Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 284 Jeff Chu - Cultivating Good Soil: What Composting Reveals About Transformation
In a world that often feels overwhelming, where systemic challenges can paralyze us into inaction, I sat down with Jeff Chu - a journalist, preacher and storyteller who understands that transformation happens through small, beautiful acts of grace. Jeff's journey is anything but ordinary. From the bustling newsrooms of Time and Fast Company to the contemplative acres of Princeton's farminary, he discovered profound wisdom in the most unexpected place: a messy, rotting compost pile. There, amid liquefying spinach and decomposing vegetables, Jeff learned that death and resurrection aren't just theological concepts - they're living, breathing realities happening beneath our feet. Jeff, like all of us navigating this world, has every reason to be cynical. Instead, he chooses love. He chooses curiosity. He invites us to channel our anger not into destruction, but into small, ordinary graces that can fundamentally reshape our world. In this conversation, we'll explore how we might move from transactional relationships - with land, with each other, with God - to something more beautiful. We'll talk about rest, about poetry, about seeing each other as God's beloved creation. So join us, open your heart, and prepare to be transformed by a radical vision of grace.
Jeff Chu is an award-winning journalist and editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure. He is the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me? and the co-author, with the late Rachel Held Evans, of the New York Times bestseller Wholehearted Faith. Chu is a former Time staff writer and Fast Company editor whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Modern Farmer. In his weekly newsletter, “Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer,” Chu writes about spirituality, gardening, food, travel, and culture. He lives with his husband, Tristan, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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And the reason I say small and ordinary is because at a time when things are so overwhelming systemically, it can feel like we need big and revolutionary gestures, and we probably do, but I can't pull that off on my own. I don't know how to do that. I'm not a big revolutionary. I'm just a small person, but I can do small and beautiful things, and you can do small and beautiful things, and we can all do small and beautiful things. And I think the cumulative effect of small and beautiful things will not be so small you music.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus in a world that often feels overwhelming, where systemic challenges can paralyze us into inaction. I sat down with Jeff Chu, a journalist, preacher and storyteller who understands that transformation happens through small, beautiful acts of grace. Jeff's journey is anything but ordinary, from the bustling newsrooms of time and Fast Company to the contemplative acres of Princeton's firminary, he discovered profound wisdom in the most unexpected place, a messy, rotting compost pile there, amid liquefying spinach and decomposing vegetables, Jeff learned that death and resurrection aren't just theological concepts, they're living, breathing realities happening beneath our feet. Jeff, like all of us navigating this world, has every reason to be cynical. Instead, he chooses love. He chooses curiosity. He invites us to channel our anger, not into destruction, but into small, ordinary graces that can fundamentally reshape our world. In this conversation, we'll explore how we might move from transactional relationships with land, with each other, with God, to something more beautiful. We'll talk about rest, about poetry, about seeing each other as God's beloved children. So join us, open your heart and be prepared to be transformed by a radical vision of grace. Here is my conversation with Jeff. Chu, Jeff, welcome to shifting culture. So excited to have you on it's a pleasure to have you here. So thanks for joining me. Thanks for the invitation. I really love your book. Good soil. We're going to dive into some of the farm and what we could learn from the soil and some of your story. I would love to start then, because we're talking about farm and area, and we're going deep into that. Let's talk a little bit about roots and your roots. Where did you come from? What shaped you growing up, and what was your your family of origin? Like?
