“Trading Certainty for Growth | Understanding the Compass (Colin Connor)” Ep#45

What happens when we trade real spiritual growth for the safety of absolute certainty? In this episode, Chris is joined by Colin Connor, host of The Bible Uncut and Unfiltered, for a raw and brilliant look at breaking free from rigid fundamentalism to embrace a healthier, question-driven faith. From the danger of prioritizing doctrine over how we actually treat people, to a flawless hockey analogy about what it means to truly "play for the team" of Jesus, Colin dives deep into the tension of living in the complexity of doubt. The conversation culminates in a masterclass breakdown of Chris's compass metaphor, mapping out how the quadrants of hedonism, nihilism, and fundamentalism pull at us, and how a feral, untamed spirit of love is the ultimate tool to calibrate our true north.

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Transcript

Chris Jones 0:00

Today I'm joined by Colin Connor, the host of the podcast, The Bible Uncut and Unfiltered. In this conversation, Connor shares the most valuable insights he's gained by hosting this unique podcast. Welcome. I'm Chris Jones, and this is Spiritual Hot Sauce.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Colin, welcome to the sauce. Thanks, Chris. I am glad to be here, and I am glad to actually see my video working. Third time's a charm on my end over here.

Chris Jones 0:31

I know, right? We had a little bit of uh hiccups getting started, but that's okay. We got it figured out. What made you decide to jump in and do a podcast anyway?

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Oh, that is a little bit of an interesting story. For any of the listeners that aren't familiar with uh my story, I grew up in independent fundamental Baptist circles, emphasis on the fundamentalist side. It was very, very conservative, very King James only circles, very Christian nationalist. We had restrictions around what you could or couldn't watch movie-wise. So you weren't supposed to go to the movie theater, listen to secular music, yeah, all this stuff. That's the world I grew up in. And after I had gone to Bible college, I had a pastoral degree and also a counseling degree. I came back to the church that I grew up in in South Jersey. And I was teaching a Sunday school class for a while. There's a whole long story about spiritual abuse that was going on in the church and that uh we had tried to call out, did not get handled very well. And make a long story short, we ended up having to leave that church I had grown up in. But I'm a nerd. I like studying the Bible. And so I told my Sunday school class, you know what, with or without teaching this class, I'm gonna keep nerding out on this stuff. And if you'd like to listen along still, I'd like to have you for the ride. Uh so the podcast actually started as an extension of my original Sunday school class when I was no longer gonna be at that church. So it just started with a few friends that knew me and wanted to keep talking Bible stuff, and now it's grown to where most of the people listening are all across the country, other countries, and it's it's been really neat to see that trajectory over the last few years.

Chris Jones 2:13

So from something that was bad, something good came out of it, and you end up having a much bigger platform than you would have had in the Sunday school class. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I want to jump in because I I want to uh give the time we have together talking about some of the most important things you believe that you've talked about on your podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Yeah, I I wrote down a handful of notes here because if I don't, I will talk forever. So this keeps me grounded. So feel free to interrupt me, ask questions, or or cut me off if I start rambling on anything. But the first thing that really came to mind for me is just the purpose of scripture and realizing that the Bible is not trying to end a conversation, it's trying to start one. The fundamentalist circles that I grew up in, they were very biblicistic. We had a Bible answer for everything. I remember a pastor that I had known for a long time would say that if somebody came to him and said they were going to move for some reason, they got a better work off or somewhere else, right? He would specifically ask them, Do you have a Bible reason for wanting to do this? Uh, which meant taking some verse out of context about, I don't know, the Israelites wandering and leaving X place, and you were supposed to say, God spoke to me and say that I'm supposed to leave where I am now and go somewhere else. And and so we tried to have a Bible reason for every single thing that we did. And treating it as that kind of rule book, it was consistent. It felt like a nice, neat system for understanding how scripture works. But we didn't like the nuance of Bible passages. We didn't know what to do with books like Job or Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Psalm 88. So we just tended to ignore stuff that made us uncomfortable or didn't fit our theology. And the more that I have studied scripture, I've realized that the Bible, I don't believe, is meant to be a rule book that we go to and check off every answer that we're looking for. I think it's more meant to be a guidebook that invites us to the right questions instead of just the right answers.

