Episode 389 - Jay Stringer, "The Civil War of Desire: Exploring Longings, Growth, and Healing"

Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick. Today, Michael is joined by author and therapist Jay Stringer for a deep and vulnerable conversation about his newest book, "Desire: The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow." Together, they explore the civil war of desire that shapes our lives—how our deepest longings birth both our greatest joys and our most profound heartaches.

Jay Stringer shares how his personal and professional experiences led him to unpack the complexities of desire, discussing its impact beyond sexuality and touching on meaning, intimacy, growth, and purpose. The episode explores how our desires are formed, suppressed, or distorted—often by trauma, shame, and cultural influences—and why understanding these origins is crucial to transformation.

Transcript

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Restoring the Soul podcast. It's Michael and it's another episode where I'm online with Jay Stringer. Hello, Jay. Hi, Michael. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. It's such an honor to be with you today. Well, it's great to be talking to you. We've talked once on the phone. Now we get to see each other face to face. Your reputation precedes you because I've quoted you a fair amount on this podcast regarding your book Unwanted. You have a new book that came out this week on March 3rd. It's widely available. It's a Random House book, which I think is really cool because it's going to go to a mass market and not just a Christian book, although the implications of it are profound for Christians. I'd like to start by reading the title, the subtitle, which sets it up, and then I've got to read the first 3 sentences to the book because it sets everything up. The book is called Desire The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow. And so as I find my page awkwardly while the camera continues, here's the first part of your book. You are engaged in a civil war with desire. Desire is the birthplace of your greatest joys, but it's also responsible for your deepest heartaches. That sentence or two sentences seems very obvious on the surface, but it goes so deep and touches so much. Can you unpack that? I can try to. I— so part of what I'm trying to grapple with is desire is responsible for all the best things in our life, like this podcast, Surfing for God. Unwanted does not exist without desire. And yet, as you and I both know, we see the vandalism symbolism of desire every single day of our lives. And so I think there's this kind of ambivalence of, I know desire has the potential to turn me into the best version of myself, but if we're honest, there are certain desires inside of us that either move towards self-sabotage or that, you know, great proverb of hope deferred makes the heart sick. And if you live with a deep longing for God, a deep longing for intimacy, a deep longing for meaning and purpose in your life, you're also going to have to get ready to metabolize disappointment as well. And so I think in my own life, working with clients, I just see people engaged in that civil war of desire all the time. And it's that sense of, I don't want my desires to come too alive because they might disrupt my life in ways that I could have never anticipated. But if I don't honor my desire, something in my soul literally becomes depressed. And if you're not engaging the life force and the desires that God has put inside of you, you're going to feel a deep disconnection with your life. So all of us, I would say, are in a deep civil war with our relationship to desire. You know, it's fascinating. I've had conversations with people where this issue comes up—desire, longing, yearning. Hope, sometimes the word eros in the traditional Greek meaning of that, which is more about longing and desire than it is about sexual eroticism. But how do you feel about desire? Like, what is your relationship with desire? And that's such a simple question. And people often just have a blank stare, like, I'm not speaking that language. But more often than not, people have said, I wish I didn't desire., you know, not necessarily in our counseling offices, looking at all the things about dreams of Disneyland with your kids and celebrating birthdays and accomplishing great life goals, but thinking about how desire has led them to pain. And I think in your book that you've handled that in such a beautiful way where you're highlighting the ways that the pain is there, but helping people to make sense of that so that they can move into the freedom of desire. So let's talk big picture. First, I want to say this book, I don't know if you see it this way, but this book feels like a magnum opus. It looks like it's about, it looks like the Brothers Karamazov. It's that thick and that dense of a book. But do not, listeners, do not fear. You can get through this and it's very well written. But it also just has an epic nature to it, which this topic requires. Were you aware when you were writing this, this sense of where do I begin and how do I begin to wrestle this concept down in a way that I can say everything I want to say? I mean, just hearing you talk, Michael, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's so true. It's such a big book. And I