Jeff Chu:Well, that's a lot of questions. We could talk for an hour about roots. I know I was born in California. My family is from Hong Kong, and I was shaped deeply by my grandparents, because while we were living in California till I was nine, every day when my parents were working, I would be with my grandparents if I wasn't in school, so we'd get up early, get dropped off at my grandparents house by seven, have breakfast there, do morning devotions, and then they would walk my sister and me to school, pick us up at the end of The day, and spend until dinner time, sometimes until after dinner time, with my grandparents. So I was raised in a very traditional Chinese environment. Neither of my grandparents spoke English well, so it was all Cantonese. My grandfather, this is my dad's dad was a Baptist preacher and a Bible college professor and my grandmother was when they were living in Hong Kong. She was a primary school Bible teacher. She could not teach once they immigrated to the US, so she ended up working in a sweatshop, which was before I was born. But yeah, that was the environment I was brought up in a lot of Bible, a lot of church, a lot of my grandparents, time and energy. So
Joshua Johnson:as you were were growing up and you were trying to figure out really who you were, where were you finding some identity and belonging throughout your childhood, as you tried to figure out who you were in this world, well,
Jeff Chu:belonging is such a challenging thing, right? I don't think kids have clear concept of what belonging means. You just know if it's there and you know if it's not there. So I'll tell you a funny story. When I was maybe in second grade, we're playing in on the playground at school, and I remember very clearly. I knew that my parents were voting for Ronald Reagan, and I knew that none of the other kids, at least from what was said in the sandbox, none of the other kids had parents who were voting for Ronald Reagan, and it's one of my earliest memories of a disconnect between me and other people. Then in third grade, I made a choice. So that was kind of lack of belonging that I fell into. But in third grade, there was the lack of belonging that I chose, which was that during the Halloween parade at school, when all the kids were wearing costumes, I refused to wear a costume, and so I just marched in my regular clothes, and I think that was hard for my mom, especially, she wanted me to fit in, and I just didn't care. So I think I've always had a little bit of a strange relationship with belonging. I want to do my own thing sometimes, and I also want to know, like any other human, that I belong I always felt a deep sense of belonging with my grandmother. I think she is the person who taught me the most, through her example and through our relationship, what unconditional love looked like throughout my childhood. It's her presence that most define unconditional love for me, and that that was especially important to me, given that once we moved away from my dad's job when when I was nine, suddenly I found myself living in places where there weren't as many people who looked like me and who didn't come from the same cultural background, and I think for a lot of immigrants kids, that tension between the culture at home and the culture outside the home is a really tricky thing to navigate, and it's something that often marks us for life, because we're living in between two cultures.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah. Yeah. So what was that experience like, as you are now, in a place of rugged individualism in America, and juxtaposed to, you know, Chinese culture, which is a collectivist culture, you're a part of a whole, and your identity is found in the whole in America, I think our identity is really found in the individual, and it's the individual way. What was that like navigating those two tensions?
Jeff Chu:There's a Chinese tradition that if your kid is praised for, say, being smart or well behaved, you never accept the compliment. So if someone said to me, because I was a pretty good student. Oh, you're so smart. And my mom was within your shot, she would immediately say, No, he's not. And that is rooted in a superstition that praise makes a child a target for evil spirits. Well, you could say, well, your family was Christian. You shouldn't believe in those kinds of superstitions. And my parents would have agreed with that, except these superstitions are culturally ingrained, so even if we didn't necessarily believe that I would become a target for an evil spirit, that habit is still there, right? And the broader understanding is that you should never really stick out in the crowd. That's just not done in Chinese culture. Traditionally, it's unseemly, it's prideful, it's all these things that a good person does not do. I was brought up, for instance, to believe that I would be successful if I brought honor to my family. There was never any sense that I should do what made me happy or follow my dreams? Those notions were not a part of my upbringing, and to this day, I still struggle, right? I'm on your podcast because I'm supposed to be promoting a book. That's what my publisher tells me. I'm supposed to be selling something, and I'm terrible at it, because the culture I was brought up in tells me you're just supposed to blend into the background. There are little voices that say to me, Well, surely there's something better for people to spend money on than your book. And I would send everybody a free copy if I could, and just pay for them all myself. But I can't do that. So it's this tension that's ongoing even now, right? I exist for the good of others. My maternal grandmother one of her proudest days, she passed away about six years ago, one of her proudest days was when I came back to Hong Kong and I gave her $100 bill because I was finally showing that I had made something of myself enough that I could help financially support her. So my professional success was really about her. For security as a senior, right? It wasn't about me or what my title was at work, or whether I was winning any awards. It was about what I could do for the family, and that was just drilled into me, never in words, always through actions.
Joshua Johnson:How did so somebody as an adult as you you started working as a journalist. You're successful journalists. You seem to have a pretty good trajectory and career going. What made you step back a little and say, this is maybe time I want to go to seminary and I want to go that direction. What made you get to this place where it says, Hey, Seminary is maybe my next step.