Chris Jones 4:27

Do you think, because this is kind of how it seems to me, but I'm I'm curious of your take on it, that it seems like if you want to go extremely fundamental and literate, like that's where your world is, kind of in this confined space that we're talking about, that it's almost like we're trying to move backwards somehow into this Old Testament mentality and bringing Jesus into that with us, that we need to apply that here and now. What's your feelings on that?

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Sure. Well, the Bible scholar in me wants to push back just a tiny bit on the idea of Old Testament law versus New Testament grace, because I do think that Jesus was more consistent with the Old Testament than we like to think, particularly when we consider like his uh you've heard it said, but I say he's not necessarily giving any antitheses as much as he is going further or deeper into the purpose of it. So I don't necessarily focus on Old Testament Judaism as being overly legalistic, but that's a whole side trail. And I had a recent conversation with A.J. Levine about that. She's a great Jewish New Testament scholar. But the the point that you're bringing up there, I would say yes, in the sense that we in that fundamentalism, certainty was key. Everything had to be certain. I remember pulling out the one verse out of, I believe it's 1 John, that these things were in that you may know that Jesus is the Christ and that you may have, and that believing you may have life through his name. And we just took that little that you may know, and we constantly emphasize the certainty. So I do think it is regressive in a way, like you brought up. There's, oh, I I think it may be Brian McLaren or Scott McKnight have this thing that they talk about of stages of faith, where you have simplicity, complexity, perplexity, and harmony. Simplicity is just kind of what we start out with, where you have the very simple aspects of it. Complexity is where you start to realize the complications, perplexity when you kind of deconstruct and realize how overwhelming they are, and then harmony when hopefully you're able to reintegrate some of it together. And I think fundamentalism fundamentally keeps you in the simplicity stage of faith.

Chris Jones 6:39

So, what is it that you have found on the other side? What space is it that you live in?

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Yeah, I find myself now most often in progressive Christian circles where I know there are still Baptists who have very different views, but I think just for me, having that background in independent fundamental Baptist circles, I've seen a lot of the bad side of Baptist faith. And the label wasn't working for me there anymore. So I just put myself in a progressive Christian kind of circle, but I don't know that I have the full harmony of those stages. You know, I feel like a lot of times I still sit in the perplexity stage where I feel the dissonance. I feel the way that things don't always work how they're supposed to. And sometimes faith can be a struggle because I have such an academic relationship with scripture. But I'm not done with it. It still hangs on somehow.

Chris Jones 7:40

Well, go back and talk to me about the dissonance. What are you talking about where it doesn't work like you feel like it should work?

SPEAKER_01 7:47

So uh I I almost think of your compass illustration here. And I I kind of want to dig into this if we get time toward the end, because I've been thinking more about it and I want to play around with it with you. Yeah, absolutely. But just to this particular question, I tend to find myself more on the West side of your compass. I think that there's there's almost like two different sides of me. I feel like there's a very rationalistic side where I go, based on everything that we've looked at in the world, we cannot prove any of these religious beliefs are real. We have the stories of people's experiences, we have stories of people's experiences leaving religion, going into Islam, going into Judaism, going into every denomination of Christianity.

Chris Jones 8:33

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Or we look at the problem of evil, or just the really crappy history that Christianity has had. And I feel like, why wouldn't God change that? And so I feel those questions pull me. But then I also have the side of me that was so thoroughly raised in Christianity that it's always there. And I feel still something greater, something bigger, something more powerful, something drawing us toward love, uh, that I am comfortable calling God and seeing Jesus as an ideal representation of that. So I see kind of these two sides where some days I feel like an agnostic at best leaning into atheist, and then there's other days I'm a very proud progressive Christian that loves reveling in that. Uh so I think that's the dissonance I feel.

