Have you ever been around someone who just can't take "no" for an answer? It seems that it becomes a challenge for them to talk you out of it. That's what boundaries are all about, and why they are so important in relationships. Listen in to find out more!

Imagine for a moment that you are a road weary traveler.

You're tired, you're hungry, and wondering if there will ever be a safe place to rest.

You've been told there's an outpost ahead that provides safety information for the road ahead and people who understand what the journey is like.

You keep scanning the horizon, hoping against hope that it will be there.

Then, as you come over a rise in the terrain, you suddenly catch a glimpse of it.

There it stands, beckoning you to come and find the rest you need.

You're moments away from the outpost.

Well, welcome, everybody, to the outpost.

I am Doctor Ray Mitch, your host.

I'm quite honestly, I'm shocked that I am able to pull this off tonight.

I have packed quite a potpourri of disaster into one week.

I might say part of that is because I am.

I contracted Covid on Saturday of last week, and then Sunday, I was in pretty much misery.

Monday got a little bit better, and so we move on basically from there.

Funny thing about this is that it has attacked my voice.

And so when I look back in time, not that this is information anybody really cares that much about, but I'll say it anyway, is that being a teacher, your voice is everything.

Actually, as a counselor, your voice is everything as well.

You really need a functioning voice to be able to be heard and everything else, obviously.

But I look back in time over the years of teaching, which is now 16 years, and it seems like every fall, I would be afflicted with laryngitis, and I would lose my voice for a few days, and I would.

Every year, I would audition for the voice of James Earl Jones and Darth Vader because I was in such a low register, and so that was always there.

So here we are.

And my voice sounds surprisingly better than I thought it would by this time, and it is strong enough to carry me through the week in the teaching that I have to do and everything else.

So thanks for joining me by way of all of that.

Thanks for joining me.

You're listening to the Outpost podcast.

I'm Doctor Ray Mitch, your host.

I am delighted that you taken some time out to listen in on the podcast.

What we're looking at and talking about this, this few, I don't know, five or six weeks worth of material here is what.

What do the relationships that exist within the outpost look like?

I mean, what's the, what's the best way to go about doing those things?

And ultimately, rather than making it particular just to the up, let's talk about it in the context of christian community, or any kind of community, or any kind of group, for that matter.

And the last couple of weeks, we've been looking at not only how do we handle truth, not only the big t truth of God's truth and things that are applicable to everybody, but how do we handle little t truth that is unique to me?

And I try to communicate that to people in a variety of ways.

And the real travesty, at least in my mind, is our tendency to try to apply big t truth principles and thoughts and stuff from scripture and et cetera onto the back of the little t truth of where we actually live.

And usually there is such a massive disconnect between those that the person ends up feeling like, well, I guess what I thought and felt really didn't matter.

The only thing that matters is God's truth.

And so I just need to suck it up, buttercup, and just try to live life that way.

It's an artificial way to do it because we invite people to split themselves between what they really experience and what they really feel versus how they should feel or what they should believe.

And that chasm that exists between those two are really where relationship is forged and where connection is forged.

And that's, I think, to some degree, what has contributed to a lot of disconnect, ultimately, for a lot of people, even from the church itself.

You know, the church really doesn't have anything to offer me because it doesn't have a way for me to connect with it.

I can get beat up, you know, I can get beat about my head and shoulders with big t truth and all the truth of God's word.

And while that may be true, it is true.

But while that may be true, that doesn't connect with the life I'm living right now.

And the thing we've got upside down and backwards is somehow we think that engaging people through big teachers, because that's what they should believe, that's what they should think, is the way to helping them embrace and understand the character of God.

And we've got it backwards because ultimately, which might be, might not actually be all that good, is that they understand the character of God by how we relate to them, not so much by what we say to them.

And that's a key point I think we have to contend with when we're talking about the outpost and maybe even in the future, lord willing, we could have outpost groups where people gather, talk about life as they are living it and as it is, not as it should be, and connect on that basis and be able to find where God exists in that, where God, you know, what God's word actually has to say about that, but nothing sooner than we should, because the reality is big t truth that is ill timed, that is done usually for the benefit of the speaker, not the listener, is because I want to be able to feel like I'm doing something helpful.

I'm doing something that somebody should have and believe.

Then I am imposing that on them and saying, this is what you should do and should believe rather than.

I wanna understand what life is like for you first, before I jump in with that.