Jeff Chu:So I worked in journalism for full time in London and New York for about 15 years, and I started my career at Time Magazine. Worked at Conde Nast in that building that is full of gorgeous people who work at Vogue, and I worked at an uncool magazine, but we were still sharing elevators, and they were judging my clothes. And then I worked at a business magazine called Fast Company. When I got to Fast Company, it was this scrappy underdog. And the beautiful thing about scrappy underdogs is the rest of the world has no expectations about what you can do. So I got to write these fantastic stories about innovation in poverty alleviation, for instance, right? And that was really feeding my spirit. I had a tortured relationship with church at the time. Wasn't really going to church. Didn't really feel like there was a place for me in the church, mainly because of my sexuality, but I could find some of that sense of meaning and purpose through, for instance, going to Rwanda and exploring stories about people who had overcome great adversity and were Making a better future and finding some sort of hope. How does a mom find hope in the aftermath of a genocide for her kids, for her village? At a certain point, fast, company started winning awards and doing really well, and people started actually paying attention to the magazine and the priorities of that magazine started to shift. Suddenly, we could get interviews with celebrities who we couldn't get interviews with before, and the kind of work that I wanted to do wasn't really a priority. As the magazine was changing, I was getting assigned stories about fashion designers, stories about rich folks, and those can be good stories. I enjoyed reporting some of those stories, but it wasn't feeding my soul in the same way. And I remember this one day getting to work early and staring out from the 29th floor this Manhattan skyscraper and thinking, wow, we are just making a luxury product that nobody needs. I didn't get into journalism to make a luxury product that nobody needs. I wanted to tell stories that mattered and that really gnawed at me. But of course, there's not a direct line from that sense of needing meaning and purpose and seminary, right? That's not an automatic path. I think seminary was really a calling more than anything else. I don't know how to explain it in logical terms, because it doesn't make sense. Why would someone in their late 30s pivot from a successful journalism career in New York City to studying theology, the only way I can make sense of it is by saying that I was called to it. Why I didn't know even when I applied to seminary and got into seminary, and I'm really lucky that I have a spouse who is willing to go along for that adventure. Because I think folks who have experienced a real sense of calling know that it can come with great personal risk and cost. I'm
Joshua Johnson:very, very thankful my wife has letting me do some things and shift and change right now in this year, and you know, there's no money right now, and anything that I'm doing, and she's like, go for it. We have a year try to figure it out, and we're going to make it work. And it's just a beautiful blessing to have a spouse, to be able to do that with you and for you, what a what a gift that is. You got on to the campus at Princeton, and you then saw this, this place called the farm, and area as you started, I want to take, take me into the the time where you first got onto the farm in your first class. Talk a little bit about the compost pile as you walk into it. What were you thinking? What were. Thinking about a a seminary class on the farm in this program, and what that was like. I
Jeff Chu:guess the first thing I should make clear is I didn't have any gardening experience. I didn't grow up on a farm. I grew up in cities and suburbs, so the only reason I ended up taking this class my first semester at the farming area is because, I think, pretty wisely recognized that after so many years of not being in school, I would need a break from a regular classroom. And there was this class that showed up in the course catalog, and it said it was on a farm. And I thought, oh, it might be nice to be outside. Great. That was it. That was the extent of my thought process, right? And we go out to the farm, and it is a super hot September day in New Jersey. I'm completely overdressed inappropriately. And we go to the compost pile, and our professor, Nate Stuckey, tells us to start digging. And it's disgusting. There's rotting vegetables. The pile has been added to recently, but not turned so on top of the pile, you've got moldy fruit and liquefying spinach, and other folks are wearing shorts, and I'm just horrified because you can see the splatter from the rotting vegetables on their legs. So I was actually really thankful to be overdressed, but it was a wild way to start, and given that first experience with the compost pile, I don't entirely understand how I fell in love with the farm, but I did, and it became one of the most formative educational experiences of my life to learn that the compost pile tells a story of life, Death and Resurrection, and to understand that there are processes beyond us that we have so little control over. We get to participate if we want to right. The compost pile is just a picture of what actually happens in nature, on the forest floor or elsewhere in the environment, where things that have died break down and then create the conditions for new life. What a wonderful sermon. I think that's what I fell in love with, is the hope that is written into creation that doesn't depend on us.
