Voice of the Heart: Finding God in a Noisy World with Greg Pai

In this episode of Hope Unlocked, Kristin Kurtz sits down with author and publisher Greg Pai to explore a powerful testimony of transformation. From growing up in poverty in the Bronx to achieving worldly success, Greg shares how deep depression and disconnection ultimately led him and his wife to surrender their lives to Jesus. Together, they discuss spiritual discernment, spiritual warfare, and Greg’s “Voice of the Heart” framework—learning to recognize God’s gentle whisper amid the noise of culture, media, and daily distractions. This conversation offers practical biblical insight for hearing God’s voice, breaking free from limiting influences, finding purpose, and taking faithful next steps in today’s complex world.

Greg's contact info:

Email - gregpai@voiceoftheheartbooks.com

Greg's book:

Voice of the Heart: The Battle For Your Purpose, Peace, and Passion

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

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Welcome And Meet Greg Pye

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Welcome to the Hope Unlocked podcast. I'm Kristen Kurtz, your host. I pray this episode is like a holy IV of hope for your soul. Please help me welcome Greg Pye to the show. I'm so excited to have him here today. We just got to know each other like super fast before I hit record. And he is going to be such a joy to you guys today. So before we get into it, would you just be open to sharing a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Yes. Thank you, Kristen. And I hope I live up to that introduction.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

It's going to be amazing.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

I'm very excited about this. So first of all, I want to thank you again and thank your audience because time is precious. It's really all we have at the end of the day. And I want to make sure that it's well spent with this conversation. So I I think I promised you earlier that I would give you, you know, my I could talk about my life for for hours on end, but I but I would I think there's one sound bite. And maybe it will resonate with your audience. My life was a think of a think of a puzzle box, a puzzle with a box with no cover on it. If you've ever gotten one of those.

Growing Up Poor And Isolated

SPEAKER_00 2:14

I was raised in poverty in the Bronx, New York, single parent, diversified background across race, religion, culture, very complex, living in poverty. But then my mother marries a doctor who was from India, adding additional diversity and complexity. And we moved to New Jersey, and my life changes financially. And I end up being able to have things that I didn't have before. Not that that really mattered, but in in this world, we think it does.

SPEAKER_03 2:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

But and and I was, you know, I started off as kind of a semi-normal child, but as I grew up, I found that I was very much isolated from the world. So because I was raised in in a very poor neighborhood, my mother was very protective. And we lived with my grandparents, and my only companion was my uncle who was suffering from Down syndrome and lived with us. But there was an interesting, it was interesting because the relationship, you know, the world looks at people that have a quote-unquote disability. I don't ever call it a disability, I call it an ability that God hasn't shown that particular person or the world what that gift is so ultimately supposed to manifest. But for me, he was the most important part person in my life, besides my mother, because uh my the role modeling and the sort of interplay with him, I used to read to him, so I started reading at a very early age. I used to pretend with him, so I started creating my imaginary world that I lived in that was separate and apart from the world that everyone else lives in, which is filled with noise. So because of that, I started seeing patterns and recognizing patterns that others didn't that would ultimately yield where I am today. So, you know, fast forward, you know, I had difficulty in school. I was very smart, but school was the educational system I realized was not built for me. And so I ended up going to, I actually was the one of the youngest, I think the youngest attendee at Berkeley College of Music. I went when I was 14 to a summer program, and I was an accomplished penist at that point. And then photography was a passion, but then I went to I wanted to go into music, but my parents wanted me to do something professional. So I went to University of Maryland for engineering and I bounced around. I couldn't get, I never graduated from school. But I did end up getting hired by Price Waterhouse. I became a consultant, and then I had careers really at the highest levels of consulting, law, technology, entertainment, finance, and more. And today being an author and a publisher. So I had been blessed, right? But the more I got, and the more acclamation, and the more accreditation, the more money, the more tragedy I experienced in my heart. Like a real brokenheartedness, separation from who I was, and the separation from the world. It was kind of like a trifecta. And I think that that feeling a lot of your audience can resonate with. I think separation from reality, I think separation from what's in what what makes us what brings us joy, and separation from one another is a crisis of humanity. We know, we know, Kristen, and your audience, many in your audience know that Jesus is the truth and the way and the light. But even knowing that, living it is in this world is complex.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

It is, absolutely.

Why School Never Fit Him

SPEAKER_01 5:55

I I want to go back for a second. I know you you mentioned, you know, school. I just want to touch on this really quick because I'm curious. For you, for school, you know, just even let's just say like elementary, middle school, high school, even what was most challenging for you?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Sitting still in a classroom. You know, in my book, I talk about, I don't know that this is the case anymore. My kids are grown, but in my book, I talk about the system of education along with all the other systems of the world and why the chairs are riveted into the desk. So, and and it's kind of like a metaphor for what the system wants to do, which is to keep us pointing forward and not having peripheral vision. I was a student of so many things by the time I was 13, 14 years old, I knew so much about the world. I had known more history about the Vietnam War than people who had served in the war. Things that are now coming out about the CIA's involvement and stuff like that. I've been reading this stuff. I have these books to this day. So a lot of them are out of print, not surprisingly. But I was very wise to the world. So my education was alternative education. And the more that the school uh let me down, the system of education, uh the more I was pushed into this alternative, into these alternative approaches of learning, which by the way, is you know, critical thinking is absent from the educational system today. I speak to a lot of homeschool moms and I tell them the biggest danger of homeschooling is that you take the, you take your kids out of the school only to recreate the same system at home. And and that, you know, they're they're and I listen, I give moms that are doing this, it's mostly moms, but it's also some men too. But I give them a lot of credit because it takes a lot to go and make that move, but they need to understand why they're making that move, and they need to reimagine the system that their kids are put in. So, short answer to your question, I was a round peg in a square hole. Today, I would say 80% of these kids are round pegs with no holes. You know, I have one saying and then I'll I'll be quiet for a second. They teach our kids, they want to teach our kids to think outside of the box, but they haven't taught them how to find the box.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