think for any of us that want to launch a creative project, you have this moment of inspiration of, you know, desire is one of those topics that's huge. And I had no idea what I was getting into. So I think I probably wrote around 400,000 words for this book between all the editing phases. And so part of what I was grappling with is after Unwanted, it was that question of where do I go from here? And so what I started realizing is, you know, Unwanted helped people to get more curious about their fantasies, about their porn searches. But part of what they would write back to me is just a sense of I'm still going back to the same marriage that I'm in. I'm still going back to a job that I don't like. I'm still returning to a family of origin that I don't know what to do with. And so I started, you know, reconciling, recognizing that, you know, people didn't just need help outgrowing a single framework. We needed to go deeper to the engine of desire itself. And so part of the complexity, I think, for a lot of us as Christians is we can grow up in a system that often teaches us to suppress our desires because they might turn into something selfish or, God forbid, sexual. But then a lot of us become adults and you get onto social media and you hear these influencers talk about like, what is it that you want to do with this one wild and precious life that you've been given? And there's kind of a new creed that's taken hold in our culture and it's do you, follow your heart. And yet, that no one is really teaching people how to actually form desire. So I started thinking about what did I need as I approached midlife? What did my clients need? And I really came down to that sense of we need to form our relationship to desire. But as you put really well, desire is not just about sex. It's not just about healing. So in the book, I talk about 5 core longings, 5 core desires that all of us have. And the way that I put it is that these are not à la carte menu options that you get to pick or choose. You have to choose all 5 desires if you are going to flourish. And so a quick example of that would be, you know, there are people that they get really passionate about mission or their church or a particular business idea that they have. And so they over-index their desire for meaning and purpose, and yet their marriages are imploding. Or you have some people that are all about intimacy and they just want to have a cozy relationship and deep friendships, but they have never done the work to understand their story. And so what they end up doing is handing over to their friends, to their spouse, a laundry list of needs and a need for validation because they have never addressed their story or confronted some of the places that they need to develop a desire for growth. So I started writing about desire and then it just started expanding, expanding and deepening. And I would say cornering me with the places in my own life where I was very underdeveloped in desire. And so I have written this book, but this book has cornered me so much in the last year or two. In what way has it cornered you? What's one of the major ways that you're willing to talk about, at least on the podcast here? Yeah, well, a couple things, Michael. One of the things that I started recognizing in my own marriage was, I would just kind of put it, one of the ideas that I'm working with that I can attribute to the Jungian therapist James Hollis is he has this notion of a provisional self. So a provisional self is not your real self, it's not your authentic self, but as a result of our upbringings, all of us have a self that we develop to be able to navigate our world. So when I think about my family of origin, My dad was a minister, Presbyterian pastor. My mom was the oldest daughter of Plymouth Brethren missionaries, and so we were steeped in kind of just Christian culture. My older sister took much more of the rebel route, like she was doing and saying things that were reflecting poorly upon my parents in her adolescence. My older brother he went more just the route of like philosophical rebellion. He was reading Nietzsche at 16, a lot of the great writers, you know, and critiquing my parents' parenting, my dad's sermons. And so I think part of the provisional self that I developed is if I am good, if I ask my mom questions about what it's like to have a dad that's so busy with people in the church and attending to crises, and I attend to my mom and I turn into a good therapist, then then, you know, our family life goes better. My dad, I would say, was very attuned to the world of ministry, but not necessarily attuned to my own heart in the midst of my own childhood. But when I started reading Lewis, Edwards, kind of that notion of dead theologians, the more that I formed my theological mind, the more that my relationship with my dad improved. And so that provisional self of kind of being a therapist to my mom and a a fellow elder, a fellow pastor to my dad, became part of what I entered into adulthood with. So when I arrive at the stage of marriage, that's part of what I want validated inside of me. And so there was a lot of false self in me. There was a lot of need for validation that the sense of like the two people on the planet that were supposed to see me and want me did not. And so when I got into marriage, it became just a place of