Joshua Johnson:What was happening inside of you at that time when you started to think about and realize the compost pile, death, new life, resurrection. Is there something that you were going, Wow, I had some expectations coming into this that maybe need to go to the compost pile to then regenerate into new life, to get some good soil into myself. I
Jeff Chu:definitely had expectations of seminary. I thought this was gonna be all day, every day, folks talking about God and love and hope for the world, and what I found was a messy collection of humans that are just as flawed as the messy collection of humans outside the seminary gates. And that was super disappointing, right? There were moments where I wanted to look at my classmates and say, you want to be pastors. Are you kidding? Because I didn't have any plan to become a pastor after I graduated from seminary, my plan was to become a better writer on religion and on things that mattered, right? So I was looking at all these other folks who were on the professional track, because I went to Princeton seminary, which is PC USA seminary. So these were folks destined for some of the tall steeple Presbyterian churches around the US. And I found ego and jockeying for position and theological peacocking in class and currying favor with professors, and it was super discouraging. And at the same time, I had to recognize those same impulses in myself, the farm, the compost pile, was the place that became my centering. I could go and turn the compost, sit by the pond, at the farm, stop pointing fingers at other people. Recognize the things in myself that were not good, that were not fruitful, the desire. To get an A for the sake of getting an A, as opposed to learning right, the longing to be seen and legitimized, even though my career path was different, all those things were going on in me as I was judging my classmates for whatever it was that their ambitions were and the farm doesn't allow you, as any farmer knows, to get ahead of yourself or think of yourself more highly than you ought to, because you are at the mercy of other elements. You don't get to control the rain and the wind. You're dependent on the health of the soil. You need to collaborate with other beings. There is a humility, and the word humility comes from humus, right, soil, grounding. These are all interrelated concepts and and I'm so thankful for the farm, because it kept me humble, it kept me grounded in truths beyond myself, and it forced me to recognize my flaws, as well as some of the ways in which I've been blessed. And
Joshua Johnson:admittedly, you write your in your book for you, I think some of the way that you approached seminary and some of the way growing up you approach God was transactional. If I do this, I expect to get something out of this right. And I think we all come in at some points in our lives as transactional relationships. And God doesn't have a transactional relationship with us, but we think he does people sometimes, hopefully, they don't have transactional relationships with us, but sometimes they do. How did you recognize transactional relationships with even with the lands of the farm, of expecting to get something from it and not just see it as it was so
Jeff Chu:the farming area is 21 acres in New Jersey. The fact that I'm calling it a farm already reduces it to what it does for people, right? Because those 21 acres are land. It's an ecosystem that exists apart from any human. But for the last I don't know, five centuries or so, because I think it was first plowed over in the 1600s so maybe 400 I'm not good at math. 400 years or so, we've defined it as agriculturally productive land. That's what it does for humans, but the land is more than that. The land is also habitat for groundhogs and deer. Before the British conquered New Jersey and took over that land, the Lenape had a more, I would say, interdependent relationship with the land. There was oak and hickory forest that would have been on it occasionally, there would be controlled burns so that they could clear sight lines for hunting as well as make space more fruitful space for berries, for instance. But the land has a life of its own. The land will do what it does. The forest will change if humans step back and allow that to happen. So I think for me, part of building my mutual relationship with the land had to do with learning about it. What is it apart from what it can do for me? And if I can do that for a piece of land, maybe I can start to do that for other people. Maybe I can start to do that for the other places I encounter in my life and the other creatures. My husband and I went on a hike two days ago, and we heard song of a bird that I didn't recognize. And I had to ask the guide who was taking us on this hike, oh, what was that? And she said it was a, I think it was a red bellied woodpecker, and it was such a beautiful and sharp and pronounced song, and I had to recognize that song wasn't for my benefit. The woodpecker was living its life, calling out, waiting for another response for another woodpecker. I get to bear witness to it. I get to pay attention and appreciate it, but it doesn't exist for me, and I wonder sometimes how this world might be different if we saw what surrounds us, our neighbors, in every sense of the word, and I don't just mean our human neighbors, if we saw those things as not existing for our sake, what might change?