That's a key right there, isn't it? Right? And were you a talker? Did you get in trouble in school like I did? I got in trouble all the time for talking too much. I asking questions.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Yeah, I did more than that. I was, you know, I was a good, I was a bad good kid. It's kind of like my children. I have four beautiful children, and they never got in trouble, really. I used to tell them, come on, can't you get arrested or something? I mean, come on, you know. Yeah. I mean, my daughter, my daughter who now has a a child, 10 months old, so she's gonna get hers. She now confessed to me, Daddy, you know, I used to sneak out at night because I used to do a test with her. I used to say, Kristen, raise your hands, your arms up over your head. And if I can see your midrift, you gotta go up and change. So I'd send her up and change, but what she didn't tell me was that she had the same top in her pocket.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

So she was up to no good.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, definitely a talker. And I I, you know, I was that energy, I still am. It's so weird. Like we go, my wife and I go out. I'm not a celebrity, I work for celebrities, but I I go out, we go out, and people come up to me. They say, Hey, you know, I just looking at you and your wife, the way you you are together, or the way you look at her, or the way she looks at you, or the way you talk to the to the waitress. And I just had to say, you know, wow, I we get that all the time.

SPEAKER_04 9:53

And you know, that's yeah, well, we all carry this.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

And again, I my the framework that I built is about unleashing that passion in everybody that's a light. It's biblical. I mean, it's not something special to me.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Yeah, yeah. Tell tell us more about this, you know, this framework that you are briefly mentioning here, because I'm sure somebody's like, Wow, wow, I don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

Yeah.

Having Everything Yet Feeling Empty

SPEAKER_00 10:22

So it's called Voice of the Heart. It came. So my wife and I were saved at the same time, the same moment in time. It was 9:16 a.m. Eastern Time on February 12th, 2012, Sunday. We were sitting in the second to last row of a very large church that had two levels. It was the last time we ever sat that far from the front. We now sit in the second row, part of it's because I can't see.

unknown 10:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

And why were we even way in the back in the first place?

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Well, you know, this is what happened. Our youngest son, we were very protective of our kids, but our youngest son had an opportunity to have a sleepover. We didn't want to do it, but something said do it. And I was at a point in my life personally, had like anyone looking at me would say, Boy, I want to be him. He's got everything. He's got a beautiful wife, he's got money, he's got the house, the cars, and everything. And traveling all the time, but I was severely depressed. I mean, I would if if I could, if I had the guts, I would have taken my own life. Really? So, and and you know, even though my wife and I have always had a great relationship, yeah, we were carrying that weight and and I was carrying it and into the relationship. So our son got to sleep over the house that night, and uh this this friend's house. And so we woke up Sunday morning, we're looking at each other, and we're like, what should we do? And I said, you know, let's let's go

Saved In A Single Moment

SPEAKER_00 11:56

to church. She's like, What? I said, Yeah, let's go to church. And she said, Where do you want to go? I said, now the first thought, we got married in a Greek Orthodox church, but her first our first thought was, well, we'll go to this Catholic church down the road. But no, there was this church that somebody told me about that was about 30 minutes away, and I used to live pretty close to, called Hawthorne Gospel Church. And the name gospel in it would frighten anybody that was not a Christian. But I said, you know, there's something crazy about this place. Every time I would drive by it on Sunday, there were cars lined up along the highway. They would, there was no parking. So I said, that's you know, coming from the the the voice of the world, I want that that it was important to me. Hey, it's a church, everybody wants to go there. Probably like a concert, you know, is this, you know, is this you too performing or whatever? Right, right. And so we went and we we walked in, and you know, everybody look, people are like extra nice. That's probably part of the problem with Christianity, is it is people names? Yeah, like like so. I've traveled the world and I have I have wonderful experiences. Like people will come up and invite you to dinner that don't know you or to have tea. It's a very natural thing, but there's something that feels felt feels feels very super natural superficial about a Christian and a non-Christian coming together because and neither one of them are wrong, but the Christian can't wait to share the love of Jesus. And I'm thinking that it's not like that really. It's like when Jesus came up to his disciples and said, Follow me. It was that simple. It was kind of like a demand. Now, if someone said follow me, I probably would have said, Well, where are we going? We're going to get some donuts or something. But but but you know, it felt weird, but it felt warm. So we go and we sat in the back because we felt like the closer we sat, the more weird it would have gotten.

SPEAKER_03 13:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

And at 9 16, the pastor was just kind of it wasn't he wasn't even an altar call. Not that I would have known what that was anyway. Yeah, we just were sitting listening to him, and we got down on our knees and were crying hysterically. And we said, just said, Jesus, you're we're yours. Take us. It was crazy.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

What a like supernatural experience for both of us.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Yeah, as I talked to you about it, I feel like I'm actually leaving my chair. It's that was that bizarre. Yeah, but like what it goes.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

What would you say to each other after that? Like, what we were afraid of both at the same time. Were you looking at each other?