So what I was saying, big t truth, which, like I said, is true when it is ill timed, it is not timed according to the need of the person that's being spoken to, is a weapon and it's experienced as a weapon.

And unfortunately, in a lot of cases, people feel like almost embarrassed that they feel wounded by that, because they shouldn't.

They shouldn't.

And so we kind of forget about the fact that we're diminishing somebody's humanity by sidestepping those little t realities that they live with.

And by doing so, we communicate to them that their humanity really doesn't matter.

And you can get all theological about it with me all you want and say, well, their humanity is broken and they're sinful and blah, blah, blah, whatever.

That's true.

That is true.

I'm not going to debate that point.

That is true.

But so what?

How do I move somebody in authentic relationship to God and to Jesus?

And it is by the power of my relationship with them.

And if I am not so good with that, then that's the face of God that they will conclude exists rather than the one that is the face of Jesus because he was the face of God.

And so what the outpost attempts to do is to build bridges back to faith for a lot of people that have left it behind but long for that kind of connection that I was just talking about or its purpose is to strengthen these bridges, the bridges of faith that people have that ultimately end up being built on us, being fully who we are, otherwise known as authenticity.

For us to understand what grace really means and what it really does to empower us to grow and to learn and to find acceptance and live in the tension between grace and truth, which I've already talked a little bit about, and ultimately, in the context of the outpost and the kind of relationships that we have there, it's being known and knowing other people and being willing to be known.

And we're not so sure we want that, because if people know us the way we know us, they're not going to like us either.

So we better not be known.

And the reality is, is that we actually believe that if they knew us the way we know us, they would come to the same conclusion that we do instead of offering us grace.

How many people have you talked to?

Or even you might have said this, I am great at giving grace to other people, but I'm terrible at giving grace to myself.

And that should be all, you realize, because if we're terrible at giving grace to ourselves, and we essentially, we essentially assume that other people will do what we do to ourselves.

And that's fundamentally false.

Even if you would check it out or test it out, you would find that.

So we're trying ultimately, in small ways, slow but sure, hopefully, to create a space where the doubters and the wounded and the confused and beat up and beat down and the bent and bruised who feel like their lives are disappointment into God, can feel accepted enough to be known and know others, because ultimately we have to feel accepted to stretch ourselves, to be willing to know other people.

And what my hope is is that these outposts could be a place where people actually bump into the biblical Jesus as he is, not as they have grown to assume he is, because those may not be the same.

So that's, that's kind of lead up to where we're going tonight.

And so pull up a chair, get comfortable and relax.

And, and hopefully the stuff that I want to talk about tonight will be immediately useful to you.

We, like I said the last time we talked about truth, and then the, the episode last week was on how do we play God and how we try to control other people.

And the antidote to control and controlling behavior ultimately, is having a commitment to freedom and to grace and to being willing to let people make mistakes, including ourselves.

And so the third one that we come to is, the way that I put it, is fence.

Fence?

What?

Fence.

And the funny thing about it is that when you look at our world around us, there are boundaries everywhere.

We call them property lines.

In the world of real estate, we call them kind of my personal space.

We call that literally, in a lot of places there are fences.

There are ways that we demarcate what we're responsible for and what we're not with our lawns.

And sometimes hedges.

I actually grew up across the street from somebody that had a hedge.

And I always just saw it as a challenge to figure out a way through it, but it was a way of demarcating what their lawn was or what they were responsible for.

And so, in the physical world, we have lots of examples of boundaries, including walls of rooms and doors that let us into those rooms and things like that, but even more so in the physical world, outside of our homes with fences.

And I, when I first was introduced to this, and I actually wrote about it, I have a devotional on the website called setting New Boundaries, and it's about healthy relationships.

And when I first learned about this from the two authors that I am going to be using their material, material from, and that's John Townsend and Henry Cloud.

And I worked with them, they were in the.

The California clinic of the Minersmeyer Clinic, and I was in the Wheaton one.

And when they first released their book, Boundaries, me and two other friends of mine who were therapists in the Chicago clinic were conscripted to put together a 365 day devotional on boundaries.

And that's essentially what that digital devotional on my website actually is.

It allows you to.

To get a devotion in your email once a week for two years, basically, where you're able to think through the boundaries in your life, in your relationships, how you want to handle it, where you might be going wrong, all of that.

So enough of the shameless plug that's there for your enjoyment.

And if you want to get it, you can subscribe.

It's less than a cost of a latte today.

