548: Reflecting on Religion & Spirituality

[INTRODUCTION]

 

Hal Elrod: Hello, friends. Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast. Today, we are reflecting on religion and spirituality. Quite a potentially polarizing topic but today I hope it is a unifying topic because that is the place that I am reflecting on this, reflecting on religion and spirituality from the perspective of unity. In other words, no matter what our religious or spiritual beliefs are or not, what do we all have in common? What are we all aspiring toward that religion and/or spirituality has and/or could significantly be helpful, useful, supportive toward us living a better life? I’ll also share the differences between religion and spirituality and the similarities, kind of unpack that a little bit.

 

And I will share my own journey with you in regards to religion, how I grew up, how my beliefs were formed, how they evolved and changed over time, perspectives. I encourage you to listen to the end because some of the best parts of this podcast are in the last 10 to 15 minutes where I really unpack after I lay everything out, after I unpack everything, I bring it all together in an empowering and hopefully enlightening perspective that is helpful for you.

 

All right. Goal achievers, before we dive into the podcast, I want to thank our two sponsors that brought you this episode and that is, first and foremost, Organifi. If you want to improve your health, lose weight, sleep better, be more focused, Organifi makes some of, if not the highest quality whole food organic supplements in powder form that you mix in water, put in your smoothie. And for me, I use a handful of their products every single day. I use their Focus nootropic supplement in the morning. I use their organic Red Juice powder, which increases blood flow before I work out. I use their Protein Powder after I work out. I’m going to keep going. There’s a variety of other supplements that I use from Organifi. If you want to improve your health, go to Organifi.com, that’s O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I, got to spell it with two Is, Organifi.com/Hal, and use the discount code ‘HAL’ for 20% off your entire order.

 

And last but not least, I want to thank our sponsor, CURED Nutrition. Sorry. My son just looked through my office window and I got distracted. And CURED Nutrition wakes me up and puts me to bed every night. I use their nootropic in the morning. It’s called Rise. I combine that with Organi’s Focus. Rise is a nootropic with superfoods, CBD oil, and adaptogens. I start in the morning with Rise, and then I end every single day with their nighttime oil, which also come in capsule form called Night Caps that blend CBD and CBN oil. It helps me fall asleep and stay asleep. If you want to improve how you wake up every day and how you go to bed every day, head over to CUREDNutrition.com/Hal and use that same discount code ‘HAL’ for 20% off your order as a listener of this podcast.

 

Without further ado, let’s reflect on religion and spirituality in a way that unites all of us and helps all of us find more meaning and purpose in our lives.

 

[EPISODE]

 

Hal Elrod: So, last week’s episode was titled Reflecting On Death (Our Own and Our Loved Ones). And that was a message that came through me if you will after I found out that one of my close friends, John Ruhlin, had passed away, which I’m actually leaving for the airport soon to fly to St. Louis for his celebration of life. So, sorry. It’s been an emotional morning already, but last week we talked about death. This week we are talking about religion. I think that would leave nothing more than politics for next week, right? These are like the taboo topics that you typically don’t bring up but we are bringing them up.

 

Now, today we’re going to talk about reflecting on religion and spirituality. And to be really clear, this is not some sort of teaching where I’m telling you, “This is law. This is truth.” I think I rarely ever, if ever, teach from that perspective. It’s always, “Hey, here are some perspectives that have been helpful for me that may be helpful for you.” That’s always where I’m coming from. Just a place of two friends, you and I, chatting about various topics. This week happens to be religion and spirituality, and I’ve wanted to talk about this for a long time but because it is such a topic that has deeply held beliefs by people to where our entire identity for many of us, our identity is in our religion. It’s like they’re one in the same, right?

 

Whether I am a Christian or I am Jewish or whatever the religion is, it’s very much a part of people’s identity. So, when you share various perspectives and paradigms, you risk offending somebody or turning somebody off and saying, “Nope, that’s wrong. I don’t agree with you.” And so, I’m going to invite all of us to come to this conversation. And I guess it’s a one-sided conversation but I’m going to ask you some questions. So, even though I can’t hear your answers that will create the conversation dynamic, I’m going to ask you to reflect on your own beliefs throughout this one-sided dialog, if you will. So, I’ll try to make it as two-sided as possible.