SPEAKER_00 14:39

We were trembling, looking at each other and holding each other like we'd never held each other before. And I felt so relieved. You know, my pastor yesterday, who's an amazing, yeah, we go to we go to Victory Church in Boca Raton now.

SPEAKER_04 14:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

And uh Pastor Donnie is one of the most gifted, one of the most talented pastors I know, is a young guy. But he was talking yesterday about, you know, I love, I love the way he just, because the church is mostly young kids, they're college kids and whatnot, which is great to see. But he was talking yesterday about the chains that you know we we walk around as Christians and we just say, you know what, just loosen the chains a little bit so they're not so tight. He said, No, no, no, no. Break the chains. Break the chains. Yeah, and that's what it felt like. It felt like, oh my goodness. I I probably could have gotten lost everything at that moment. And by the way, that's exactly what started to happen. Everything, well, both through my own and just involuntarily, we started to get weaned of all of that stuff of the world, even our friends. Oh, yeah. I had a couple of buddies that I used to golf with every Sunday, and they had heard, you know, that I was going to this church now, because we started going, and they one of them broke down and said, Please stop going there. It's a cult, and you're gonna change. And he was right about the latter.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

Greg's gonna change. That's too bad. I mean, yeah, but that's really I think it's a fear for people, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:19

You know, I don't think people know it at first when they go, like I like I said to you before, you know, that so that day we were saved, we went to the because it's a big church with a big campus. We went to the bookstore and we bought 60 Bibles. And I always joke with people, I said, you know, we bought all these Bibles because we said, we've got to share this. Because I was I was a giver, but the wrong kind of giver. But I was a giver, and I said, I'm gonna get 60 Bibles and give them out. And I always joke and tell people that we ended up at the end of the day with 61. You know, it's it's an experience. Um, you know, why is it called a testimony? You know, testimony is the most valuable weapon we have against evil, the enemy, and against ourselves, because we need to always go back to that moment and we need to hold on to it for dear life because it is so precious, right?

SPEAKER_01 17:14

It is absolutely I I like to call it reminded to remember, right? So we don't want to go back and like state, we don't want to stay in things. We can go back and be reminded of of that. Can I ask you?

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Like my daughter does, yeah. Yeah, my daughter writes them on and she puts them on the bathroom walls and stuff, and she just yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

You were gonna ask how well I was just gonna ask, how old were you two when you got you know saved radically?

SPEAKER_00 17:40

So we were no, we were we were in our late 40s, I guess. Late 30s, okay or 50, 51, 52.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

I hope I don't lose half your audience now, but you know what? Age is wisdom.

SPEAKER_01 17:55

It is, and don't believe me as Solomon. I honestly, Greg, to be honest with you, like I actually love hearing from the older generations that have had those, you know. I'll just an example. A lady came to me and she's like, Hey, can I be on your podcast? I just wrote my first book. I'm 82. Yes, please, right? So it's all relative. But I did want to what's because that's a long life. That's a long life to live prior to being saved, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:26

Right. And it's also my story, my personal story is woven through the 30 chapters, 500 pages of the master book, which is called Voice of the Heart, which sits at the center. So you were asking me how we got, yeah. So you were asking me how so how did we get to this franchise or this framework. So so this is what happened. We got saved on February 12, 2012. Within three months, I found myself as part of the worship team and leading worship because I was musical and sing and play piano, whatnot. And that was extraordinary. I mean, I'm starting, I'm I'm experiencing life at a whole nother frequency now. And so is my family, so is my wife at least. The kids were still kind of you know meandering. Then within a few months thereafter, through happenstance, like it was really another God, God shot where God was working behind the scenes as he had always been working. Because when you know my full story, like when you read the book, you're like, oh my goodness, this is this is like a novel in and of itself, but it's not there to be the novel, it's there to add the continuity and the substance of why

Africa Missions And Risky Obedience

SPEAKER_00 19:30

I was writing this book. But God had been working. And, you know, when we don't see it, he's working, right? So the next thing I know is my wife and I are in Africa, and we are in Nairobi working with African inland missions, and we're not working with them as part of them. I'm providing all the experience I had and network and resources to help them and their people in the field create businesses that would go mostly into what they call the 1040 window, which is the latitudinal spectrum around the globe where there's about 3 billion people who have not heard the name of Jesus. And the reason for that is because of mostly cultural and political opposition. So we're talking about countries like Libya and uh Morocco, places where people even vacation, right? But and in the Middle East, but walking around and proselytizing or sharing your your testimony is either illegal, culturally taboo, or can get you killed. And so that's what we were doing, yeah, because we had nothing better to do. We wanted to risk our lives. And we were in some, you know, we were actually in Kenya right the week after the Nairobi attack. In fact, it was there's the movie that was our very people we were staying with. Uh that was the family, they had five kids that were in that mall, and the movie the HBO did was about them. And so we've been in many situations, but never scared. Because never scared. Can't be scared to share the gospel. That is the weapon. And and so what happened was we were in Kenya one trip. And you know what's really crazy? You know, in a lot of these countries, like you go to Dubai, which we were many times, there are more Christmas trees. Uh not that that, and believe me, I'm not about the sort of the archetype of commercialism of religion, but in terms of recognizing Christmas, there are more Christmas trees in Dubai than you would find in places in Manhattan, because in this country, you know, we know what you know, God is under attack. So it's an interesting phenomenon. But so we're in Kenya and we're going out in the Masaimara, which is a beautiful place if you want to go safari. But we were actually going to visit a school, a one room schoolhouse, and it was about sunset. And my wife said, Hey, because the Know I'm a photographer too. And and so she said, Hey, look, look at the sunset. It's awesome. There's an acacia tree of all trees for the for your audience that does not necessarily know this. The Ark of the Covenant was built out of acacia. So it's an it's a very precious wood, obviously. I also think that the Ark, Noah's Ark, was acacia. But anyway, an acacia tree, lone acacia tree in the distance, under the sun, with a falling drape of blue and gold and yellow that was majestic. Look, I took a picture of it. It actually is called the Tree of Light. It's been everywhere. It's been in museums