a lot of entitlement, a place of like, I want you to want me. But the dilemma is that I had a lot of, I would say, you know, just my own civil war with regard to food and body that I come from a lot of like body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and as a man, never having a place to talk about those things. And so I arrived, I think, in marriage hating myself. And part of what I wanted out of my marriage was for her to want me even though I did not want myself. And so I think part of during this project, I started thinking about, like, sometimes attachment theory in the context of marriage can feel a little bit like a hostage situation that, like, I need you to want me, see me, attune to me, but I'm not doing that difficult work for myself. And so the category of differentiation or personal growth, which is the second core desire, has been my crucible in life is how do I grow in an authentic way? How do I offer radical hospitality towards my shame, towards the places that are underdeveloped in me, instead of outsourcing them to family and friends to take them away? So that's been the hardest part of this journey into midlife and my own chrysalis. I, I wouldn't say I'm in a midlife crisis, Michael, but I'm in a midlife chrysalis where I'm in a goop and I don't know what's going to emerge, but just so grateful to God that some this provisional self is dying so that something hopefully more authentic is emerging. And so that's a big part of this book is we've all got crucibles in our life, whether it's marriage, personal growth, meaning, purpose, or sexuality that are underdeveloped. And most of us try to escape our crucibles rather than actually desiring transformation within them. Hmm. And that desire to escape that crucible comes out of how our desire for growth was actually formed or not formed. I want to also, Jay, just thank you for sharing that. That was very vulnerable, and you write vulnerably through the book, but I appreciate it on the podcast. And what you illustrated was this idea, and there's a sentence in your book, something like, problems with desires and desire in general are not random., and that much of the time we don't have a lot of sense or idea about how those desires were shaped. And that's a core as well. So in your life, you just talked about your story and looking at your story to understand desire through that lens. And you also have this phrase, if we don't interrogate the origins of our desire, we surrender our ability to author or to write our story. So talk about, first of all, that it's not random, and then a little bit about what it looks like to begin to interrogate our desires. So all of us think that we are the authors of our desire. Like, we see a donut, we want food. We see porn and we're like, I want to go after that. Or, you know, I want to make a certain amount of money. But part of what I'm working with is this notion that all of our desires have been groomed into us. And so when you think about just even something as basic as a desire for green grass in your front yard, that has a history to it. So you have some people that long for green grass, but part of what we know about the history of that is that comes from 17th and 18th century wealthy aristocrats who had so much money and extra laborers that they could basically use people to develop fields for them. There was another study that I looked at in the early stages of the research for for this, that the researchers basically gave participants two words. And so some of these participants were given the word ocean and moon, and then about 20 minutes later, the researchers said, "Hey, what's your favorite detergent?" And the amount of people that answered Tide detergent that were given the word pairing ocean-moon was very statistically significant. And so part of what that researcher said is that desires and differences can be built up within us without any recognition of what we have. And so that's what I'm really trying to invite people into is, you know, I think a lot of Christianity sees the vandalism of God's world and the selfish inherent nature of some of our hearts and wants us to suppress it. But then when we also want to feel fully alive and move towards desires, but I don't think we're really interrogating where those desires came from.. So that's that sense of what does it mean for you to interrogate what you want? And so that could be, you know, a certain financial number, that could be, you know, a certain amount of weight that you want to get to in order to feel okay, it could be amount of copies that you've sold. So all of us, I would say, have something of a reflected sense of self. So when we're thinking about narcissism in our world, it's one of those diagnoses that just, you know, people say very readily. It's way overdiagnosed, but there's this sense of narcissism is not a fullness of self. It's much more of an absence of self. And so when I was in high school, we used to refer to this guy named Trey as, you know, he was a narcissist. He was full of himself. He wanted his Ford Mustang Cobra Saleen Edition. He had to have Tommy Hilfiger clothes. He had to have the most attractive girl in the school. And so we would always say Trey was full of himself. Self. And yet the reality is that what's driving so much of narcissism these days is an absence of self. And