 

But I am often asked if I am religious. I’m asked that quite a bit, and probably more often I’m asked specifically if I am a Christian. I get asked that question quite a bit. And so, today I’d like to answer those questions. Am I religious? Am I a Christian? Am I spiritual? What’s the difference? And just share my journey with regard to spirituality and religion in hopes that you gain some valuable perspectives from what I share that might help you on your own spiritual journey. That is it.

 

And I think where to start, growing up, I was raised Catholic. So, from the time I can remember, I went to a Catholic church every Sunday. And our priest, Father Tunisi, was from Italy. He had a very, very thick Italian accent. I, in full transparency, couldn’t understand a lot of what he was saying. And I often tune out in church, in full transparency. However, I did go to catechism Sunday school, and I got a lot more value from that because I could really understand and the teachings were catered to my age group, right? But there were pros and cons, more pros and cons, by the way, and the pros for me was that my conscience, if you will, really developed from church. Like, it was, “Hey, these are guidelines.”

 

And I hear people that don’t go to church, they would argue, “Well, you don’t need church to create guidelines and values for your family. You can do that,” which absolutely. And my parents did that but they were often rooted in our faith and our tradition. And the power of going to church for me was I heard those beliefs or those values, those guidelines, those rules, whatever you want to call them, week after week after week after week. And because of that and because I wasn’t just hearing them from my parents, but I was hearing them from our priest. I was hearing them from my catechism Sunday school teacher. Catechism, by the way, is I don’t know why it’s called that but that’s what Sunday school is called in the Catholic Church.

 

And so, it was really reinforced. And I was introduced to the Ten Commandments when I was, I don’t know, very young and introduced in Sunday school. So, it was really broken down at a level I can understand. But the point is my guiding, my compass, if you will, my guidelines for living a moral life were really, what’s the word? They were initiated, established, and then reinforced when I was very, very young and my brain was still forming. So, that was a huge benefit for me. And when I had children, I wanted them to go to church, even though, as you’re going to hear, I’ll share this here in a minute but I went further away from like being religious and more so being spiritual. And we’ll talk about the differences.

 

So, I wasn’t so religious when I had children, very spiritual, but I felt it was important for them to go to church for those same benefits that I got. I also never felt alone. When I was eight years old, I woke up one Saturday morning. If you haven’t heard the story, here’s the synopsis of it. But I woke up on Saturday morning to my mother screaming across the hall. And my baby sister, Amery, who was a year-and-a-half old at the time, I was eight, she was a year-and-a-half. I have another sister, Haley, who was six at the time. And Amery was born with a very rare heart condition called metatropic dysplasia. She was one of a few people in the United States with this condition. It was very, very rare. And she also was a dwarf because of that.

 

She would never be over right around four feet tall. She had a very curved spine, like very curved, I mean, to where you could see it through her clothing. And one Saturday morning, I woke up to the sound of my mother screaming from her bedroom, which was directly across the hall from our bedroom. We had a very tiny house in Oakhurst, California. And I ran into the bedroom. It was only me, my mom, and my baby sister, Amery, at home because my dad was at work and my sister, Haley, was at my grandmother’s house for the summer.

 

I ran into the bedroom and my mother was screaming, “Oh, my baby, my baby.” And Amery was lifeless in her arms or on the bed. I can’t remember which, but my mother was performing CPR and pressing on her chest gently and then breathing into her mouth. And when I went in and I said innocently, “Mommy, what’s going on?” And she panicked. She said, “Hal, go call 911. Call 911.” And then I called 911 and told the police. My mom told me what to say that my sister had stopped breathing and her heart wasn’t beating. And then my mom sent me to run next door to our neighbor’s house who was 80-something years old, and he had oxygen tanks with him all the time.

 

But we lived in the mountains, so like we didn’t have a flat yard. You had to go up hills, down hills. And so, our neighbor, Grant, I got him and I said, “We need your oxygen. We need your oxygen. Amery’s not breathing.” And he grabbed his oxygen tank, which was on wheels. And he’s literally shuffling his feet. I mean, this man was very elderly and it took him probably, I don’t know, a good 5 or 10 minutes just to get from his house to our house. And sadly, the oxygen tank was too big for her face and the air blew out the sides. And Amery died that morning.