The Tree Of Light Revelation

SPEAKER_00 22:38

around the world, it's been in galleries, and it is an awesome picture. And it is glorious and beautiful. And I shot it, but I didn't create it. I know who created it. That's good. But here's the thing: we're flying back, and I'm looking at this picture in the back of the camera, and it's starting, it goes from wow, this is an amazing picture to this really bothers me. There's something really troubling about this picture, so much so that I started getting like anxiety attacks over it. And then I realized something. It occurred to me that the picture was talking to me, and it said that everything under the sun and everything above it has been created with a cycle of purpose and fulfillment by the creator. Everything has this perfect cycle in resonance with one another, with the totality of creation, except for one thing. Because I saw this tree out there, and this tree is thriving in the desert basically by itself. And at the same time, while being alone, it is glorifying this majestic scenery. And I said, the only thing that falls out of that favor is mankind. Mankind is in a cycle of a disconnected cycle of purpose and fulfillment. It's disconnected. What does the connected view look like? It looks like the Garden of Eden. It looks like what the way God created us, to why He created us and the circumstances under which He created us. And the last command, the last, and I want every Christian to hear this. The last command he gave to Adam and Eve, be fruitful and multiply. He didn't say be fruitful so that you're fruitful and don't worry about multiplying, or don't worry about those you multiply. He said, be fruitful and multiply, because we are here for him. And I realized that there's an attack on humanity and there's an attack on the individual. And it manifested into this invisible war that a lot of people don't want to talk about. And the ones that talk about it don't know quite where the war is. And what this voice of the heart framework does is it categorizes two voices, the voice of the heart and the voice of the world, and what they sound like, how they manifest, and how they're destroying our purpose, peace, and passion. What I call the command centers.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Take us, take us on a little bit of a journey into this framework a little deeper if you're open open to doing that. Would you mind? Yeah. For those who maybe are being awakened right now to like, you know, because I've I feel like I've been awakened over the last decade, especially with systems. Yeah. This is your your channel today to talk on. But you know, I've I've come out of the Lord kept saying cut the cord to the systems years ago to me. Oh it's almost like an umbilical cord. And so would you would you maybe even share some of the revelations that you've received and then take us a little deeper into the framework?

Voice Of The Heart Framework

SPEAKER_00 25:48

So I love that you use that particular illustration of a met of a umbilical cord. That's gonna make sense in a second. So there's the the war or this voice of the heart framework has four foundational building blocks. And by the way, this is not a compromise of scripture, it's a strategy. And you'll hear how, why, and how it's a strategy momentarily. So the the four components include number one, recognition of the invisible war. See, I came to the conclusion, and now this is a couple weeks later, and I started writing notes, hundreds and then eventually thousands of pages in notes, putting my historical experience to, you know, putting glue around it. In fact, what I would say is starting to form the picture on the puzzle box. And I came to this conclusion that there were two types of people on this earth: those who are openly struggling emotionally, mentally, financially, physically, spiritually. We find that most of those or many of those will eventually come to the altar. They will be on their knees and give their life to Jesus. This includes the oppressed, the enslaved, the dependent, you name it. There's certainly no shortage of them. So that's the one group of people. The other group of people is everybody else who doesn't know that they're struggling. So, so it's like you're struggling and you know it, or you're struggling and you don't know it. And I was in both camps, so I know that that is not impossible. And in fact, I know it's pervasive because I've been around, you know, people that read the book will know more about my professional history. I've worked with the biggest names in business and the biggest names in entertainment.