so what happens to us is we look to the world around us to reflect back our worth, to validate us, and that becomes the model of desire that we work is if I can get to this point in my career, if I can have this partner, if I can have a desire for that, then all of that reflects back to me that I'm okay and stabilizes me a bit. So, you I think it's just a really good question for all of us to say, not just like, what do I want, but why do I want that? And is there unaddressed trauma that's informing that? Are there multi-billion-dollar tech industries that are grooming our desires to open up our wallets? But this could save you a lot of heartache and a lot of money to just interrogate your desires. That's so true. I mean, as I'm scrolling through Instagram and I'm taking a 40-day break from it for Lent, I just get mad. I'm probably projecting my anger onto myself, but I get mad that it feels so predatory from these corporations and the fact that they'll look at my last search and then suddenly there's a leather wallet that pops up and that I have to have and like, oh, where did that come from? That's been suggestibility for a long time that my life will be complete if I have of that. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, you're right. They are, they're predatory. They know what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And you use that word groomed as well, that our desires are groomed. Let's talk for a minute about not the person that, you know, they say, I want a Cobra Mustang and the prettiest girl and Tommy Hilfiger, but the person that's in our counseling office or the person that's listening. When you I say, what do you desire? And they go, I have no idea. That something has deadened in them and been diminished. And, you know, back in the old days, I would just say, well, let's work on this cognitively and give them exercises. There's a neurological apparatus that's responsible for that as well. But where do you go in terms of helping people interrogate that? Lovely. So I go to two different words, and I didn't put them in the book, or maybe I put one of them, but they've just been coming to me in the last month or so. And where I typically start with clients would be like, think about an albatross and then think about bells. Now let me clarify. So an albatross is that thing that's just kind of like hovering over your life. It's a sense of it feels ominous. You have prayed to get rid of it. It's been something of a thorn in your side. So one of my albatrosses has just been my body through the years. Long before I got bound to porn, food was definitely the place that I had a lot of self-soothing, a lot of judgment, and a lot of escape. And so my own body, my own body dysmorphia, eating disorder has been one of the biggest albatrosses in my life. And so I have tried to optimize my life. I have tried to run marathons. I have tried to indulge food and just resign to the reality that this is just gonna plague me. I've tried to be much more bulimic at different points in my 20s. And so that's a particular albatross that I would say I need to get curious about my relationship to food and my desire for it, but also this sense of bells. So bells is taken from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard, and she said, "I never knew I was a bell until the moment I was lifted up and struck." And so what she's referring to there is this sense of like all of us have bell-like moments that have defined our life. It could be what it meant to be a parent. It could be something in our career that we were deeply proud of. It could be something all the way back to childhood where you're like, "This was one of the best days of my life to run through the cornfields, to ride my bike in a neighborhood, to just build forts with my friends for days and days on end." But there are bells ringing inside of us. And so I think when we start, we have to kind of say, "Where is the albatross in our life?" Like, what is that thorn in inside that we have prayed fervently to get rid of, and how can we develop curiosity about that, but then also return to something generative, which are the bells embedded within us. So as I've gone through this desire project, one of the parables that has just been cornering me is that of the parable of the talents and that sense of the master has given people different talents. And it's that question of what are you going to do with the talents inside of you? Well, I think of talents as like desires, and many of us are suppressing and burying our desires rather than really investing them. And so I think that's part of the invitation is, yes, there are certain desires that are wreaking havoc in your life, but I think the God of the universe has planted desires and talents inside of us that really need to be cultivated in our life. So I don't think it's possible to live with too much desire in our lives. I think we live with a distorted relationship, a suppressed relationship to desire. So if we can get more curious about the bells inside of us and get more curious about the albatrosses and where they come from, I think that will put us in a really good position. I want to just reflect back what you said, that you don't think that we can have too much desire, and that's going to be a frightening statement for some people. I want to echo