 

The reason I shared this story with you is because I had been going to church for at least three or four years, maybe longer. I don’t know what year I started, and I had a really strong relationship with God or relatively strong. And what I mean by that is I believed in God. I had faith in God and I prayed all the time, or not all the time, but I prayed regularly at church and with my family. So, I felt like I had an open dialog with God. I felt like he was there for me. I could talk to him. I never felt alone. I could always talk to God.

 

And after Amery passed, my family, my mom would pray a lot openly in front of all of us. We’d pray to Amery directly. We pray to God. And I ended up talking to God all the time and that created a dialog that to this day, for my entire life, ever since Amery passed away, I’ve just had open dialog with God. And of course, if someone is an atheist, they would say, “Well, you’re just talking to thin air.” Maybe, maybe. But one thing I encourage you to consider for all of us is that often consider the paradigm that when it comes to beliefs, and I mentioned I don’t know when. I might have shared this on last week’s episode. I’m having a little deja vu right now.

 

But when it comes to our beliefs, think about, is it true? Which is more important, is it true or is it useful? Is it true or is it useful? Meaning, that’s why it’s called faith. You can’t prove to somebody that it’d be hard to prove that there is a god, right, or that there’s afterlife. It’s hard to prove that. You can show him a YouTube video of someone who died for eight minutes and went to heaven and tells their story, right? But there’s real no proof. It’s faith. But for me, the belief that I had God to talk to was very useful for me. It gave me a lot of peace of mind. At eight years old, trying to make sense of my sister dying in front of me was very traumatic.

 

And the belief that I had in God, it was extremely soothing and useful. So, it added a lot of value to my life. And it continued to this day. So, that conversation, that open dialog continued. And so, in church, by the way, I served as an altar boy. That was another valuable part of my experience where I was really involved. My parents encouraged me to become an altar boy. And if you don’t know what that is, it’s church on Sunday. I would be up on the altar dressed in a, I don’t remember what the outfit is like. It was like a robe or something. And then I would light candles for the priest and I would hold things. I was involved.

 

And that was great because it gave me a sense of significance and contribution at a young age. Of course, mass was, like I said, it was boring for me. It was like I couldn’t understand our priest because his accent was so heavy, so it wasn’t even the details as much as it was the big picture, feeling, an idea of having this God that I could talk to and this set of morals and values that kept me in line.

 

So, I want to invite you right now, and we’re going to shift gears here. I wanted to just give you a little bit of background on my religious experience as a child, and it did change. And I’ll circle back here in a few minutes to after my car accident in my 20s and going into Eastern religion and down that spiritual path. I will touch on that briefly, but I want to shift gears. And first, I want to ask you to consider your religious experience of growing up. And maybe you already were. So, considering what religion, what part it played in your life.

 

I know for some of you, and it’s a small percentage, I think it’s roughly 84% of people do abide by, identify with some sort of religion and 16% do not. So, it’s a small percentage of people that do not, whether they’re atheist or agnostic. And even if that’s the case for you, if you’re like, “I had no religion, no spirituality growing up,” reflect on what it was like growing up. And here’s the specific context that I’m going to consider or ask you to consider. Where did you develop your beliefs about God and religion? Where did those come from? And here’s what I mean. Did your beliefs come from an experience you had directly feeling connected to God and the divine? Or did they come from an adult telling you what to believe?

 

And I remember in college and I might sound like a jerk here when I share this story, I’m not sure, but I think it was 20. It was right after my car accident. I went back to college. I was 20 years old or 21 years old, and I remember I was in a World Religions class and everybody was so like arguing in there about, “This is the way it is. This is what it says in the Bible.” And someone else is like, “No, this is what it says in the Koran.” And then they are doubling down and, “My way is the right way. Your way is the wrong way,” kind of thing, right? Like, “My religion is the truth. Yours is not.” And at that time, I had started studying world religions outside of even that class.

 

And I had learned that there were, I think it’s estimated by theologians, researchers, there are somewhere around 4,000 religions. I’ve seen things online that say there’s over 10,000 but most, if you read multiple articles and research and studies and surveys, you find that roughly there are roughly 4,000 religions, right? So, the numbers are arbitrary. It could be 2,000, whatever. But at that time and what I spoke up in class and I was kind of being a smartass. That’s why I said I’m going to sound like a jerk right now probably but I promise I’ve evolved since when I was 20. But I raised my hand and I said to the teacher, I said, “It’s interesting to me that everyone in here is really passionate and adamant that their religion is the right religion and that their way of seeing things is correct. And the others, if you don’t see it their way, that you’re wrong.”