Joshua Johnson:How do we move into that direction? That there is mutuality, that we are connected, that there were connected with the land and that and the creatures were connected with the with the forests and the gardens, we're connected with the humans around us and the humans around the world. Like, how do we move into that posture? Of of paying attention, recognizing that, and saying, Hey, you are good for who you are or what you are, and not what you just do for me. So
Jeff Chu:I'm reformed, even though I grew up Baptist, right? That that's a part of my faith. Story is that eventually, when I came back to church, I ended up in the pews of a Reformed Church, and reformed theology is based on gratitude, and that gratitude is rooted in grace. I think Grace is the beginning of all of this. I am not responsible for the goodness that surrounds me. I didn't create it. I get to receive it, and when I stop and recognize that so much of my very existence is rooted in grace, that completely changes my perspective. I realized, as I was studying the compost pile, for instance, that all this is happening beyond me, right? I didn't put the worms in the ground. I didn't activate the bacteria, and then I stopped to think about my own body, which I have a frustrated relationship sometimes, especially as I get older. I don't tell my heart to keep beating. I don't have to focus on opening my mouth to take a bite of food. I don't have to keep my blood pumping through my veins and my arteries. I'm a recipient of grace just by virtue of the fact that I'm I'm alive. I didn't do anything to orchestrate any of this so so there have been situations where I'll talk about grace, and people will say, Well, that's because you have a relatively stable life and you don't have to worry about X, Y and Z. And my response to that is always, anyone who is breathing is a recipient of grace. When we realize how much grace surrounds us, I think that Kindles a sense of wonder that can compel us to pay attention. I hope it does anyway that
Joshua Johnson:is beautiful. I hope that we can recognize that there is Grace surrounding us at all times that we could receive it. There is a relationship with the land, with the farm, where there's work to be done, there's weeding to be done, there's tending, there's watering, there's there's things that that we need to do with with the land to produce something so that we can receive the good gifts that the land brings. How do we not move into this place in in all of our lives of striving so that we can get from, like take from, but know that we actually have to work in relationship with what's that? That subtle difference for us to not just be strivers in our life to take but work with the lands and how do we, like reorient our our what good work looks like? I
Jeff Chu:think part of it has to do with balance and harmony, right? So I'm taking you into the realm of Chinese philosophy, because harmony and balance are foundational in Chinese thinking, everything in moderation. Yes, you work hard, but you also recognize what forces are beyond you. And at this point in my life, I feel really fortunate that my understanding of some of these traditional Chinese principles resonates with what I believe as a Christian Right, and one of the aspects of balance and harmony that I learned about at the farm is the Sabbath. I took a class called soil and Sabbath. And look, full disclosure, I am terrible at resting. I'm an immigrant kid who was taught by his parents that you have to work twice as hard to achieve just as much as your average American, right? And I'm sure there are others out there who were told the same thing rest is not something that my parents really taught me about so I'm in this class on soil and Sabbath, and the professor does something that seems kind of weird for a master's program in theology, right? He's like, Oh, we're gonna reread the creation story. Well, we all know the creation story six days, you know, the whole order of things. I would guess that most of the students could recite it, not word for word, maybe, but we've got the days down right. And then on the seventh day, God rested. And after we go through the familiar steps, the professor says, You. How much work has humanity done when they arrive at the day of rest? And I had never noticed before. Humans were created on day six. Their very first full day of existence is rest. They didn't earn rest. They didn't earn Sabbath. Their lives begin with rest and grace. So if that is the template, shouldn't that reorient our relationship with work and rest? That's our beginning, not our ending. God earned it for us. We didn't earn it. I didn't realize that. I didn't ever think that's how the pattern went. I think that's transformative. I would like it to be more transformative than it actually has been in my life, right? I can talk a good game about it all day long, but implementing that, believing that rest is our beginning, is much harder, but I see now, with all that's going on in the world, right, with the anxiety and the chaos, there's this pressure to do more. Speak Out, act and yes, that is all right and good for the sake of justice, for the sake of the vulnerable, for the sake of people who need help, but we can't maintain the pace if we don't begin from a place of groundedness and rest, there is no way to keep up the momentum. We will be exhausted if we don't recognize that humanity needs to begin from a place of rest. Such