that. That and say that the spiritual life rooted in a Christian, not just worldview, but experience of God, that we're experiencing the God that looks like Jesus, that we're really called to the intensification of desire. Because when Christ said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst," those might also be synonyms for desire. Hunger and thirst might sound like passion words and hunger and thirst to win the race, but it's a state of emptiness It's a state of electrolyte imbalance. It's a state of a grumbling stomach. It's a state of low blood sugar. And that's actually what we're called to. Yes. Yeah. When Paul talks about sin, it's often in reference to what, you know, sin is against righteousness. It's against the law. It's against things. So it's a type of anti. And so when I think about sinful desire, it's actually against the force of holy and good desire. So that sense of, you know, when I look out at the world, I'm so grateful for the desires of God. God desired diversity in our planet. You know, you can't go for a hike, you can't travel, you can't fly over the country without seeing the diversity of geography and landscapes and fauna and flora. Like, the world is imbued with the desires of God. And then for God to desire not to stay in heaven, but to make himself something of a servant and to make himself nothing. That's a desire. And so that's part of where I'm coming from is, you know, desire is about coming fully alive, but desire should also be moving us towards a life of love and service and self-emptying for the sake of others. And so all of that, the common thread is desire, whether you're coming fully alive or you're seeking justice and seeking mercy for others. All of that is because of the desires inside of us, because we are image bearers of the most desiring being in the world. The most desiring being in the world, which you're referencing God. And most people don't think of that. You know, Ronald Rolheiser, Wendy Farley, others have written about the longing of God and the eros of God, which can make people uncomfortable, right? Because, oh, God, that desire is bad, but it originates in God and God is desire. God is longing for his own creation. It's beautifully said. I mentioned Rohrheiser in the book where he talks about like the point of community is to essentially disciple, which means to teach children how to connect these raw, unformed desires to the life of the community. So he uses this example of food where if you're your child has an intense desire for food, your job as a parent and as a community is to take that raw desire and then to connect it to the table. So if your child has a desire for a good donut, it's like, great, go to that pastry shop, but then buy 6 of them and drop them off for friends and family to be able to bless them. Or maybe learn how to make a scone and then invite people over to your table so that the whole community can benefit. So it's this movement went from how do I connect these raw, unformed desires into communal life? And that's where we see the flourishing of desire really take root. I love that. You wrote a lovely section on community, and I've got to read this quote. I wrote it down and I put it on a Post-it note. Community is where shame-based belief systems go to die. And so as you talk about shame, then that opens the door to trauma, but even trauma has to be healed in community. And you make the point that individual therapy is great, but where people have actually been transformed the most is in group therapy and therefore in a kind of community. So I'll let you comment on that, but then I want to segue into talking about how trauma shapes our desires. Yeah, so part of what happens with regard to community is shame is a merciless narrator of our lives. So it is ready to document every single case of failure and shame that we have lived through in life, and it presents that evidence to us. And so part of what happens for all of us as, you know, individuals, clients, is we, we have very negative core beliefs about who we are. So we look at a particular story that we come from, and we usually give ourselves the worst possible interpretation of what ended up happening. So part of what happens in community is that we receive different interpretations. We begin to get different stories about what has happened to us. So one of the stories that I'm working with in this is from a poet by the name of Gregory Orr. He wrote a great book called Poetry as Survival. And long story short, Gregory was involved in a hunting accident that he essentially killed his brother. And there was this, you know, follow-up from his church that basically said this is all part of God's divine plan and sovereignty. They did not engage his heartache, his trauma at all. And then what he would say is that his parents were so heartbroken by what had happened to his brother that they never spoke to him about the accident again. So that's what happens within trauma. That's what happens within shame is that we begin to form these core beliefs about who we are. And as Gabor Maté and many others have said, shame and trauma are not just about what happened to us, it's what happens inside of us in the absence of an empathetic witness. And so for Gregory Orr, his family of origin, his church was not an empathetic witness to him at all. But what he says is he met a librarian sometime in middle school that gave him poetry. And it was reading the words of poets that helped him to understand his own interior world, and in many ways were a witness to the heartache of what he had experienced. And so that's what we need as community members, is to be able to tell some of the hardest, darkest stories of our life and allow our face, allow our stories to receive that empathetic witness. Because most of the time we want to go into isolation, we want to go and run and hide and believe the of shame. Thank you for that too. I mean, there's so many things you're saying that I want to just have a separate conversation about. When you're writing about trauma, you said that it's important to