 

I said, “But what I find fascinating is that I’ve been listening and observing, and it seems like every single person and the beliefs that they’re sharing, they learned when they were younger from someone else. In other words, they didn’t arrive at those conclusions on their own. They didn’t develop those beliefs on their own. They were told this is the truth by their parents or whomever they looked up as an authority figure or their pastor and they went, ‘Oh, okay, well, I don’t know any different. So, there it is.’” And that led me down a path of and, again, I said that I don’t know what my intention was. I think it was just a shared perspective but it was also probably some sort of ego-driven comment that I made in all honesty. But I went down a path of studying various religions and trying to look at the commonalities. Like, what are the common themes?

 

And in my 20s, I don’t know if I’d say conclusion that I came to because conclusion is a very definitive word and it was definitely not definitive, but it seems to me that these 3,000 or 4,000 religions are all humanity’s attempt, human beings’ attempt at understanding life’s biggest questions. Where did we come from? Is there something beyond this life? What happens after this life? Is there a God, right? And in trying to explain it to the best of each person’s ability, what this higher outside of our physical world that we live in, in our physical bodies, do we have a spirit? What does that look like? What is consciousness? Where does that come from? Why do some things happen in my life that feel so, you know, I say a prayer and then it happens exactly as I wanted it to, or not exactly as I wanted to, but it happens like it’s almost like it’s such a profound “coincidence” that you just go, “I don’t know how it could be anything other than a miracle or God.”

 

And so, for me, I also read books like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which is probably one of my first books into spirituality, I would say. I read Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsch, which was one of my favorite books at really shifting the perspective on how you think about God and religion and really in a more unifying way. And to me, that’s what religion should be is whether you’re, one, religion shouldn’t fight each other, right? How many people have died over, “Our religion is right. Yours is wrong. You’re blasphemous. We’re righteous.”

 

To me, religion should unite, including different religions. Like, I mentioned this a few months ago that two of my close friends, Brianna Greenspan and Josh Eidenberg, who happen to also be part of the Miracle Morning Miracle Workers team. Brianna runs our schools program, and Josh is our Head of App Development, but they are two of my closest friends and they are Jewish. And I have asked them to explain to me the role that their religion played in their life growing up and to this day. And it’s profound. I’m not an expert in Judaism, so I couldn’t unpack the details but I just remember when they were telling me my thought was, “I kind of wish I grew up in Judaism.”

 

Like, what a powerful religion. What a powerful set of principles and guidelines, and moral values that really, to me, would lead someone to living a really just and holy life. But my point is that all these different religions, all different religions, I would encourage the people to consider that if you had been born into another family and been raised in a different religion, you would have an entirely different set of beliefs. I’m going to say that, again, I’m going to invite you to consider the implications or not implications but just consider that statement that if you had been born into a different family in a different religion, you would have an entirely different set of beliefs.

 

For example, if you’re Christian, you’re born in the Middle East and you were born into the religion of Islam, you’d have an entirely different set of beliefs and you would be just as convicted. Think about this. You would be just as convicted, and so would I. Like, I’m not pointing the finger at you. I’m saying for all of us, right? If we were born into another family with another religion, we would have an entirely different set of beliefs, religious, spiritual beliefs, and we would be just as convicted that those beliefs are the truth as we are about our current beliefs. So, what is that? Where’s the value in that like in that consideration?

 

It’s to consider that maybe there’s more than one way to experience God or the divine. Maybe there’s more than one path. And I know that’s blasphemy. I attend a Christian church every week, and when I’m asked if I’m Christian, it depends on the context of what you believe. And I have done a deep dive into this. In fact, we’ll get into it in a second. But, meaning like, okay, what does it mean to be a Christian, right? And some folks I would imagine or that I’ve spoken with, when I ask them, “Hey, what do you think it means to be a Christian?” they go, “Well, I believe in the Bible. I go to church every Sunday, and I gave my life to Christ.” And I go, “Okay, awesome.”