unknown 27:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

And I've been involved in some of the most some paradigm-shifting industries. I've been at the center of them. But you know, it's hard for people to see that war because it assumes that number one, you've got to kind of make a confession or you've got to look in a mirror. And it does. So you gotta look in the mirror, you gotta be honest with yourself. And then you gotta realize that there's an enemy. Now, people, Christians, some Christians will say, okay, the enemy's Satan. It's true, but we also should know that under that guise, Satan has many, he has an army, one-third of heaven, in fact, of the angels. So there's minions, and there's and it, and he operates in uh and he operates under the authority of God, but he does operate and he is pervasive. We're gonna talk about how that is. But you know, I always say, don't I I did a cat podcast not too long ago, and they said, Well, why don't you just name it in the book? And I said, Well, there's a number of reasons because I want non-Christians, I want everybody to read the book, because the book is for everybody. But the other thing is there's something very interesting about naming the enemy. The enemy wants us to name him because when we name him, we limit his pervasiveness, we limit his presence and his impact on our lives. Think of it this way: you get you got you got you got this terrible boss, and so you attribute everything to him. You say, Life stinks because I gotta go to work every day and I work for this boss, and the boss becomes your enemy. But you know what? It distracts you from all of everything else that's led you up to making the decisions to number one, work for that person, stay working for that person. People who knew our abusive relationships should know this that the abuser is not their enemy. In fact, they're just a bunch of victims. We're gonna learn that too. But your your circumstances are far more complex than a single enemy. So I don't like just calling that person or that force a single, because I will tell you too, if I start saying Satan, I've eliminated half the population who doesn't believe in God. You know, so here's the thing there's an enemy, there's a force, whatever you want to call it, there's a force that wants to disrupt our purpose, peace, and passion. And the other part of this that in in this first building block about recognizing invisible war is that people don't necessarily want the bad news while they're consuming it all day and night on TV and other media, they don't want so they always say to me, Greg, whenever you talk about this war, you're such a pessimist. You see the glass as half empty. And you know what I tell them? I tell them, I don't see the glass as half empty or half full. I just don't see the glass. And let me tell you why I don't see the glass. Because I don't believe that we were designed to have a half anything, I believe we were supposed to have an overflowing bucket of life, and that's why I don't go there. Amen. Right? And then the last piece of this, this over here, because I know this is like drinking out of a fire hydrant listening to this, but the the voices. So I did need to, I didn't want to name the enemy, but I needed to sort of classify them. So the enemy is the voice of the world. Who is the voice of the world? It's basically no, I don't need a psychiatrist. Well, maybe I do need a psychiatrist, but I don't need one for voices. We do have voices. We have the voices in our head, the voices in our heart, the subliminal, the subconscious, the conscious. We have voices that speak this. We have people we trust that we listen to, we have political voices that we listen to, that we enslave ourselves to. There are voices of the world, those are all the voices of the world. The alternative is the voice of the heart. How do we know the voice of the heart? Well, as a Christian, we're our pastors will tell us it's the Holy Spirit, and he's correct or she's correct. But what is that? What does that sound like? Well, this is how you know what it is. The voice of the world is loud, and the voice of the heart whispers, because the voice of the heart does not need to compete with the voice of the world.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Say that again.

SPEAKER_00 31:51

The voice of the world is loud. In my children's book series, the voice of the world is the personified by a character called the noise, capital N, capital O, capital I, capital Z, capital E, the noise. The voice of the heart is a whisper. The voice of the heart in the children's series is a character called Heartwell, who has just a worn-out well in the corner, but his bucket's different. He's got a heart bucket that goes down into the ground because things of that are good. I call it things that stay, things that are substantive, they come from deep and they come from quiet. So, you know, this metaphysical, if you want to be a metaphysicist or whatever, they'll tell you you can't do it in a in a crowded room. You gotta go, you gotta be relegated to a quiet room with certain kind of lighting and everything. There is a common denominator here, and that is that God is omnipresent, he's everywhere all the time. But the world, Satan, whatever you want to call him, they have to create a frequency of distraction and distortion that says that you do not have any view to that opportunity to know him and to meet him. So it's a whisper. And that's what's important about it. You know, we know as musicians, it's not the what you hear that attracts somebody to a particular song, it's the overtones, it's the frequencies that are there and present, but you can't hear them audibly. And so that is what the voice of the heart is, and you got to train yourself to listen to that. So that's that's the war. That's block number

Selfless Help Versus Self Help

SPEAKER_00 33:38

one. Block number two, Kristen, is really cool. You know, as Christians, we're we're we want to go from whatever we were, we want to go to a selfless life. We want to go to a place where we give, give, give. Now, I was a giver, yeah, even way before I was a Christian.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:59

So what happens when you give? Yeah. The two things happen when you're a giver. Number one, you find that you're giving for the wrong reasons. And number two, you exhaust yourself and you leave nothing left for yourself. So as a giver, now I have yeah, I have a quote in the book that picks up on an old adage. Don't give a man a fish. Don't teach a man a fish. Ask him if he even wants fish. And so when I was giving, I was giving for myself, and I was giving because you know, when you give to people, like if you have money and you give it to them, they end up really resenting you. You don't know that yet. And they do want the money, but they don't like you much because they've depended on you. So the one extreme is being a giver, the other extreme is being a hoarder, like a lot of people, a lot of Christians even will say, I'm, you know, I'm wealthy, I'm collecting my money because I'm gonna be. We know the parable of the talents. So I'm collecting money because I want to do kingdom type of things, and I'm gonna allocate it responsibly, and all you know, they all almost over-engineer God's plan in their life. And so they become hoarders or takers, and that's the other extreme. So self-sacrificers and self-fish or self-helpers. So people go, do you know the biggest growing section in the bookstore is the self-help section? Right, right, self-help is useless. I have another saying in the book you know, if you're at the bottom of a broken Ferris wheel, you can be thankful. But you can never ride that Ferris wheel again until the people at the top are brought safely down.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