It used to be about equal to a latte years ago, but that's long gone.

So that's there, and you're welcome to hit it.

And you can go to resources on the website to find it.

So in the physical world, we have lots of examples everywhere about boundaries.

What about in the spiritual world, though?

And one way to think about boundaries in the spiritual world is they literally define my soul and our soul, or our heart, depending on what the phrases are that are used within scripture, usually entail the immaterial part of us.

The heart, generally in scripture includes our dreams and our will and our choices and all the things, our emotions.

Because heart isn't just our emotions.

The heart, at least as defined within scripture, is really all of us, ultimately.

But our soul ends up being kind of the immaterial part of us, where the spirit of God resides, if we accept and invite him into our lives.

And so in the spiritual world, boundaries define our soul.

Now, let me give you an example.

And it's from proverbs.

It's one that a lot of people are relatively familiar with, and it's from proverbs 423, if you're interested and want to look it up, it says, watch over your heart with all diligence.

For from it flows the springs of life.

Now, if you think about that closely and carefully, what you will find is that our heart is likened to a spring, and out of that spring flows everything into our lives and into other people's lives, for that matter.

And Jesus refers to this regularly in a lot of his teaching, that, that it's what is in the.

In man's heart and the overflow of that that contaminates him, not what he puts into his stomach and comes out of his digestive tract.

And so when proverbs, the writer of proverbs, says, watch over your heart with all diligence, he's not talking about something that is a outlaw that should be caged or.

Or jailed or imprisoned.

It is something that should be watched over with care and a sense of immense value.

For from it flows the springs of life.

And the thing to understand is that oftentimes when we see behaviors and things in us that we don't like, what we're actually looking at is the trash that has accumulated downstream from the spring itself.

And we try to clean out all the trash downstream, hoping that that will clean everything up.

But we don't take the time to look at what's going on in the spring.

And if from another point of view, you could look at the sermon on the mount that way.

Is that sermon on the mount just.

Just by way of commentary?

Not that you asked for it, but you're going to get it anyway.

The sermon on the mount just tells you where it was.

It doesn't tell you anything about the content.

I mean, imagine if you were to go to church and the sermon was entitled message from the name of whatever church you're going to, and that tells you nothing of what it is.

But if you were really to summarize, what the sermon on the mount is about is you will find that it's about the human heart.

It's about looking at this very thing of watching over our hearts.

We can notice all the things downstream that come out of it, but that doesn't tell us enough for us to go back upstream and find out what's going on in that spring.

And so, boundaries define our soul, and they make it clear that we need to take care of that spring of life.

Because from it flows everything else.

Okay, so that's the first one.

It defines our soul.

The second thing is, is boundaries help us to understand what's me and what's not me.

And, you know, kids learn this relatively early, probably around the two year old range ish, from a yemenite developmental point of view.

And we know it because suddenly they have discovered the word mine, or me, for that matter.

So they begin to realize that me is separate from somebody else.

And boundaries are that thing.

Boundaries are me versus not me.

You're not me, but I am me.

Right?

In other words, I'm the only one that knows what bitterness is like for me.

You may have a hint of it from your own or your own joy, but you don't know it from what.

How I experience it, because you're not me and no other way to really put it.

And so they define our soul.

They define me and not me.

And they also define what I'm responsible for versus what I am responsible how I can be responsible to someone.

Now, again, a verse from scripture.

Paul talks about this in Galatians, and he says something most everybody knows.

This first verse.

Bear one another's burdens and thereby fulfill the law of Christ.

That's true.

Everybody knows this verse.

And.

And usually this verse is one that I point to and say, this is the.

The boulders and backpacks verse is the way I put it, because burdens, literally in the Greek, means boulder.

So bear one another's boulders, which means something so big, so crushing, somebody can't possibly carry it alone.

And now I am responsible for somebody else when they are attempting to carry a burden so big that they can't do it alone.

And I come alongside of them.

But two verses later, Paul says this.

He says, for each one will bear his own load and load.

Here is, if you look at it, it's really where we get the word knapsack.

And so in our world, that would be the equivalent of backpack.

And it would.

It would carry the same connotation.

Because ultimately, in your backpack, whatever you're carrying with you, whatever it might be, messenger bag or whatever you carry, only stuff for you, it is solely yours and yours alone.

And Paul is saying, look, you carry your own backpack.

You need to do that and be responsible for that.