 

To me, what it means to be a Christian and really, whatever religion someone identifies with, for me as a Christian, it’s like, A, do you study the principles that you are claiming that you abide by? But more importantly, do you live your life in alignment with the values and principles of whatever your belief system is? And obviously, we know there’s lots of folks that are not religious and they’re not great folks, and there’s a lot of people that are religious and they’re not great folks, and there’s people on both sides that are completely atheist and agnostic, but they have an incredible moral compass and they say, “I don’t need God to know what’s right from wrong.”

Oh, the point being, how do you live your life? Do you live your life in alignment with a set of morals and principles that enable you to be a great person. So, to me, to be a Christian is, are you Christ-like? Do you live in alignment with Christ? And for my entire 20s, in fact, to this day, I consider myself spiritual, not so much religious. And let me define the two for you right now.

 

So, religion, by definition, it’s a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices, the service and worship of God or the supernatural. So, that’s a definition, right? And of course, religions are most often based upon the lives, the teachings, the beliefs of a historical or archetypal figure. So, Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad, which are also referred to often as ascended masters, and it’s the details of their lives as holy or highly evolved beings that have been carried to us across time and through oral tradition and written scriptures. And these figures are the subject of worship and devotion, and they form the foundation of religious practices and rituals in a community. So, that would be religion. And typically, again, there’s almost always a set of texts, the Bible, the Quran that lists the stories and the lessons and the values and the beliefs to follow. So, that’s how I would establish religion. And again, this is just one way to explain it. I’m sure you could ask 100 different people, and they’d give you 100 different ways, they would define religion.

 

Now, spirituality, on the other hand, is more about the connection, right? So, not the written rules, but it’s actually our personal connection to the divine, to a higher power, to something greater than you, whatever that is. And of course, both exist. You can be very religious, attend church, believe everything that it says in, for example, the Bible, believe that is the Word of God. And I’ve always and, again, I’m going to get called a blasphemous, but I’ve always thought, well, the Word of God but that was told to human beings who are fallible and might misinterpret or make mistakes. So, I just want to put that out there like, my journey has been one of questioning and curiosity.

 

So, growing up, it was one of obedience of this is what my parents told me. This is what my priest told me. This is what my Sunday school teacher told me. So, this is what I believe, period. And I would defend it. I would always say, “Oh, no, Catholicism is the first Christian religion. It started from the apostles.” Like, I used to defend that, and whether or not that’s true, I was convicted.

 

And then after my car accident and after studying other religions and, again, going from conviction to curiosity, and I think that you can be both. You can be convicted that there is a higher power, you can be convicted in your religion, but also, curious what other perspectives are out there. If nothing else, then develop empathy. How can we have unity as a species? How can we have unity as the human race without empathy, without putting ourselves in other people’s shoes and understanding how they are?

 

And again, this applies to religion, it applies to politics, people on the other side of the aisle that you think are crazy, that you think are watching the wrong news channel and don’t have it figured out, right? To me, the most important thing, well, one of the most important things in life right now in our world is unity. We are more divided than I have ever seen in my 45 years on this planet. We need to come together and remember that we are all human/spiritual, if you will, beings on this journey called life. And no matter what a person across from you believes about religion or politics, they are human being that deserves love and empathy and understanding and forgiveness and all of those things, all of those things that are taught not just in one religion, but in virtually all religions.

 

See, that’s what I looked at in my 20s, is what are the common themes, the common teachings across all religions. And I don’t have a list of that in front of me right now, but the general idea, be a good person. The golden rule, treat others as you want to be treated. Love your neighbor. Forgive those who trespass against you, right, on and on and on. And those common themes to me are the messages that you can go, oh, wow, if virtually, everyone from most, if not all of these religions got all of these messages, even though they got some different ones, but they got all of these that are the similar, that are the same, to me, those are universal truths that transcend religion, that transcend cultures, that transcend time frames, right? Centuries. So, what are these common truths that all of us can agree with and abide by, and that if we did, if we do, that we’re going to be better off.

