where they're going to go to lunch and they're.

Yeah.

And, and, and then all of a sudden they go in and their voices hush, not because they saw a sign, but because the architecture told them that the stones were crying out the glory of God.

I love that idea that that Christ said, if, if, if we don't cry out his glory, the very stones will.

I think one of the coolest things in Christian history is that we actually ran with that and said, we will make the stones cry out.

And the, there's, there's, so there's sort of that high beauty that we used to put in our church buildings.

And we have a lot of church leaders now who have been just as desensitized to that high beauty as everyone else.

So as good as they may be at any other aspect of, of pastoring, they don't boldly promote and protect sacred spaces and art, ritual and tradition, authority and reverence.

These sorts of encounters with a beauty is sort of the Niagara Falls type beauty, what I remember called the sublime, this thing that is almost scary how how far beyond you it is.

The problem is if we've if you don't have a church like that in your neighborhood and someone's not inviting you into it, it's hard to have those encounters.

A lot of the time you go to the the Art Museum or something and you encounter something like that out of context and you're just not ready for it.

So I think the one of the best meeting places actually for most of us where we are, and this was one of the meeting places for for me as well, is to take something that we already value, but don't value enough and elevate it.

So we all value food.

We all like eating.

We would rather be full than hungry.

And even if our, you know, our tastes run more more McDonald's than fancy restaurants, we know what it is to taste something good.

And one of the things that we have ended up focusing on a lot in the Anselm society is these sorts of experiences with beauty, not in that high architectural or sacred music sort of realm, but in this really earthy, ordinary sort of realm.

Because if you take something as simple as feasting, not just eating, but feasting, recovering this theology of not only do I still love this material thing, I love it more than you because I'm a Christian.

So we're going to take food and we're going to create the sense of abundance eat.

There's more than enough.

Somebody loved you enough to think of you before you got here and prepare this table for you in the presence perhaps of your enemies and.

Put thought into what it.

Looks like and spend hours just enjoying it and talking together.

I had a German professor in college who got a bunch of the freshmen together and just because this was his thing put on a a full recreation of the 9 the last nine course meal served on the Titanic dish by dish.

We'd never tasted anything so fancy, right?

Even.

Like even some of the dishes were like, maybe this one wasn't quite my thing.

For someone to love us so much that they would put this spread before us like that.

All of a sudden, you.

Put someone in an environment like that, 2-3 hours in, they're.

Having conversations.

They never would have had.

They are attuned in their with their senses to things they've never noticed.

They're tasting subtleties in the dish they maybe wouldn't have tasted before.

They're experiencing love they've perhaps not experienced before.

And we've had people in these these feasting, conversational kind of settings actually walk up to us and say, I think I just got a taste of what heaven is like.

That's why.

We are.

Here That's why we're on this planet to commune with God and offer this communion to the world.

So the best place to me I know I've sort of gave me a really long answer to a short question, but I think the one of the best places that we can start to kind of wade into the challenge of this disconnect between the material and the spiritual is to find those really incarnation a really practical ways to bring them together and offer them to people.

I just one note I want to.

Make and Benjamin I'll turn it to you as you talk about food it makes me think of the reality that artists are a lot of the community that we're dealing with would.

Be well.

Served in in your model, to think of themselves like the chef, as the servant of those who receive rather than the hero.

And I do think that for Christians, servanthood is the defining moral mandate for what it is to be in the Kingdom, and that the Christian artist is like the chef, that these works that are produced high or low are acts of love for others.

I think you characterize that really beautifully.

Yeah, well.

That, I mean, it's not an accident that you picked up on that.

I'm the the so Christina, my wife runs.

She's the director of our Arts Guild, which is a group of vocational artists.

That may not be their primary income, but they could.

You know, if you look at yourself in the mirror, I am a writer.

I look myself in the mirror, I am a painter.

I am pursuing excellence in that craft.

They are.

We've created this environment where they don't have to choose between their artists friends and their Christian friends.

Frankly, if we did nothing else, that would often be the most important thing they needed.

But we're also trying to to then give them things they they are getting in the larger culture around them, more of this theological backdrop and and whatnot.

And one of the things that we hit new members with quite early is, yeah, you have to get out of this mentality that the the world around you has given you of the the artist as profit, the artist as higher than yeah, you are not the hero.

You are the servant.

And what if you had an ethos of creating as a gift of love, not for a hypothetical someday audience that gosh Gee, I sure hope my book reaches.

But adults and.

Children in your community, in your church, in your life.

What if that was why you created To love real people right in front of you?

And so often we see it changes everything.

We have a big.

Birthday celebration coming up here in just a couple of weeks that wow.

The Ansem Society is putting on a long expected feast to celebrate Bilbo and Frodo's birthday, It looks like.

Brian, tell us a little bit about this idea of feasting in your gathering.

A weekend of revelry and restoration.

Wow, that's that's exciting.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, well, we used to do a a weekend conference called Imagination Redeemed and hopefully someday we can we can do that again.

But it is so expensive to do these kinds of big conferences these days.

And honestly, we love the doing a lot of the show element to go with the tell element because you know, a lot of people aren't conference people.

Even if you put on the best conference in the world, but who's going to turn down a feast?

There's not that many people that are going to turn down a Lord of the Rings themed weekend.

There's, there's a certain value to just sort of laughing at yourself a little bit and going, gosh, I love this story so much.