But when you see somebody carrying a burden and a boulder so big they can't, then you need to be responsible for them and come alongside and help them with that.

On the other hand, somebody carrying their own backpack, I can be responsible to them and say, well done, keep going.

Don't give up.

This is.

This is something that you're responsible for.

How can I empower you to take that responsibility?

So being responsible to somebody is being an encourager, a supporter, a person to empower the other person.

But being responsible for somebody is.

Is reserved for when they are carrying something so big, so crushing, they can't possibly do it alone.

So there's.

It defines our soul.

It defines who I am and who I'm not.

It defines what I'm responsible for versus how I'm responsible to other people.

And then finally, it's also a way of understanding, keeping the good in and the bad out.

It's a simplified way of saying it, but ultimately, this is where the fence analogy is very effective, because fences, I don't know that you've probably ever come across a fence.

It doesn't have a gate in it.

The question is, who is the keeper of the gate in your life?

Are you or someone else?

And so ultimately, the gate that is part of a fence, not a wall, not a wall, but as part of a fence.

And fence is good because you can come up to the fence and converse with somebody at the fence and they're in their world and you're in yours, and there's separation, and you can have a conversation over the fence and still be separate.

But we need gates that we are responsible for.

I am the keeper of my gate.

No one else is.

And no one else is entitled to come in that gate unless I invite and allow them to do that.

We have plenty of people in our lives.

I know a lot of people that say this, that feel entitled to come to that gate because of their position or their relationship or relation and really take offense that we would actually choose to keep the gate shut.

So we.

We have a right to say no.

And that's where, that's one of the examples of boundaries that we have.

Actually, in a lot of ways, the hardest time doing is to simply use the.

Is to use the simplest word of our vocabulary, which is only two letters, and that's no.

Partly because we're sure that the other person's going to leave us.

And if I say no, then they won't like us or they.

They will get disappointed, or they'll get angry, and we don't like that because now we're responsible for that.

And their emotions are not a boulder.

Their emotions are their own thing.

They need to take responsibility for that themselves.

So we need gates.

And gates keep the good in and the bad out.

And that's how we exercise, having good boundaries and saying no to certain situations or to certain people or whatever that might be.

So, like I said, examples of boundaries in our everyday world would include words like no, speaking the truth rather than a falsehood, or saying something just to keep somebody happy.

And sometimes even distance, I mean, just geographical cures, if you will, is what oftentimes people, how they set boundaries, because they can't set boundaries and the person is close to them.

And that's some other issue that's a lot bigger than I have time to talk about.

But emotional distance or geographical distance is not uncommon, because we feel we have.

The other person has such sway over us, for whatever reason.

I'm not throwing stones.

They have such sway over us for a variety of reasons that we can't seemingly say no.

And when that's the case, we separate ourselves and create emotional or geographical distance with them.

The other one, which is very simple in terms of a boundary, is just taking time away.

And so time is also a boundary, and what goes into it.

Now, what I want to do is walk you through four different, well, actually five different groups of people.

And more than likely one of these will probably get your attention or poke you in some way, maybe more.

And that's okay.

It doesn't mean that you're doomed at all, but it just points out the area that you may need to pay attention to.

And John and Henry, in their book, boundaries separate people by what they call compliance and avoidance and non responsives and controllers.

I call it something a little different.

Same concepts still indebted to them, but I call it something a little different to make it a little bit more understandable.

Because when I say compliant, most people don't immediately understand what I'm talking about.

So I've relabeled these groups of people.

This is not a profile.

Doesn't mean that you do it all the time.

It doesn't mean, as a matter of fact, you probably don't.

It is probably in certain situations with certain relationships, that these things happen.

And so there may be pieces and parts of each one of these that you find familiarity with in some way.

Okay, so here's the first group.

The first group is what I call the go along to get along people.

And ultimately, they say yes to everything, including the bad.

And these folks oftentimes have very fuzzy or indistinct boundaries with other people.

And so when somebody else feels bad, they.

They feel bad.

Too, partly because the other person's feeling bad and they feel responsible for that.

And so they, their tendency this go along to get along, folks.

Their tendency is to try to minimize their differences with other people.

And unfortunately, we have bought into the lie that I have to minimize the differences in order to have anything that will connect me to the other person.

Instead of seeing differences as a fundamental quality to relationships, people are going to be different.

I think intellectually we can assent to that, but I don't think emotionally we do.

And ultimately, the basic driver of this behavior is fear.

It's fear of being abandoned.