 

So, I want to shift gears again and I want to talk a little bit about religion. I’m going to go through this relatively quickly. This is like, I know it’s a history lesson. It’s probably not the right way to put it. But I mentioned that there are over 4,000 known religions, and population researchers estimate that approximately 84% of the people around the world identify with a religion. And that means, if you do the math, that of the roughly 8.2 billion people on the planet, approximately 7 billion, it’s like 6.9 billion, and I’m sure it’s not an exact number, but roughly 7 out of the 8.2 billion of us identify as religious in some sense. So, think of that universality that, wait, okay, 7 billion of us believe there is something more than we see in the physical realm, some sort of higher power – God, Allah, whatever you call it.

 

And by the way, of those 7 billion people who are religious and those 4,000 religions, roughly 75% adhere to one of four religions. So, there are four religions that make up roughly three-quarters of all religions, which would be what? Out of the 4,000, roughly 3,000 of those religions are– or no, never mind, that was not accurate. But anyway, of the 7 billion people, roughly 75% adhere to one of four religions. Number one, Christianity, roughly 31% identify as Christians. That’s roughly 2.3 billion followers that identify as Christians. It’s the world’s largest religion, but it’s deeply diversified into numerous denominations. So, roughly half of Christians identify as Catholic as I grew up, 37% Protestant, 12% Orthodox, and then 1% other, right? Of those 4,000 religions, there’s all sorts of variations and denominations that fall underneath Christianity, and then some of the others. And the United States, by the way, is home to the largest Christian population, roughly 11.3% of the world total. And they’re followed by Brazil 8% and Mexico 5%. So, there’s little some stats for you.

 

So, Christianity is 31% of the religious population in the world. Islam is 24%. And they say that it’s growing at a rate where by 2050, most likely at this rate, there will be more people that are part of the religion of Islam than identify as being Christian. And of course, Christianity was based on Jesus Christ. We talked about an archetype or an ascended master that the religion is founded by based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, of course. Islam is Muhammad. And then the other two religions are Hinduism. Roughly 1.2 billion of the 7 billion people identify as being Hindu, and that’s one of the oldest religions. I believe it began 2000 years BC. It’s one of the oldest religions. And then the fourth is Buddhism. And Buddhism is– yeah, so those four, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

 

And then approximately, as I said, 16% of people around the world have no religious affiliation at all. So, that includes atheists, agnostics, people who may believe in God or spiritual life but don’t identify with any particular religion. And that was really me throughout my 20s, and in some ways, today, although here’s what I want to share with you. I’ve shared some personal journey, but this is a deeply personal journey. And it’s uncomfortable for me to share this. It’s uncomfortable for me to share this, and I think one, because I don’t want to turn anyone off, which I might have already done. Maybe, you might be like, “Dude, I’m not even listening anymore. It’s too late. You turn me off 10 minutes ago.” I don’t want to turn anybody off because this is a very specific path that I’ve been on, so I don’t want to alienate anyone. But I’d encourage you to listen. I’m going to try to go another five minutes. I’ll probably go 10, but I’d encourage you because I think there’s a lot of value in this recent journey, these breakthroughs that I’ve had.

 

So, a few months ago, I’m in a Front Row Dads’ band, right? You probably heard me talk about that. I meet with my four band– there’s four of us, three other bandmates. It’s a group of four guys that are part of the Front Row Dads. And we meet once a month to talk about being better husbands and better fathers and better friends. Those friends are Jon Vroman, founder of Front Row Dads, Justin Donald, author of Lifestyle Investor, and Dane Espegard, author of The Dream Machine. And they happen to be authors, but they’re three of my best, best, best friends in the entire world.

 

And we meet at least once a month. We hang out more often than that, but once a month, we go out to breakfast and we talk about family. And one of our Front Row Dads, he is a very strong Christian, and he shared at the beginning of this year that one of his goals was to bring people closer to Jesus Christ. And actually, his number one goal is to be more like Jesus Christ, to study Jesus and live like Jesus. And I know some of you are thinking like, okay, Hal is about to go, like deep dive into born again. No, no, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not where I’m going. Please stay with me, because this is a very logical lesson I’m about to share with you through the experience that I’ve had in the last few months.