Yeah. It's heavy duty, Christy. That's why it takes people 30 days to get through chapter one. Yeah. But you know, this is the thing. So think of the the the metaphor is the the wheel is the system. So like people look at education. So we've got a whole bunch of people homeschooling now. But we still, what's the sense in homeschooling your children if the other half of the children are in public school? Right. Eventually they gotta, they the two shall meet. Intermingle. Exactly. And so, so here's the thing: it's not self-help, it's not self-sacrifice, it's not selfishness. It's the thing I call selfless help. Selfless help is the act of solving a problem for yourself, but at the same time in parallel, solving it for others, one or more people. Now, we know this works because we know people who are like whistleblowers or, you know, I use the uh story of Rosa Parks, who was relegated to, you know, the prejudicial, the prejudice, the awful prejudicial state of our country many, many years ago. It's still, you know, we we've never stopped being prejudiced. We're prejudiced against everybody at the end of the day, whether you have wealth or whatever. But you know, African Americans were obviously enslaved in this society, legally enslaved, and she had to go to the back of the bus until one day she decided she wasn't. But she didn't do it just for her. She wasn't looking for a better seat, she was looking for a better world, and she made that choice. There's people, you know, like Eric Snowden, you know, and I'm not political, and I don't, you know, I'm not judging people whether they did something right or wrong. What I'm saying is examine their what their intentions were, why they did what they did, right? Revealing, you know, certain things about systems that are harming people. Right. That takes not, you're not just solving it for yourself. In fact, you're going to a place of danger for yourself in order to make for better life for yourself. So this third and the fourth, I'm going to kind of run through these real quick. The third is

The 12 Systems And The Tree

SPEAKER_00 37:52

the infiltration of the enemy into 12 systems, which metaphorically tie into what I call the tree of life. There's the soil systems. Each one, each part of the tree has three systems associated with it. The soil systems, which are the systems of family dynamics, education, and religion. Those are systems, big ones, because that's where your roots are planted. The second group of systems are the trunk systems. So think about whatever's in the soil, how bad the soil is, and feeds up through the roots, now it goes through the trunk. The trunk systems are the influence systems, media and entertainment, news and information, technology and data. So whatever kind of mess you have in the soil ends up getting amplified by those systems. The third set of systems are the trunk systems. I'm sorry, the uh branch systems. The branch systems are how we reach into society. Now, anyone that knows anything, I'm not a horticulturalist or agriculturist, I know very little about anything like that. Yeah, yeah. But you know, if you think about the California Redwoods and and you know, they're they're dependent on each other because they're interconnected underground to keep from falling over. And but think about our branches. What how do our branches grow in society? They grow over each other, they grow to kind of starve or starve the sunlight out of others. So those systems are finance, government, and social structures. And then the last group of systems is are the legacy systems. But don't think about legacy as a Christian per se. Think about it as a child of God. Remember what I said earlier: the last commandment, be fruitful and multiply. So the legacy systems are about the the about the ability to multiply and to thrive as a humanity for the one and only reason we're here, which is to worship God. And so those systems are health and health and wellness, order and justice, which is freedom, and the last is the military-industrial complex. You know, it and they're all interconnected. And if you don't believe me, anyone that remembers COVID and other situations that it you'll see how the contagion from one system to the other is designed to just destroy us. Then the last the last block, Kristen, and I'll take a breath, is the other roles that we play. And we kind of touched on this before. We're all victims in this war. But this is the part that people get stuck at because it's hard, and I know it is. But the second phase of our evolution is as a soldier, but not as a soldier for God, a soldier for the enemy. I have, you know, so many examples, but the one classic for us Christians is Saul to Paul's conversion. Saul was a persecutor of Christians, he was also a persecutor of Jews because he was a Jew. And he then worked for the system, just like Matthew. Matthew's another example, but then he became the third, which is what we're all called to be, which are warriors. It's when we know that we are victims, we know that we've been working for the enemy, and we decided to dislocate from the enemy, and we're going to declare war on the enemy. We don't defeat the enemy, we thrive in his presence.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

If you could see me right now, you would see me cheering.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

You know, I listen, Kristen, I I wish I could take credit for this. I really do. It's so fantastical. I wish I could say that this was just I'm so brilliant, and I've, you know, I'm a genius. And but I gotta tell you, God downloaded this thing. Yeah, yeah, because it's not just, yeah, it's not just one book now, it's it's a it's a volume franchise. It's 30 children's illustrated books. It's designed to take us into battle along with scripture, and not just as Christians, but this book, this franchise speaks to atheists. They're buying the book. And we can talk more about how that works, but I'll I'll pause there for a minute.

SPEAKER_01 42:02

Yeah. I mean, I I just feel like have you heard of the Seven Mountains of Influence too?

SPEAKER_00 42:06

Yeah, I yeah, it's been paralleled a little bit to that.

SPEAKER_01 42:09

And yeah, but this is deeper. This goes way, like, and I'm just here going. Uh yeah, this this is so good. Um the Seven Mountains, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:21

The Seven Mountains is is really you won't find a non-Christian picking up the Seven Mountains, let's put it that way. But I think there's some good, there's some good stuff in there, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:30

Absolutely. Like, I I just love the picture of the tree as well, right? So you're you're you're moving from the soil to the out the appendages of the tree, and just that visual of you know, just the warrior, too. This is incredible. So, are all of your books geared towards children, or do you have adult books as well?