It's a fear of being left or somebody being mad at me, which is a separation.

And so that fear drives us along, and we minimize the differences with the other person.

It's fine.

It's fine.

It's no big deal.

I'm making a big deal, more big deal out of it than it really is, etcetera, etcetera.

Okay?

And that's what the go along to get along people are really all about.

The next group is what I call the yeah, but people.

And so instead of saying yes to the bad, they say no to the good.

So when good is offered them support, encouragement, help in getting something done, they typically will say no to that good that's being offered them.

And the way that they go about doing that is that they rationalize that their problems are not as big of a deal because they relativize their problems to other people's problems.

And so my, you know, my problem, the thing I'm wrestling with, and I'm asking for help, it's not that big of a deal because after all, people have it far worse than I do.

I don't know what I'm complaining about.

Yeah, but thanks, but no thanks.

And so they, they suffer from an inability to ask for help because they are constantly relativizing their problems compared to somebody who always has a worse than them.

Always.

They don't ever compare it to somebody who has a better than them.

Why would they do that?

But there's an inability to ask for help.

And in these folks case, boundaries actually are walls, and they, it separates them from people that goes into that.

So we've got the goal on to get along the.

Yeah, but, and then finally, this one is a bigger category, and there are two different kinds and flavors of this one.

But the larger category here is, it's all about the outcome.

In other words, all that they, all that matters is that they gain the outcome that they're trying to achieve.

And so ultimately, they don't respect other people's boundaries.

In their way of thinking, no is simply a challenge to overcome or to convince or to cajole or to intimidate or whatever to get the person to change their no to yes.

And in a lot of ways, these folks tend to resist taking responsibility for their own lives.

They're always projecting responsibility onto other people.

And so they have different methods.

And that's what the two different kinds are that I'm, I want to talk about, because the two different kinds, the first one is the intimidator.

Now, this is, this person is easy to pick out.

We can see them coming a mile away.

Oftentimes we refer to them as controllers, and they don't listen.

They run over fences.

Sometimes they escalate and power up on people when they get a no.

And so they, some, they can get verbally and even physically abusive when somebody resists a request or to help them or whatever that might be.

And in their economy, there is really no place for somebody to say no to them.

There's no place for that.

And so they don't, they really, these are the, probably the most outspoken critics about boundaries are these people.

And in a lot of cases, people criticize boundaries partly because they don't want to abide by them, and that's why they criticize them, when, in fact, I would make a pretty unequivocal statement to say that ultimately healthy relationships can't survive with poor boundaries.

Let me put it another way.

The healthiest relationships have the clearest boundaries and a respect for boundaries in them.

In other words, to put it simply, they have a respect for the per other person's no.

And so the intimidators are the first group.

The second group are the manipulators.

And the manipulators ultimately, ultimately are less honest.

They hide and they try to persuade people into believing that they really wanted what the other person is resisting.

And so a no is just a challenge to overcome.

And they try to manipulate or to persuade the other person to give in.

And so a no is not acceptable, really.

And that's the manipulator.

So it's all about outcome can look two different ways.

It can look intimidating in order to get the outcome they want or manipulating in order to get the outcome that they want.

And those are the two kind of flavors, if you will, that are part of that group of people that the.

So there's.

So what do we got?

We got, we got the go along to get along.

We've got the.

Yeah, but.

And we've got, it's all about the outcome people.

We've got one more group in that.

One more group is what's your problem?

Ultimately, they don't hear the needs of other people at all.

And their kind of life philosophy is, if you don't like it, how you feel, change your feelings.

Life's tough, get over it.

Suck it up, buttercup, you'll be fine.

And they tend to have a very critical spirit.

They tend to evaluate other people's circumstances to minimize it ultimately, and make it so they don't have anything to respond to.

And so they oftentimes will say, hey, what's the problem here?

This is not that big of a deal.

You're making a bigger deal out of it than it really is.

And so they end up being absorbed in their own desires and needs rather than actually hearing other people.

Now, like I said, these are the four profiles.

I even hesitate to use that word because profiles are way more rigid than I'm trying to communicate here, because ultimately we may have features of each one of these in the different relationships of our lives, whether it's at work or personal life or wherever that might be.

So we might have features of all of these in here.

And, and the challenge is, is how committed am I to freeing people and giving them the freedom to say no and accepting their no?

Because we communicate respect, we communicate dignity, we communicate value to the other person when we accept no for an answer.