Joshua Johnson:a good thing that we begin with rest, that we do not end with rest, and that is a totally different relationship with the way that we live our lives, the way that we encounter the earth and each other. It's beautiful. As I was reading your book, I was struck when you were talking about Chinese classical poetry a little bit, and it just reminded me of Ephesians two when a lot of times it's it's translated to your God's workmanship, or handiwork. But I think the Greek is poem, and some people translate it, you're God's poetry. For me, when I think of God's workmanship, I feel like sometimes I could be a machine or a cog in a machine, that I'm the one that's doing the work. But when it's translated poetry, it's a it's a totally different connotation for me. What is that for you? Then, if you take what you've learned with classical Chinese poetry and what you've brought out. How do we see ourselves through the lens of poetry and the way that we
Jeff Chu:were created? I've never heard that translation before, and now I want to go back and look at it and think about it, because the mischievous side of me says there's also bad poetry. So what do we do with that? But you're God's poetry. Yeah, right, okay, so let's assume God only writes good poetry. The thing about poetry, though, is it's relational, right? The poet doesn't get to define how the poem is received through the lens of another person's life experience and social location. The words might ring true or they might not. Song lyrics, right? Song lyrics are just another form of poetry, and every songwriter knows, probably to great frustration, that songs can be completely misunderstood. People can ascribe meaning to them that is absolutely not there. Anyone who's preached a sermon knows the same thing, right? You stand at the church door and someone thanks you something for something that you absolutely did not say, are you gonna try to make your claim, or do you just trust that the spirit is gonna do something good with that. So the concept of poetry is interesting to me also, because not every poem is for everyone. They can serve a purpose for particular audiences and bless them and enrich them and point them to beauty. And for other people, it's just not there, and that's okay. There are very few poems that have that universality to them, where everybody's like, Oh, wow. Even right, biblical poetry, 150 Psalms, most people have a different favorite. Different Psalms will rise to relevance in people's lives at different moments. I think the same is true if we think of humanity as as God's poetry very different kinds. I want to try to appreciate the goodness, even if it doesn't personally Delight me. Maybe that's one of the challenges when we think of other people as God's poems. Yes, sometimes
Joshua Johnson:it's really hard to see the goodness.
Jeff Chu:Bad poems. Bad poems, really bad poems.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, it's true. You know, in your life, you have been hard. You've been pressed on all sides and parts of your life. And what I have seen from you, if I've listened to you, know, some sermons, or listened to you, if I've read your writing, for me, you exude love and belonging. That's like, that's what comes out of you. Is love and belonging. How did your experience then shape you into this place of getting you to a place where you do exude love and belonging where, really, I'm just in your life, you could have come out cynical and bitter.
Jeff Chu:Maybe you should fact check with my husband. He could tell you, I do not always exude love and belonging. There is an element of fake it till you make it right. Like, yeah, but I do think we all have those layers right. And I ask myself, who do I want to be given, what public places I inhabit? And yeah, there are some cynical and angry things that should be reserved for my text messages with my closest friends, right? That should never be on social media, and then there are other things that I will post, right? I think we all have to calibrate that way and have those spaces where we can let off steam. So I absolutely do not want anyone to think that I am some kind of weird saint, because I'm not. I will say part of it for me, as someone who has worked in journalism and has told stories, I do think we have more power than we sometimes acknowledge. And by we, I mean anybody who uses social media to shape the story that we're telling the world. Social media is a platform, podcast, a platform journalism, a platform Who do you want to be? How do you want to show up when you're telling your story to folks out there, whether it is 10 people on Facebook or 500 or 5000 or 5 million, and what I decided, relatively early on, after a couple of really egregious mistakes when I was a journalist in New York City, was that I don't want to be the bitter, cynical, angry person who is litigating personal conflict in full view of a broader audience. I don't want to be that person, and part of the way I learned that was when I and a colleague of mine, we were both editors at Fast Company. We had a series of Twitter exchanges that were very thinly veiled swipes at another colleague, and we got caught by our boss, and it was painful and embarrassing, and I absolutely made mistakes