Chris Jones 9:19

You brought up West of my compass. And for those people who don't know what we're talking about, East represents the spiritual side and West represents the literal physical side, where we embrace science and we embrace what we know and knowledge and using wisdom to just try to get through the suffering in life that we can't control. So are you specifically talking about suffering things in life that we can't control, seeing the hurting and the pain and trying to make sense of that?

SPEAKER_01 9:48

That is a part of it for sure. And then I also think just sometimes traditional theologies, and like honestly, this is a whole other point I wrote down that is something I've learned or or changed through the podcast.

Chris Jones 10:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

And so so let me just kind of maybe answer with that. This point would be that God is bigger and better than what I was taught he is. Because I grew up with very traditional, pretty orthodox theologies. I would say leaning slightly Calvinist, even though ironically enough, the Bible college I went to was very anti-Calvinist. And then I've had conversations with people like Tom Ward, which, if any of your listeners don't know him, he's in open and relational theology, and he specifically has this idea of an amipotent God. It's a word he created, where usually we say God is omnipotent, omnipotent, all-powerful. And he says, well, actually, if you look carefully at Bible verses that talk about that, the portrayal is not of an all-powerful God, but of a most powerful God, specifically looking through the lens of love with the AMI prefix and amipotent, love-powered, love-based. And I think that view, while I wouldn't say I've fully adopted it myself, it has actually helped me keep believing in God longer than I would have without it. Because what he suggests, and this speaks specifically into the suffering dissonance, is it's not because we all will often say, right, either God is all powerful or he is all good, but both can't be true if there's all this suffering in the world. It's it's a constant dilemma we've talked about for thousands of years as humans. Right. And and Tom says, Well, I believe God is all good. So maybe the problem is that he isn't actually all powerful. He is the most powerful being in the universe, but maybe there are some things that he cannot stop. And he wants to. He wants us to partner with him in stopping it, but on his own, he's not going to override free will and he even can't. So stuff like that has given me a lens to feel like I don't have to get everything right right this second. And maybe if I let love guide, which is a very scriptural principle, I can come to better understandings of God and my faith.

Chris Jones 12:05

Aaron Powell I'm getting ready to do an episode talking about because someone had asked me about can you explain more about what you're talking about that from a tree we would get the poison that's inhumanity. And I've been studying on the reaction of what happens to Adam and Eve. Adam hides from God because in that moment he now he understands shame and guilt. You know, and so now he has to hide and he has to cover himself. But even then, God helps him in his choices to try to get to a better place in what he has. Um you you've got to leave, but let me upgrade your fig leaves and give you skins here and and cover you because you won't be warm with the figs. It's not going to be enough to protect you either. Here, take the take these skins. So it's almost like a concerned father on the cross. It's like the best that God had to offer. It's in that suffering that we find communion with God, that God came to us in our place of hurt and he shared in that suffering so he could be with us in it. There's something kind of speaking to what you're talking about in that.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

And I like the idea too that that means there's not necessarily a second best. It's that God is always remaking a new best for us as we go along.

Chris Jones 13:19

Yeah, I like that.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

So even if your choices didn't add up to what you wanted them to be, you haven't missed the boat. There's still a best for where you are right now.