SPEAKER_00 42:53

Yeah. So the voice of the heart is an adult book. It's a 500-page manifesto. You don't have to read, so a lot of people are like, I'm not touching 500 pages. Listen, even for me, 500 pages is hard to read. There's a reading plan in the back that allows you to go through different tracks based on your reading aptitude. When I say aptitude, I'm not talking about intelligence. I'm talking about, you know, some people need to gloss over, but you want to go in, you want to do a fast track and still get the framework, you can do that. So there's different reading plans in that book. There's also a devotional, it's called, but it's not traditional devotional, it's very popular. It's called Whispers from the Heart. Now, a lot of people will that would be their entry point. So think of all these as entry points. They'll enter into the voice, uh, into Whispers, which is a daily devotional, but it's really a cleanse. So every day, there's 30 days, each day ties to the one of the 30 chapters of the book. Day one, chapter one, day two, chapter two. And it's instructive. It there's prayer. Meditation, there's you know all kinds of good stuff, but it takes 15 minutes, or it could take all day. Whatever

From Victim To Warrior

SPEAKER_00 44:06

you want to do with it, it can be a small group study, and it's designed to be used over and over again. And what happens is people get that, and then they go and get the big book. Okay. Now there's two other groups of properties. This is very exciting because it just launched about four weeks ago and it's already just broken records, and that is the Growing in the Garden series, the story of sapling, which is a little seed that grows up, and he each of the 30 books parallel the respective devotional day and chapter of the masterwork. So guess what? A family can now have conversation about real stuff. Like, think about talking about media and entertainment with your four-year-old and how it's infiltrated. But in the children's books, which have amazing characters, it's contextualized. It's not the war connotation, the war lingo. You know, it's it's it's made, it's about the garden. It's called the garden of weed and wonder.

SPEAKER_03 45:07

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 45:08

Yeah, the garden of weed and wonder is so much rich. Oh, it's so rich. And it's people are going bananas for it, and we're actually having a production problem now because book two. So this all 30 books have been created. Yeah, book one is out. We've transitioned off of, we're not going through Amazon or Barnes and Noble anymore. We pulled, I'm actually having a little battle with uh Barnes and Noble and Ingram Spark because I want to pull the books off of their shelves. We want to only be direct because we don't want anyone having the relationship with the readers of the franchise. So it's really important. So that's going on, but book two is coming out. So book one is called The Backwards Berries. So remember, we talked about chapter one, the invisible war.

SPEAKER_03 45:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

So book one, the backwards berries, is Sapling goes into the garden, it's his first book, and he sees that everybody's running, all the carrots and the tomatoes and the sunflowers, they're all running like bananas to this part of the garden where there's these crazy electrified berries. And he ends up going there and he's using discernment, but he doesn't really know. And he tries one of the berries. He sees, he sees some of the, like he sees this tomato, call him tomato head. He eats one of the berries and he gets sick. Then Sapling has one, and he gets he says, it felt like greatness, but now it feels like sadness. And so the child is learning discernment about things that are flashy. And at the you know, I don't want to give the whole book away, but yeah, yeah, he he comes to the conclusion that, you know, we have to, and and by the way, there's extensive SEL reading programs in the book, so you can have conversations about every spread in the book with your child. And so you might say, Well, how did how did you feel about that dress, Susie, when you wanted it so badly two weeks ago? Now you have it. Do you still feel the same way about it? And so they're learning discernment. But here's what's funny

Adult Book Devotional Kids Series

SPEAKER_00 47:08

what a mother reached out to me. Yeah, the mother, a mother reached out to me a couple of days ago. She said she's just ordered the book and she loves the berries. And I said, That's the problem. I and I said, Oh, thank God she bought the book because I don't want her teaching the kid her kids to love the berries, right? So every book parallels all the way through one through 30. Now there's one other category. So I didn't want to leave young adults and readers of novels and novelettes and whatever else you want to call it. So there's a book that's I'm just in my final line that it's called Thin Places. Thin Places is actually a Celtic characterization of a place where the veil is torn. So think about the Wizard of Oz, which by the way has a lot of manifest, a lot of you know manifestation of signaling and like all content, you know, that's been brainwashing us and our children for decades, hundreds of years maybe. But the the veil, when it's brought back, it reveals the wizard. So in Thin Places, it's a story about a community which is kind of suffering because a factory left, and it centers around one young lady who it's got family dynamics, it actually parallels the it's a novel that parallels the masterwork. But what happens is this community is infiltrated by a company called Planet Tear. Now, for those of you, I'm not gonna say what it kind of sounds like. I don't like a suit. Planet Tear is the name of this company that moves into the neighborhood and starts turning it upside down with surveillance and all kinds of good stuff. But it's a really cool story and it uses a part of my imagination, which I I, you know, look, I wrote the the nonfictional masterwork. It was just a dump of really everything I've experienced over my 60s something years of life. But when I did the creative stuff, like when I started doing the children's books, I went to town because I'm a goofball and I love characters. My wife has hidden all my puppets, and my 10-month-old took one of the puppets I gave her. It was with Chef, and she took the jacket off and she's like undressing the puppet. So my daughter was upset. But I I'm a kid and I like it. Like you call to me like childlike faith, right? Childlike Faith. So I I'm I went nuts. So I'm since the 30-book children's series is done, it's just final illustrations for the last, you know, 20 books or 15 books. But you know, I'm gonna have another series where Sapling is going to try now, he's a tree at that point. He's gonna travel the world, and it's gonna be a cultural geography experience from country to country, 30 different countries.

Where To Get The Books

SPEAKER_01 50:04

That's amazing. Where can people find your books then if they can't be found on the main mainstream main systems?