doing things to hurt a colleague in a very public way. And you get called into the boss's office and you have choices, are you going to double down, or are you going to say I don't want to be that person, even if my grievances are legitimate, even if I felt like he was getting praise that he didn't deserve and I wasn't right? I don't want to be that person. So who do I want to be? And honestly, one thing I found is that it's also a survival strategy, because I saw people I cared about who, yes, they were fighting the good fight, right? They were saying good things, and they were getting slaughtered on social media for it, but they were saying things in a way that was combative and that occasionally might have veered into character attack on other people, and they just kept getting drawn into these conflicts that weren't super productive, because nobody came out looking good. I realized that when I responded with grace and curiosity, the trolls were actually super uninterested in those things, and I ended up having productive conversations with a few people because they were expecting attack. They weren't expecting Wait, what do you mean by that? Tell me more. I think Tell Me More can be three of the most beautiful words in the English language, because they overcome defenses, if you mean them genuinely, and they invite the other into relationship, I will tell you I have relationships with some people, for instance, who absolutely do not believe that my marriage is. Holy or sacred or even legitimate. We have respectful relationships. I genuinely feel loved by them, and we have those relationships because we were willing to say to the other in mutuality. Tell me more. We know what our theological convictions are, we don't need to sit down and litigate them, and I don't feel the need to persuade them either. All it takes sometimes is to say, Tell me more. And I also use that sometimes to check myself, because I can feel that sense rising up in me. I have to defend myself. And the question I have sometimes when we get into that defensive crouch is, what, what am I? Why am I defending myself? What is that defensiveness for? If I believe in a God who is love, and if I believe that love is greater than any other love, why would I give an opponent's hate more power in my life than God's love. So if God loves that other person, egregious as their convictions might be to me, who am I to try to out shout god, that's when I'm at my best, best self. That's like 10% of the time. Okay, 10% of
Joshua Johnson:the time. We need more of that 10% in our day and age and our culture today, when everybody is on the defensive and everybody is angry and everybody wants is in their own little camps, and my way is the right, your way is wrong. We need some of that. Tell me more. We need some more of grace and curiosity and that posture. Have you found any of that as you've now are traveling the world, you're writing and you're seeing cultures and people. What have you found around the world that could speak to us, angry Americans? One
Jeff Chu:of the sad things I've actually found as I've been traveling, I was in New Zealand last month reporting for travel and leisure I'm an editor at large at Travel and Leisure magazine. Is that a lot of the rhetoric that Americans have been deploying has now because of social media and for other channels, then exported overseas, right? So I'll give you a little anecdote. I was spending time with this woman who's looking at these mountains in New Zealand. She lives on the coast. Once upon a time, that was all forest right down to the water where she lives. Now, it's these stark and gorgeous barren mountains, and we think it's so beautiful, these cliffs plunging into the ocean, that's not what it was when the British arrived, they chopped down all the trees. So she wants to restore the ecosystem. She wants to plant native shrubs and trees, and she's going around her neighborhood, talking to neighbors, trying to rally support for restoring the ecosystem, imagining what the air would sound like if the native birds came back, right? And she knocks on one door and her neighbor says to to her, I don't want anything to do with that woke bullshit. And she's like, I just want to plant some trees. But you can see that polarization, right, and what that neighbor might have been reading into this invitation to persist his pain in this effort, everything signifies something more. And I think that's really hard, and I think it's really dangerous. I guess what I'm hoping for is that we'll be angry about the right things, that we'll have the self awareness to understand why we're hurting, because I think a lot of these responses are rooted in some kind of fear and hurt, and then turn whatever energy we have toward small and ordinary graces. And the reason I say small and ordinary is because at a time when things are so overwhelming systemically, right? It can feel like we need big and revolutionary gestures, and we probably do, but I can't pull that off on my own. I don't know how to do that. I'm not a big revolutionary I'm just a small person, but I can do small and beautiful things, and you can do small and beautiful things, and we can all do small and beautiful things. And I think the cumulative effect of small and beautiful things will not be so small at all. I think the transformative power of a person who feels well loved, even in tiny moments, is incredibly underestimated. I don't think we have yet tapped the potential of what it might look like if people genuinely felt loved. So if I can do one small thing. Whether it is a text message that I could send in 30 seconds, or a loaf of bread that I could bake and take to a neighbor, or last summer, it was we had a great potato harvest, and I got to share potatoes with friends and folks on my block. If these little things can shift just for a few minutes, someone's sense of belovedness and their place in the world. Why not multiply that by a billion a day, 3 billion a day, and that's not even half the people on the planet. So small, ordinary graces, little acts of mercy. That's all I can hope for, really, because the big stuff is beyond me,