Chris Jones 13:27

Aaron Powell That's right. Is the father's love of against a punitive God? We try to make it a literal thing, like God's this traffic cop. You know, Jesus is the rubber stamp that gets you out of the traffic ticket or the infraction against the law. And that it's not that. It's more about the father's love trying to help his child to get to a better place.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Yeah, absolutely. And and you just brought up Jesus. So is it cool if I move into that point? Because I had something like Please do. Yeah. Uh something that's changed for me with thinking about him, and this will tie right into some of what you and I have talked about before, is that following Jesus matters more than being right about Jesus. I remember growing up, we had this idea that if you could just get someone to pray the sinner's prayer, right? The dear Lord Jesus, I know I'm a sinner. I know my sin separates me from you. Would you forgive me of my sin and uh let me go to heaven when I die? You know, some variation of that. That's what mattered. And we could then say, you're in the fold. We got you saved, we got another number in. And then now your job is to go have other people make that same decision. Get people to join the club. Exactly. Where Jesus is that rubber stamp that gets you in. The more I've lived through, the more that I have seen so many people who believe the right things, they've said the right prayers, that does not guarantee you're a good person. And I think this is what happens in so many churches is when we focus on mentally assenting to what we consider to be orthodox doctrine, we then ignore orthopraxy, which is right behavior. It's not just about orthodoxy, it's also about orthopraxy. I may have shared this story with you before, but I haven't shared it too much on the podcast. When I was leaving the church that I grew up in with the spiritual abuse and everything that was going on, it was one particular assistant pastor who was known for misleading people, gaslighting, yelling. He was very misogynistic, racist. And I had several pages laid out of documentation from former staff members saying all this stuff. I brought my concerns to the pastor and to the deacons. And after looking at everything and having a very unproductive conversation, they basically said, Yeah, we know all this, but if he leaves, good tithers are going to leave with him. Wow. And I said, Okay, so all we care about here is that people have believed the right things, and it doesn't really matter what they do. So this is how you can have so many people in churches who check all the right boxes of mental ascent, but then they don't care about gas slaying, they don't care about manipulation, they don't care about covering up spiritual or sexual or physical abuse in the church, because what matters is that they are saved. They said the right thing. This is what you bring in of the difference between being a follower of Jesus or a disciple of Jesus and being a believer in the deity of Jesus. Because you can believe all the right stuff and still get it wrong.

Chris Jones 16:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

You know, it's kind of like I'm a big hockey fan. The wall that I'm facing right now has uh a bunch of uh flyers stuff up for the Philadelphia team. And let's say I could know every possible fact there was about the Flyers, beat everyone in trivia at night. That does not mean that I have ever played for them. I can get every fact right, but I haven't actually lived it. And even if I could tell you what all their plays are, what how what makes them win every game, I don't have the experience in that because I've never actually been on the team. And I think that's what we have going on in a lot of churches, where we have people who know all the right facts, they can spit out all the right verses, but they haven't actually lived out the way of Jesus. And I think we've missed the boat big there. That's been a huge lesson for me to learn. How do we get to this?

Chris Jones 17:13

Because you're right, a lot of a church is that's what it is. How did we end up in this place that we're at now?

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Honestly, I think it's just a human drive that that pulls us into something that we can recreate. I think this goes back to the time of Jesus. I mean, if we have Paul, who's just one generation after, who is dealing with these exact same problems of people trying to make it about checking the right boxes instead of actually following Jesus. And this reminds me of a conversation I had recently earlier this year with a guy his name's Ben. He does the beer selection at the theology beer camp that I go to every year. And he has this really cool idea of uh what he calls a feral spirit of God, the untamed God. And he said that religion is what happens when somebody has an experience that is very real, but then they try to recreate the experience without the experience. And that's what religion is it's us trying to get back to a point where something really mattered and felt spiritually significant to us. And you can't actually manufacture that because you can't put God in a box. He's gonna come and go when he pleases and he's gonna do whatever he wishes. So religion, I think, is just our drive to codify, to quantify, to reproduce, to uh capitalize on something spiritual and turn it into something marketable.

Chris Jones 18:47

That reminds me of something Britt McKay said. He was on the show and scars a speak with his son that had cancer.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Yes, yeah.

Chris Jones 18:53

And he said, somebody has an experience with God, and then we say, Hey, this is the way. This is what we all should be doing. And now we all try to posture ourselves like that person and do the five-step thing they did so we too can have this experience with God. And it becomes a movement and then becomes a religion, a denomination. And his point was that is that we all have an experience with God. None of us should be going trying to have the experience that someone else did. That's wonderful that you had that, but my experience is gonna be different.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Right. That limits us to where we're only expecting God in those specific places, like maybe a religious tradition that has uh shrines or icons or you know, relics sort of thing, where you can look for God in those things, and maybe you'll find them. Some people do have some experiences of that. But if that's the only place you're looking, you're gonna miss them in a lot of other spots.