SPEAKER_00 50:12

Yeah, so voiceoftheartbooks.com. It's a very deep website. You can go there, you could probably spend the all week on it. There's a lot of content. It's very descriptive about whether it's the SEL programming around the children's books or the framework. People should just go there and really peruse it on their computer. Get off your device, go to a computer where you can see it and share it with your spouse and your family, and try to understand it. And and by the way, I'm accessible right now, anyway. I mean, reach me at info at voice of the heartbooks.com. Excuse me. I'm happy to try to respond. If you have questions, if you have comments, criticisms. And also the other thing is the children's book, you could buy a book at a time, or you can join what I call the Garden Circle Club or Garden Circle Membership, where you opt into a membership. There's no cost, you just automatically get notified of when each book comes out, you decide whether you want it or not, or you can actually have auto delivery. That's that's your option. And there's some benefits to that as well.

SPEAKER_01 51:17

That's a great, that's a great way to go about it. I love it. I love this. And I asked, I have one more question about this. Did you did you ever think you'd write books? I love to ask this question to people.

SPEAKER_00 51:30

So yeah, I wrote poems as a young child. They weren't even poems, they were limericks and they were silly. But I liked writing and I love I've written music. I've written a lot of music. But I wrote up when I was in entertainment, I had worked uh for Eddie Murphy's for a number of years for his organization, and you know, knew a lot of people, obviously. And uh so I said, Oh, well, you know, I'm gonna write a screenplay. So I wrote a screenplay, got picked up by ICM, and never got made into a movie, but it was a struggle. You know, screenplay is like 100, 110 pages, and it's of course formatted differently, so it's not that many words in you know, relative to a book, but it was a struggle to get that done. I thought I was never gonna finish it. When I wrote Voice of the Heart, it came from two things. We would go places where I would tell people if we were at a restaurant or sitting at a bar or having a glass of wine, and I get into a conversation

Writing Process And 75 Drafts

SPEAKER_00 52:28

about my this experience or my testimony, people would say, You gotta write a book. And my wife would say, He's got one in him, but he hasn't written it yet. And I said, Well, I'm gonna write, and they would say, Here, take my number when you get the book. And I I was like, So when I sat down, my wife said, Write the book. She's usually right, she's usually right about everything. So I wrote the book. When I wrote it, it was a toil. I wrote 75 drafts of a 500-page book.

SPEAKER_01 52:54

75 drafts.

unknown 52:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:56

How long did it take you to from like start to finish? Would you say?

SPEAKER_00 53:00

Yeah, day and night, you know, when I'm available because I do have a day job. I it it was uh two years, but that was because I had accumulated notes and presentations over 12 years, and some from even further back than that, but lots of notes. I mean, recorded notes, written notes, type notes, you name it. And so that was the assembly, those were the pieces of the puzzle that that ultimately formed the picture.

SPEAKER_01 53:27

Yeah, going back to that puzzle, I love this. Greg, you are a gem. I'm definitely gonna check out your website. There's so much language you're using here that is like a lot of what the Lord's been showing me over the years. So thank you for coming on today. I would love for you to just share as we're wrapping up today, if you don't mind, maybe a final word of encouragement, wisdom, or hope for the person who's listening in today. Because I do this for the one and beyond, of course.

SPEAKER_00 53:56

Yeah, yeah. So there's two quotes,

Final Hope And Pursue Truth

SPEAKER_00 54:01

or rather, two lines in the book, the first one and the last one, which are like bookends. The first line in the book, which, you know, even again for an unbeliever, non-believer, or an atheist, anybody, it still resonates. And it's it goes like this when the snake moved into the garden, there went the neighborhood. And that's the reckoning. That's what I want. I want people to, that's that glass thing. Oh, Greg, it's half empty. No, I want people to be really upset that this is they've been living like this is all there is. And then the last line of the book is that when you're all out of hope, the only thing left is hope. That is maybe that's one of the few lines of everything I've written that still, when I say it, it rivets me. It it may it bring it wells in me for not just myself, but for everybody. Everybody that I come in contact, everyone I'm gonna come in contact with, the entire face of the planet's you know, occupations. I I feel that for everybody. And then, you know, the last thing I want to say is there is one quote that I think we need to carry as Christians, especially now, because we've got an attack on Christianity that's coming with from within and from without. It's a political, there's politicization, politicization, there's all kinds of stuff. There's a revival too, right? But it's going, it's trying to get swelched. And so here's what I want to leave with my brothers and sisters. Those who pursue the truth are more faithful to the truth than those who know the truth. Those who pursue the truth are more faithful to the truth than those who know the truth. Now, why do I say that? And why do I say it like that? Because as Christians, you know, we say Jesus is the truth, but if we really look at the people who were closest, I'm talking about humans that were closest to them to God in history, they walked with God. And you don't walk with somebody you know, you walk with somebody you want to know. And so it's so important as Christians that we humble ourselves and say, we don't know Jesus, but we want to know him and to live in that power because that's what forges the relationship, that's what keeps us close to him, is wanting to know him. If we already knew him, then we wouldn't need to know anymore. So I call on my brothers and sisters to pursue the truth, always pursue it. Don't know it, pursue it.

SPEAKER_01 56:55

Wow. Greg, thank you so much for being here today. I you I we might have to have you on another time in the future if you're open to that. Thank you again. So I'm gonna close with the Hope Unlocked anchoring

Anchoring Verse And Goodbye

SPEAKER_01 57:08

verse. It's may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. And that's Romans 15, 13. So thank you for being a brave voice who's setting so many free. Keep going, listeners, keep trusting and keep living unlocked. I'll be back with another episode next week. Thank you.