 

So, it started with, in January, so it was eight months ago, my friend shared that he would like to (a) be more like Jesus, and his number two goal was to bring his friends closer to Jesus. And I thought, that’s beautiful. He’s one of my favorite human beings on the planet. This is Justin Donald, by the way. And he’s, I mean, like, what would Jesus do, right? That age old question. If you were to swap out the WWJD, the J from Jesus to Justin, like he is living his life as close to Jesus Christ as anyone I know. And I’ve strived to do that as well, but I mean, he is someone I model myself after Justin, like what a beautiful human being. He’s so selfless. He’s such a great father. He’s such a great husband. He’s so moral that I really strive to be more like him and in an effort being more like Jesus. But that was his desire was to bring people closer. So, that planted a seed for me. And I didn’t think too much of it.

 

But I think what I started to think is, maybe I should study Jesus more. Maybe I should study Jesus. And obviously, someone that has 2 billion people still following him, in fact, I’m reading a book right now, which I invite all of you to consider if you are in leadership, it is called Lead Like Jesus by Ken Blanchard. And he makes a really powerful, left-brained logical argument. He says, “What makes a good leader?” He said, “Typically, how you can measure a person as a leader, how effective they are is what the people that they lead think and do when they’re not in their presence.” So, if you’re a good leader, then the people that you are leading or the influence you’re trying to have in that person’s life on their thinking or behavior, it extends when you’re gone, right? So, if you’re a parent that yells at your kids and you’re not a very effective leader because you’re screaming all the time, and as soon as you turn your back, they’re doing whatever you told them not to do because you didn’t really lead in a way that inspired them to want to sustain the change that you were sharing with them. Makes sense?

 

So, he said, number one, what do people do when you’re not around that you are leading? How do they think? How do they behave? And then number two, what do they say about you when you’re not around? When you leave the people that you lead and you turn your back, do they start to go, man, under their breath, “Oh, what a jerk. I can’t stand that leader. They’re terrible”? So, do what do they say about you. And he made the left-brain logical argument that, 2000 years after Christ died, he has 2.3 billion people, roughly, that are still thinking and doing things in alignment with his teachings and 2.3 billion people that are praising him. They’re saying great things about him, some that are worshiping him, right?

 

And they said, by that measure, Jesus is one of the effective leaders of all time. So, in that way, let’s study what made him such an effective leader, and his style, the values he upheld, the moral compass that he went by. So, I was like, “That’s interesting.” So, I bought that book on Amazon and I started reading it. Then it led me to another book called In His Steps. And I love this book. Right now, I’m reading Lead Like Jesus in the morning. And again, this is from a logical perspective, meaning, I’m going, oh, wow, Jesus– okay, my friend Justin, who I respect to the umpteenth degree, would like to bring his friends closer to Jesus. I’m respectful to that. I’m open to that. I’m not going to go, nah, I’m not going to– like, no, I mean, okay, Justin, I love you, brother. Justin is like a brother to me. I love you. What might that look like? If that’s your genuine heart’s desire, how might I support that goal for you? Well, the only way I could support that goal is to actually study Jesus a little bit and inch a little closer.

 

And so, I started reading Lead Like Jesus in the morning, which is a phenomenal book. I’m underlining every page. And then at night, I read this book In His Steps. And it is a fictional book written in 1896. And by the way, I love it. Every night, I love getting into bed and reading this book for 30 minutes. And it basically is a fictional story about a pastor, again, written in 1896. It’s kind of hard to read a little bit because the language they spoke, the way they spoke in 1896 is a little different than– they’re like, here other two or whatever. But I listened to– or I read the book and it’s about a pastor that challenged the church members. For one year, he invited them, anyone who wanted to join, to follow the question, asked the question, what would Jesus do before making every single decision in their life, their personal life and their professional life? And then following through to the best of their ability, despite the fear or consequences that that decision might have.

 

And 100 people from the church stayed after and they all took the challenge. And so, you’re reading all these really, even though it’s fictional, it’s really profound. Like, I underline that book as much as any other book because I’m like, wow, this businessman asked that question. He stopped advertising with his two biggest revenue sources because they were tobacco and they were whiskey. And he thought Jesus wouldn’t promote these drugs that were killing people. And then he lost customers, but then look how it turned around. It’s just a profound book.