Chris Jones 19:47

It seems safe though, because now we can have the experience through someone else's experience without actually having it ourselves. Now you talk about the trauma that comes from that fundamental grip that happens when it becomes more important than the people, that the people need to serve that rather than it's there to serve the people. The trauma you're talking about. Can you open that up and explain how that all kind of ties to this?

SPEAKER_01 20:14

When we push for certainty, it is a push for safety. I think this is what you're getting into, because we feel certain about things that we know. We feel uncertain about things that we don't. And things that we know are safe because we've already lived them out. I think that's just nature to us as humans, as we look for what's familiar. We don't realize how much that limits us and how much that can also cause a trauma, like you brought up, when we are told this is the only way. Stick with the way it has been, stick with what we are familiar with. Because none of us actually know that we get everything right. What arrogance to think that everything we know is right. I I remember one time I had a professor in college and I asked him a question. It was um it was a harmeneux class on interpretation of the Bible. And I said, So you've pastored for much longer than I've been alive. What happens when you inevitably end up back at a passage you've already preached, let's say five years ago, but now your interpretation has changed. You realize maybe you were wrong about it before. Guy thought about it for a second. I said, You know what? I don't think that's ever happened. And and everyone in the class is like, oh yeah, stand firm on the truth. And I'm sitting there going, I am never asking you for advice ever again. Because you're in your 70s, you've been preaching since you were in your 20s, and you're telling me you haven't changed anything, that means you haven't learned anything. We trade growth, we trade life for certainty, and we think it's going to give us life because we are familiar with it, but in reality we miss out. Whereas I believe a healthier faith allows for that growth where you don't then have to go through the trauma of essentially ego death. A healthier faith would not require you to lose yourself in order to refind yourself.

Chris Jones 22:06

Somebody that's not correctable, you know, 70-something years old and they've rigidly held on to what they have, that yeah, that speaks to that speaks more to an organization and literalism than it does to something living. Yes. Because something living is always evolving. Who I am right now is a lot different than the person I was 20 years ago or 30 years ago or 40 years ago. I'm a different person. And I think that when you are in that rigid posture, you're stuck.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

And this is something I've learned through the podcast as well. I had this down as a note to talk about, is that I feel like my relationship to people has changed. How so? Because my expectations of them have changed. In the fundamentalist circles in which I grew up, every person was a potential convert. That was how we always viewed them. Was you you were supposed to feel guilty if you didn't hand a track to the cashier in Walmart or a witness to the person sitting next to you on the plane or whatever. So it was always about seeing them as a potential convert, as as a soul, we would say. But what I've realized is that didn't actually allow me to see the other person. All I saw is what they could be for me. And if they rejected my message, well, it was on to the next person. That person didn't really matter anymore. And that's not caring about people, no matter how we tried to present it. So now, as I've been able to have a little more of what you call the an open-handed posture rather than a closed fist posture with scripture, with belief, with God, I can say I am not the sole person responsible for making sure they get everything right, because I don't have everything right. I had a really cool conversation about a year ago with a sibling duo, Paul and Billy Horde. They wrote this excellent book called U Contamination, EU contamination. And it's based on this idea of a good contaminant. We always think of contamination as a bad thing. But what if the message of Jesus was that you can actually contaminate the world with good? This is the mustard seed. This is the leaven in the loaf. This is how instead of a leper turning Jesus into a leper, Jesus turns the leper into a whole person, a healed person. And maybe that's the point of Christianity is not to be so scared of how the world around us is going to influence us, but rather to be inspired by how we can impact the world. And that's given me the ability to see people as people. And so at the end of the day, if we don't fully agree on something, I can still respect you and learn from you and realize maybe you've got some stuff right that I don't. And I that doesn't mean I have to accept your whole views or convert to your religion or whatever. It just means that together we become a little better because we had this experience together.