You do too.

Let's give ourselves permission to enjoy it.

So what we've done is, is, yeah, we've crafted a a weekend that it has September 19th and 20th of 2025 in the middle of we do have a retreat portion and we've got some wonderful speakers that are going to be dealing with different elements of feasting as spiritual practice and as artistic practice.

So there's, there's that intellectual and spiritual feast component kind of in the middle of it, but there's also components of, of rest and, and, and communion.

You know, you can, we've got a pipe move group.

We're just going to, but a bunch of men are just going to go off and smoke pipes and talk.

They're hiking groups.

There are just sit down and don't bother me all afternoon while I process everything that I just experienced at the retreat.

There were whole rooms devoted to that.

But yeah, it's bookended with just enjoyment, rightly ordered enjoyment.

So we'll have a a Lord of the Rings game night mix of trivia and just like Balder dash variants and poem recitations and things like that.

Make it good for both Tolkien newbies and and and then the Uber fans that can answer the really really hard trivia questions and they really need to read.

Up on Tom Bomba they'll so that you know, you can weed out the just the movie guys, the movie Lord of the rings.

But if you are just the just the movie guys, come on and we'll you know, you'll you'll hear songs you recognize, but all up with what we call our pub nights, which is literally just singing and storytelling and distinct.

Wow, that it sounds.

So incredible.

And then you turn around and come to the Rocky Mountain Conference of Kalos and you're going to be a feature presenter there.

We're so honored that you would come to our first Rocky Mountain Conference.

Tell us a little bit about what you're going to be sharing there.

Brian, we can't wait to invite you and the Anselm Society to this amazing conference that we're going to be having in Fort Collins the next weekend, the weekend after Bilbo and Frodo's birthday.

We're going to have a really.

Good September.

Yeah, yeah, it's.

Going to be incredible, right?

Yeah.

So first of all, I'm just, I'm really excited to get to come out with, come and hang out with you guys in Fort Collins because there's we're, we're, we're so blessed by what we see going on in, in Colorado Springs.

But they're great.

There's great stuff going on in Fort Collins too.

It's so exciting that, that you're there, Gustav and some of our other friends there.

I'm so I'm just excited to come and hang out and be a part of that there.

As far as my session, see, I mean, see if any of these lines, if you've ever heard any of these lines before, oh, beauty, whatever it is what you mean that you mean when you say that.

Oh, that's not for me.

Like I'm not an artist, I'm not qualified.

I don't have the time.

That's my wife's thing.

I'm just an engineer like.

All of us on some.

Level know that that beauty thing, somebody ought to do something about that, making it and enjoying it.

But we tell ourselves a lot of stories to convince ourselves it's not us.

And I think.

That's exactly how the enemy wants it.

But I mean, we were just talking about Lord of the Rings.

What if, as Gandalf said, it is the deeds of ordinary people that keep the darkness at Bay?

What if there's a way for ordinary people through ordinary things to participate in the life of Christ in the building of his church?

So what I want to do in my session is take that theological vision that is the really the centerpiece of of the whole weekend.

And there are smarter and wiser and more educated people than me that are laying the groundwork with keynotes going into to the breakouts that include mine.

So that's awesome for me.

I don't have to do that heavy lifting.

I want to take that theological vision and bring it to the dinner table, the workplace, the backyard, the small group.

I want people in my session to leave feeling like we've opened a door to further up and further in.

Not in the realm of the thing those fancy people do, but in the realm of my cubicle tomorrow, my home schooling tomorrow, my laundry tomorrow.

Oh, that's exciting.

And we're so looking forward to this conference and to have you there and to just dive into these themes that you've laid out so beautifully just in this conversation here on the podcast.

Gustav, you got anything more for for Brian before we head out to our day?

No.

I'm just.

Really thrilled Brian, you're going to be sharing those thoughts and and I want to encourage you want if.

You hear this before?

Our conference.

You really won't want to miss Brian.

You've heard a bit of his.

Intellect and his.

Passion and his faith here.

And I very much look forward to hearing from you at length.

Brian or at least greater length and and want to thank you so much for being a part of our conference and being such a supporter too as a sister organization with and so I'm feeling that sense of journeying together on this mission that's bigger than either of us and and I'm grateful for that so I look.

Forward very much to having.

You with us?

It's going to be.

Great.

And honestly, it's our our.

We, I mean we support.

Each other because it's the larger mission and because thank God we don't have to do everything we can we can specialize a little bit we can focus on the yeah that the things that we're best at or the people that are right in front of us, which is the way that we are are made to work and and if I were to sort of piggyback on what you just said to to leave a sort of a parting gift to the listeners that.

If you're sitting there listening.

And thinking, I wish you know, I wish I had this where I am.

You can.

Start where we started.

Which is plan to flag?

Put a flyer up at your church and say I love such and such.

Anyone who wants to come and talk about such and such over dinner, sign up.

I can pretty much.

Guarantee you will be surprised at just how much you 2 I thought.

I was the only one.

Comes up.

So, Ryan, thank.

You thank you for joining us on Beauty Through Faith.

It's been an honor and we will have you on again very soon.

Maybe we can debrief on the conference.

I want to hear about the revelry and restoration that's happening and at your gathering as well.

So we're we're going to have you back to to fill us in on those details.

I know our listeners are going to want to hear that too.

So thanks so much.

Yeah, my pleasure.