And the funny thing about it is, is that if the person recognizes that I value their freedom to say no, then the potential is pretty great, that they will also understand that they have the power to say yes.

But if we prohibit no, then the yes we get is going to be a false yes.

It is not going to be authentic, it is not going to be sincere.

And ultimately, I think for most of us, we don't want an insincere yes.

We don't want to be manipulate somebody into saying yes because it doesn't mean as much.

And that's true.

And the funny thing about it is even the God of the universe, Jesus Christ, when he was on this earth, he let people choose.

He let them choose.

And even if they choose, chose, choose, even if they chose wrongly.

And a classic example, and this is there, there are other examples.

If you know what you're looking for, you will see it.

But the classic example is the story that is told, I'm not sure which gospel it is, of the rich young ruler that comes up to Jesus and tries to justify himself by saying, I've kept all of the law of Moses.

And Jesus looks at him and it says, he looks at him with compassion and points out, but there is one that you have not kept, and that is, give all that you own to the poor and follow me.

And the young man gets kind of pulled up and he says, yeah, no, that's okay.

And he walks away.

We don't see Jesus running after him and trying to change the conditions of the agreement or anything like that.

He said he's free to choose, and even choose wrongly.

And obviously, there are a lot of people that chose rightly in following Jesus, but there are lots of people that didn't.

A lot of people that didn't.

As a matter of fact, they were in the group of people that crucified them eventually.

So boundaries are a critical thing to understand in our relationships, whether that be in the outpost like we're talking about here, or even in christian community, because it communicates something by how we relate, not so much by what we say.

And that's what's important to understand and keep firmly in our minds.

I think once we understand that, because this is a linchpin, I will say this is a linchpin to relationships as boundaries.

And increasingly over the years, as I've been in the counseling field, which is over four decades, I have seen a slow deterioration of boundaries between people, to the point where people are held hostage by other people because they can't bear the other person saying no.

And it leads to all manner of conflict in relationships as a result of that.

And that's.

That's what's key here in terms of the relationships within.

Within the uppost, within our relationships and community.

However, you know, whatever the context is, you can apply it.

It will still work and it will still be applicable.

And again, this is not the kind of thing that you have chapter and verse to quote, although there's plenty to point to.

But it is the kind of thing that, in principle, agrees with the value of human life and the dignity of the human, the imago dei in each person, the image of God in each person, and how we communicate that value by respecting their freedom and their ability to say no.

So that is it for tonight.

Thanks so much for joining me.

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And so the other thing I'd mentioned, and I already mentioned it in the podcast, was the digital devotional.

It is called setting new boundaries.

It is in the resources section on the website.

And you can sign up.

It's $5 a month.

You can try it for a month.

If you like it, great.

If you don't, then just cancel it.

It's just that simple.

But you get to a devotional to be thinking about the stuff that I just finished talking about on this podcast.

And so it's there for your enjoyment and hopefully your encouragement and even challenge.

So there's another podcast I've been doing.

I do this kind of periodically based on how the spirit moves me, and it's called unscripted, the collected wisdom of life, living in sorrow.

And it has a slant toward talking about the process of sorrow and what it looks like and some of the landscape that I think is important to understand.

In scripture we often refer to as lament.

And that's not something we do very much of, at least in our culture, because of our commitment to being happy.

So you can also listen on that one on whatever podcast platform you use.

Follow us on social media, Instagram, SGI International, Facebook, at stained Glass International on Facebook, and then LinkedIn at Drmitch.

M I t s c h.

So you can find us in any of those places if you want to partner with us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You can do that by using a donate link on the website.

Or if you'd rather send us a physical check, you can certainly do that.

Just make it out to SGI.

And.

And we just opened a store, SGI store.

And there are window stickers and the books, my two books are available there.

The newest one, the seasons of our grief, is there.

And excuse me.

And if you want to take advantage and, and order something up that way, you certainly can, whether it's on Amazon or anywhere else, and subscribe.

Subscribe to our online community.

You'll get hit.

Once you hit the website, you'll get hit with an invitation to join the community.

We're not going to hit you up for money or anything like that, but we send out a newsletter periodically, again, just to give you stuff to think about and to read and hopefully find some encouragement from.

So that is it.

Thanks so much for joining me.

I appreciate your time and your willingness to seek it out and to listen.

I pray that you will find application from some of the stuff that I've been talking about in your relationships this week.

And until next week, love you.

Later.

Bye.