Chris Jones 24:56

Peter Rollins said something on the show. He said that we give each other the gift of seeing our wounds. Ooh. Even if you disagree with the person, that if you allow them to show their wounds to you and not judge them for them, that is love and that is community of how Jesus demonstrated it. Yes. And I think when you're coming at somebody in a literal way, like trying to convert them in this rigid posture, you are not allowing them their wounds. You're not allowing them to show their wounds and share in their suffering. You're expecting them to either see it your way or, like you said, it's on to the next. What's some of the other things you've been changed by?

SPEAKER_01 25:42

This one is huge for me. It reframes the purpose of the gospel. This goes a little bit hand in hand with the disciple of Jesus versus just believing the right stuff about him. But I always saw the point of the gospel as being get someone to believe the right stuff, go to heaven, you know, you're you're sharing your testimony, something like that. But the amazing thing, if you check out the very end of scripture, Revelation 21, right around there, you see that the point is not us escaping this world for the next. It's actually about the new heavens coming down to this earth. And it's about a renewal with God. It's not leaving for a pie in the sky by and by kind of thing, but really it's about renewing this earth, a restoration of Eden. And so the message of the Bible really shifted for me because growing up, I always just felt like the whole point was salvation. And then I remember I had a pastor in college who said, Well, if that was the whole point, why wouldn't God just zap us up to heaven once we got saved? And he's like, Well, actually, if you look at it, almost every book of the Bible was written to people who already believed in God, whether that was the Israelites of the Old Testament or the Gospels. Uh, you know, maybe you can make a claim for like Luke or possibly John being evangelistic. But overall, you know, Paul's letters, everything, they are written to people who already believe in God. So they don't need the salvation message. So, what is actually the point? And it's about sanctification, it's about becoming a better person, it's about making this life better, not just for ourselves, but for everyone around us. So, so the goal of the gospel is not escape, but actually restoration. And that's really opened me up to feeling like there's so much more I can learn from scripture and also so much more I can live out than just trying to convert someone.

Chris Jones 27:37

Yeah. I heard somebody recently say the Antichrist isn't a person, it's a movement. And the Antichrist is a large part of the church right now. It's keeping us from getting to fulfilling our purpose and taking us down another path.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

That's an excellent point. And honestly, I think it is pretty accurate because if you look for that word antichrist, we use it all the time in a left-behind kind of eschatological end time sense, right? There's is is the Antichrist the person leading Russia? Is he the U.S. president? Is he from Iran? Is he yeah, whatever? And we're reading the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. That's true. But the word antichrist only shows up a believe it's four, possibly five times in the entirety of scripture. And none of them are in revelation. They are all in first through third John. Oh, really? Yes. And revelation is a bottom of that.

Chris Jones 28:32

Until you just said that, we always think it's revelation.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Right. And there is no antichrist figure in Revelation. The word is only in first through third John. And in one verse in particular, he says, the Antichrist has come. In fact, even now there are antichrists, plural, among you. So for the writer of that, I believe that one's 2 John, for the for that author, he believed that there were multiple people who could fit this spirit of literally just look at the word being anti-Christ, anti-Messiah, anti-the idea that God was in flesh and redeemed the earth through Jesus. He's saying there are literally people who are against that right now. He's not saying look for it in the future. He's saying these are people who aren't fitting Orthodox doctrine. So that explanation you were given, I think, actually really makes sense that we can have people who are anti-what Christ was about without them being some political end times leader.