Joshua Johnson:beautiful, and that adds up in incredible ways and beautiful ways, and that has the power to change the world for the better, to see love flourish once again, that love can rewrite the story of Humanity. And I
Jeff Chu:don't want people to think I'm not mad about things, right? I am completely mad about the ways in which people are hurting, right? But how are we going to channel that anger? What are we going to use it for? We have a choice. Is it going to be destructive, or is it going to be constructive? Well, Jeff,
Joshua Johnson:your your book, good soil. Uh, fantastic. I started reading, crying really quickly. He got me. Thank you. I had an English professor in in college, and she's this little ball of energy. She got me like i i loved literature and writing because of her, like she just awakened that in me, and she just tells the story of her reading a book and wanting to throw it across the room because it was so good. And I was like, who does that? There's no way that I would ever feel that way about a book. And your book made me want to throw it across the room. It was so good. There's a few books where I start to read and go, I don't think that there's going to be another book this year that is better, and yours is one. Sorry that I'm giving you heaps of praise, but
Jeff Chu:evil spirits are gonna attack.
Joshua Johnson:But the evil spirits are not coming. It's okay. Don't worry about it. I'll throw you down a peg. What hope do you have for your readers, if they would pick up good soil? My
Jeff Chu:hope is that readers would think a little bit about their personal, spiritual compost pile. What is the slow and steady work that you get to participate in, trusting that there are forces beyond you that are working for good? What are the fears that we need to send and I say we, because I need to do this every day. What are the fears that we need to send to the compost pile, and what is the life giving soil that we want to cultivate we get to participate in it? I know that's hard in a consumer culture, right? We just want to buy it. Compost is not convenient. The Good Life is not convenient. We have to make choices, and we have to recognize the grace that comes to meet us in those choices. So my hope is that folks would just be a little more attentive to that. That's
Joshua Johnson:good. I have a couple of real quick questions here at the end. One, Jeff, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Jeff Chu:Oh, never give advice to a 21 year old. What? No. How
Joshua Johnson:do you want to live different if you were 21 I
Jeff Chu:think I would not change my trajectory. As hard as it has been, I am the person I am now because of what I went through. And a lot of it sucked, and now I am just starting to be grateful for it. So yeah, if I could say to my 20 anything than my 21 year old self, it would just be, keep going. You're more loved than you believe. But I also know that 21 year old would never have believed
Joshua Johnson:it. Yeah, that's right, anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend
Jeff Chu:we are watching in our house the night agent, which is on Netflix, and it is none of the things that I have just been talking about. It is anxiety producing and stressful, and it's a thriller, and it's about evil. I'm waiting for the good so. And then, honestly, we watch HGTV shows. I love hometown and fixer to fabulous, and it's just a steady dose of transformation, human stories, the spaces we inhabit. How can we create beauty? Yeah, that's what we're watching, nice.
Joshua Johnson:How can people go out and get good soil anywhere you would like to point people to? How can they find some of your stuff?
Jeff Chu:Good soil is available at all. Good bookstores. Bookshop.org, is a great place. Your local indie bookstore is a great place. Your local library is an excellent place. Support libraries,
Joshua Johnson:that's great. Well, go out and get good soil is fantastic, as I already said, Jeff, thank you for this conversation. It was beautiful to actually see what it looks like to go and be like the compost pile and to all the the dirty, messy, ugly things in our lives can actually be ground up into a place that brings about new life and good soil, and that we can see goodness and mercy in this world, that we could use our anger for good and channel it into a place where it moves into a place of Tell me more and grace and belonging and love instead of retribution and revenge and ugliness and so Jeff, I loved it. Thank you so much. It was fantastic pleasure.
Jeff Chu:Thank you.