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what stories of harm have we concluded are irrelevant to our current self? And I've certainly done this. I've said, oh, that, you know, that I've got things that I know that were abusive and traumatic, but no, that didn't affect me. And sometimes they can be relatively meaningless in the moment, but in the scope of things, it's, oh my goodness, that deeply formed me. Yes. Yeah. I remember one of my own stories with that was when I, you know, part of my relationship with food and my civil war that I've lived with my body is in middle school, my nickname was Donut. So I had a, you know, this kid in my, at my bus stop, his name was Brian. And I went to middle school for first day of school with a jelly donut, and that jelly donut dripped on my white shirt. And, you know, this was the era of the Pillsbury Doughboy commercials. And so what Brian did is he put his finger into my belly right where my jelly stain was and then did the Pillsbury Doughboy sound of "Ooh-hoo!" And so that became, you know, from that day forward, all through middle school, My nickname was Donut. And so part of growing up in that family system that I described earlier is that we had a lot of image management as a family. It was kind of like, we need to make sure our actions, we need to make sure everything is cleaned up and presentable when we're in the outside world. But there wasn't a lot of care and connection within our house. And so food became both a place of self-soothing for me, but also intense judgment that in the midst of my shame, in the midst of of my rage against myself, I would just eat my way all the way through that. So when I began to grapple with my relationship with food, my attachment to food, some of the family of origin wounds in my life, one of the stories that came up for me was being about 6 years old, and I used to get so excited for barbecues. Like my dad would get out the Weber grill, get the charcoal briquettes, and I would get so excited that I would have bowel movements and have to go to the bathroom. And I would make up songs to hamburgers about, you know, putting them with ham, like ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise. And I was just singing my 6-year-old heart out. Well, right after that, my, uh, one of my siblings said, Jay, do you live to eat or eat to live? And it was one of those comments that I didn't think much much about until my mid-20s, but there was this bind that I felt in the question of I loved food, I enjoyed it immensely, but because I, you know, lived to eat, I was a bit hedonistic as a 6-year-old, and I didn't just kind of eat the bare minimum, there was something wrong with me. And so I think just that, that's part of what I had to grapple with is, you know, just a sentence, a question of like, can I really enjoy my life? Can I enjoy food? Can I enjoy something? And in my family, it was a sense of, nope, if you enjoy your life, you're going to get shot at. So if you have a coat of many colors, if you grow, if you become a tall poppy, to use that great Australian example of, you don't want to be the tall poppy because you're the first to get cut down. I think that's part of what I started grappling with is, yes, I have all of my shame because of failures of my life, but some of my deepest wounds have actually come on the basis of my desire and on the basis of my glory, not of my failure. And just that sentence really, I think God used to invite me into, you know, part of your shame, part of the civil war that you've lived with is not just because you're a failure, but because you have had a heart that wants to be fully alive. So I'll say what you said again. Some of our deepest shame, some of your deepest shame, some of my deepest shame has been not my failure or my hall of fame of sin and addiction, but my, but my glory and my desire. And that's such an important thing to pay attention to, because especially as I've worked with men and women who come to my office and they have profound failure and sometimes very, very public shame, they're surprised to learn that there's a shame that's deeper than that, and it's the shame over their very being. And in your illustration, how demonic— and I mean that in the most literal sense— how diabolical that we would come to despise our simple desire for enjoyment, whether it's the jelly donut for you or anything like that. And I also have a hypothesis that today you're a foodie living in New York City and Will Guidara endorsed your book. So I imagine that you, you've spent some time in nice restaurants in New York City, but as