Chris Jones 29:26

Well, you know, if I'm part of the Antichrist movement, the very last thing I'm going to do is draw attention to it now. I'm always going to be talking about when the Antichrist comes. The unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of people that would be a part of that wouldn't be aware they are a part of that. I think this one is so deep we have to leave it here because this one deserves its own episode. But you would uh ask for some time at the end so we can open up something that I had shared or or you wanted to talk about and get into. So here's your opportunity. Let's bring it up.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Okay, cool. So I have been thinking about this compass illustration that you use uh frequently on the pod. And you have the the four directions, north, south, east, and west, with the north-south axis. You describe that as being in terms of like Jonathan Hayes' elephant and rider illustration, where the north side is the emotional side, the part that's uh really driving us of like uh the toward hedonism and just experience and pleasure. And then the south side is more of the rider, it's more of the rationalistic going will, like my strength of will. And that's kind of leaning towards toward uh stoicism on the extreme. And that's a relatively common example people will use. So I think that's a a pretty easy idea to grasp. I think each of these can get pulled into an extreme where it goes too far, right? And where you get really interesting with it is making the the x-axis, the east-west, about suffering. And where you bring in the on the west side, it's more uh you've described as science, it's more of just like the suffering without any purpose. And then on the right side is more of a religious side with suffering, uh having a purpose and trying to find something in it. Well, the more I've thought about this, I think what actually has helped me understand this, and I want to propose this to you where you can tell me if I'm getting it right or wrong or whatever. Yeah, let me hear it. Is actually understanding your compass in terms of the quadrants that it forms and looking not just at the directions themselves, but at each of the four sections of like northwest, northeast, southwest, southeast. So when I've considered it that way, I was thinking about it like if you're going on that northwest side where you are getting pulled into, you're getting pulled by the emotional drive, but you're also convinced that things just happen. There's there's not a lot of meaning to it for you. I see that as leaning into kind of like a YOLO kind of lifestyle at that point. Right. So there's there's no real meaning. I might as well just get all of it, take all of it for myself as much as possible. And to that extreme, I almost see where we have all the richest people in the world today. Yeah, we do as we're talking about this, we we just have the world's first trillionaire named this week. Right. It's crazy. Yeah, and and that pool, I think, in that side is where you're you're being defined by a life of hedonism and and you're just living it up. The Northeast side, I think, is more of a almost like prosperity gospel Christianity, where you believe that God wants you to have good, to experience pleasure, but there's always a spiritual meaning behind it. It's a reward for obedience or something like that. Southwest, I think, was the hardest one for me to figure out, but I think it gets into just like almost a nihilism when it goes too far. And I think this is where I find myself a lot of times, where I go, we can't really know how much of this has meaning. And we just have to make our own meaning, accept, you know, the the uncertainty of life, the the heavel, as the preacher in Ecclesiastes would say, make our own purpose, right? And then Southeast is really interesting because I think that fits fundamentalism, and specifically the way that I grew up, maybe even Calvinism in that sense, because you believe that everything is your responsibility. It's about your will overcoming your sin nature, but everything also has a purpose. So there's this excessive guilt, there's constant self-monitoring. And I think the way a lot of people can hear this illustration is they're thinking that one of these quadrants is where we're supposed to be. And your example is almost more like the Enneagram, where it's not telling you what you're supposed to be, it's helping you understand what you currently are so you can draw closer to center. And so I think your compass really speaks to people in each of those sections. It tells people that some things can't be changed and some things can. Sometimes suffering has meaning, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes uh discipline matters more, sometimes desire does. And so I think you're telling people on the north side, the hedonism side, don't worship your desires. You're telling people on the south side, don't deny your humanity. On the east side, you're saying don't assume everything is a message from God. And on the west side, you're saying don't assume that life is meaningless.

Chris Jones 34:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

And Jesus calls us to the center to know whichever quadrant you're in, he's trying to pull you closer to center. So that's a little the meditation I've had on it recently.

Chris Jones 34:48

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, that's actually fairly accurate. And I would add that the in the very center of all of this is the commandment of Christ of love. And that if you allow that to be the final say, the executive order of everything, it if like uh had the guest on Abby Martin, where she said that when she hears from God, she just always poses it against what would God's love say about this? And now you have your answer. Yes. I I think ideally life is a marathon and we want to stay in the center as long as we can, although there are times that we lean into different parts of the compass. But with the overall control coming from what does the love of God say about this and how I interact with this situation and allow that to be the final say, that typically calibrates our compass and makes sure that our true north is pointing true north.

unknown 35:41

Yeah.