 

So, this is the journey that I’m on right now. And again, I do not want to preach. In fact, I need to remember when I record the intro to make sure this is not designed to be preaching at all. This is designed to be thought provoking, like for you to be on your own journey and consider what we’re talking about, right, which is, number one, I think it’s important, if we had been raised in another belief system, another religion, we’d have a different set of beliefs based on that religion and we’d be just as convicted that those were the absolute truth. So, where is the disconnect there? Or where is the unity between other people’s beliefs and what they’re aspiring toward with their religion and their beliefs and their spiritual journeys that they’re on? And how might we find unity as opposed to finding separation, as opposed to highlighting our differences? And again, please apply that to politics as well. How might we find the unifying beliefs, the commonalities, as opposed to the differences?

 

So, I’m continuing on this journey. I’m going to continue studying Christ, striving to live my life in alignment with Jesus. But here’s the thing, not because I would argue as many Christians would that this is the one and only right way. And maybe it is, I don’t know, but I don’t know, I don’t have the conviction to tell you that one way is right and the others are wrong, and I actually have more conviction to tell you the opposite, that all ways are different paths to a higher power, and including the people that lived long before Buddha or Muhammad or Jesus came and they were practicing their own belief systems to try to understand God and they thought it was the sun or whatever, right? Like, I’m trying to zoom out for all of us and realize that we’re all just striving to make meaning of this thing called life and what’s outside of this thing that we can see and touch and smell and taste called life. Is there something greater? What is this higher power that we call God, that 7 out of 8 billion people, 7 billion out of the 8, believe that there is some thing, some religion, some spirit outside of us?

 

And the last thing I’ll say, I want to close with something that Jon Vroman just shared with me the other day when we met at our Front Row Dads’ breakfast about our friend John Ruhlin, who passed away. So, we’re all very close friends. And in fact, we’ve been trying to get John Ruhlin to move here for years. We’ve all been trying everything in our power to get him to move to Austin so that he could be with us and he didn’t move here. But we were talking about him at our Front Row Dads’ breakfast, which was two days after John passed. It was last week. And Jon Vroman shared something beautiful. He said, “John was one of my best friends,” he said, “and I’ve been really having a difficult time. And I’ve been crying a lot, and I’ve been smiling a lot, looking at our pictures and reading text messages and just thinking of what a light he was in this world and in our lives.” And he said, “I only saw John in person since we left Cutco.” That’s how we all met at Cutco 20 years ago. But he said, “Since we left Cutco,” which was 15 years ago or 10 years ago, he said, “I only saw John Ruhlin–” so, this is John Vroman talking. His family saw John Ruhlin once or twice a year for the last decade. And he said, “So, I realized that John Ruhlin, my love for him, it didn’t exist by being in his physical presence every day. It existed by his spirit living within me, by the thought of him, by the memories, the energy, who he was as a person, and just allowing his spirit to infiltrate my own,” Jon said, “that was how Ruhlin existed for me.” And he said, “And I realize nothing changed in that regard.”

 

And of course, we talked about how heartbroken we are for his family because that’s very different when you’re used to seeing dad every day, like that’s very different. But for us that didn’t see him every day but thought of him very often and talked to him on the phone once a week, and when we did see him, it was the highlight of our year because he was such a light and such a sweet, beautiful human being who, by the way, was very religious, very convicted in his spirituality as a Christian. And Jon sharing that that his spirit still exists was really comforting for me. And so, whether you consider yourself to be religious, spiritual, or completely agnostic atheist and not in the realm of anything religious or spiritual, consider that example as evidence of what spirit might be in our lives, that the spirit of someone we lost exists as our thoughts and feelings and emotions, and the energy, the memory of that person can generate within us, within our consciousness.

 

And then you can translate that into a religion or into spirituality that the Spirit of God or what, in Christianity, is called the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of Jesus, meaning, when you ask yourself that question, what would Jesus do? And you actually get present to who he was and the values he lived by. And again, I am just using Jesus as an example. It’s really the only avatar that I have close enough experience with to use as an example. But for you, it could be Buddha or it could be Muhammad, or it could be your grandmother, right? But to consider that spirituality isn’t just the dogma of religion. It is your connection to spirit, whatever that is for you.

 

All right, friends, I love you so much. I hope I didn’t offend anyone during this episode. I hope it was enlightening in some way for you to not take what I say as the word, but as an invitation to find your own truth while examining other people’s truth and finding the common themes, common beliefs the unifying universal spirit that connects all of us. I love you so much, and I will talk to you next week.

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