Chris Jones 35:42

So maybe what you came away with, I like that a lot. And I I think that when we get stuck, like you could you could say that when you go south and you stay south or southwest or even southeast sometimes, it's almost a stoic philosophy. I don't know anybody who's done really well with philosophy if they've picked, you know, a philosophy and that's just what they live by. That's the only thing. It seems like, you know, that's a lens, but it's a lens for certain times in your life. You need different lenses for different, you know, moments in your life. Sometimes you do need a little hedonism in the right place in the right context. Sometimes you need to go into a storm knowing that you're going to have to see purpose in it or you're not going to make it through it. You know, there's not going to be a tomorrow if you don't see it like that. I think ultimately it's that commandment of Christ that helps us sort it all out and what we need to do.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

Aaron Powell Yeah, it ties together the whole conversation we've had here today because it it shows that we can't just have an individualistic focus. We're trying to get pulled back to Christ where we have the center of the best of it all. And it also tells us that we can't just look for an easy answer to check off the list and say, I got it right. Because you may someone might need to move further southwest, someone might need to move further northeast, you might need to move in a different direction depending on where you are.

Chris Jones 37:05

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 37:05

Uh so there's no easy answers, but good guideposts to have.

Chris Jones 37:09

The landscape is constantly changing and evolving. So it'd be odd to think that our faith doesn't evolve with us. This has been a great conversation, Colin. Thank you for taking the time to jump onto the sauce with me. But as we conclude, what final thoughts would you like to share?

SPEAKER_01 37:28

Oh, absolutely. Thank you for having me on, Chris. I I've been thinking about this the last couple of weeks, what I wanted to talk about, and just made me think about the conversation we had. I feel like this is really just part two of that one. It carries out what we talked about more, and it's it's been a lot of fun. I look forward to more conversations with the mics on and off in the future. Yeah. So yeah, if anyone has enjoyed this conversation, definitely go check out more of Chris's episodes if you haven't already listened and and uh mine as well at the Bible Uncut and Unfiltered. I'm sure we'll link to some of that. But every episode, almost every episode that we do, we end with this single line that is stay curious and keep asking questions about the uncut and unfiltered Bible. And so, my final thought that I would want to share with anyone listening, assuming I'll never get to talk to any of you again, this is all you can take of me in this life, is this one hour you got to hear my voice. I would say stay curious. Because I think that one of the biggest problems we have in this world today is we have the easy answers. We can search Google, we can use AI, we can come up with an answer to anything in a few seconds. And I think we've lost a lot of curiosity, where we just want to learn more. We see the bigness of the world around us and the smallness of us, and we we want to keep growing. That's what keeps us growing. That's what keeps us from seeing other people as enemies, is when we ask questions instead of making statements right away. So, no matter what part of life you're in, no matter where you are in the political spectrum, the belief spectrum, religion, just be curious. Ask questions about the world around you and the people around you. And I think you will find it to be more amazing than you could ever have imagined.

Chris Jones 39:15

If people want to get in touch with you, how do they do that?

SPEAKER_01 39:19

Uh so personally, I am on socials, but I don't post a lot myself. Uh, we are pretty active on the podcast accounts, though. So uh the podcast name is the Bible Uncut and Unfiltered. You can find it on any of your podcast platforms. We are also on YouTube and we are on Instagram, Facebook, occasionally Blue Sky, and also TikTok. Most of them, I believe, the handle is the Bible Uncut, but you can find any of them by searching the Bible Uncut and Unfiltered.

Chris Jones 39:48

Colin, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I appreciate it. This has been very insightful, and I think you've given us a lot of good things to think about. I appreciate it, and we absolutely will be talking again soon, both on and off the mic. Thank you, sir. Sounds good. Thanks so much, Chris. Well, it's not often that you get to have a conversation with somebody that uses your own metaphor and profoundly demonstrates high-level command of it. I think Colin could teach a class on the metaphor of the compass. It was impressive what he did with it. If you want to learn more about the compass, episode one, two, three, four, and I think maybe even five, my earliest episodes. Guys, if you like the show, please follow and share, and I'll see you again soon.