you talk about it, I imagine like me, and I've been in a 12-step group for a couple of years for food issues and for overeating. So I can completely relate, but the simplest aspect of my longing to joy, there's something fundamentally wrong about that. And then how right that feels, how that feels so at home within us, but that that's completely counter to the narrative of God. Yeah, you're putting it so, so well. So one of the stories that just came up for me, Michael, was right after my first book, Unwanted, was released, I had some friends and family take me out to a great restaurant in Chicago, and it was like one of those 7-course meals. And the 4th course, or maybe the 5th course, the only word on the menu was donut. And when that dish arrived, it was more of like a bun than a classic donut that you think about. But I remember that civil war rising inside of me. And part of what I felt like I was being cornered by God with was, can you suffer the goodness of this donut. Like, you enjoyed it, and you have not allowed yourself to enjoy a donut since you were 12 years old. And that's what I think God is so interested in doing, is to corner us with experiences to be able to say, will you suffer the goodness of what you enjoy? Because all of us have, you know, that— I think of the Joseph story of you have this coat of many colors, and what happens to Joseph is he ends up in a ditch as a result of that. Some of us, I think of the great— it's a film from I think the year I was born, 1983, Amadeus, Best Picture. You see part of Antonio Salieri's deep envy of Mozart who's been given this gift. And Antonio Salieri is at war, he's at odds with the reality that God could give such gifting, such revelation to a man that he thinks is a buffoon. And so Salieri hates Mozart. And that, I think, is true for a lot of us, is we have been deeply envied in our life as a result of our desires, as a result of our envy. And so when you live with a lot of desire, you're gonna be shot at, you're gonna be misunderstood. And so for many of us, there's a sense of failure almost is easier, resignation, some level of depression is almost easier to bear than someone being against me or someone being opposed to what I'm doing in the world. Say again what you said about bearing the suffering of our own desire or bearing the suffering of enjoying goodness. Say more about that. Yeah, like that, that moment for me with the donut was a sense of integration. And so when I think about— I'll kind of pivot from that donut story to what I'm doing with my life these days with my desire for food. But so I live in New York City, a lot of great bakeries all over town. And so part of what I've been doing on weekends that I'm in town is I will pick bakeries usually within like 8 to 10 miles of my home on Saturday or Sunday mornings, and I will go run to these bakeries and I will gather a bunch of treats, selection, and then I will city bike back to our apartment. And it's become a ritual tradition in my family. If I come back into the door on Saturday or Sunday without pastries, my kids are just giving me this look like, "You're such a pathetic dad. Where are our pastries?" And so I come back and we eat these really good treats, sweet and savory. But part of why I think I've begun doing that is I'm trying to integrate my life. I'm trying to go back to that 6-year-old boy by saying, "You loved food." But then there was also this 12-year-old boy inside of me that loved the comfort of food. But then there was also, I think, a twin 12-year-old that was much more sadistical and mean that was always criticizing me for soothing. So I have the 6-year-old, these two 12-year-old twins inside of me, but then I also have a 27-year-old, mid-20s man that like loved running, loved climbing mountains and summiting Mount Rainier and kind of testing my body to the limits. But then I also had a man in his 30s that kind of rejected food on the basis of, I just don't want to enjoy it, but I also don't want to just run and over-exercise and try and optimize my life. So now as a man in his 40s, I'm trying to bring all of that together now. So the run, you know, it is the integration of that 20-year-old and that 6-year-old by being able to say, you know, your desires to run, your desires for good food are so good. And then going back to these 12-year-old boys inside of me by saying, I'm going to teach you how to eat really good food, not in isolation, not at midnight, not like sneaking an extra donut or two after church and just eating in the bathroom, but let's bring all this to the table and really suffer what it means to enjoy this food. And so I think, you know, one of the definitions I've loved about repentance from our friend Dan Allender is repentance is turning to the party that God is throwing in your honor. And I think that's a good picture of what it means to suffer is that the God of the universe is throwing a party. And it might come through the language of desire, of God is inviting us to suffer, to enjoy being enjoyed, but to also know that he has planted things in our hearts that our hearts are eager, that ache to experience. And so whenever we enjoy goodness, especially in the context of the failures of our life, that Hall of Fame, how did you put it, Michael, the Hall of Fame of failures in our life? That's the table that God is inviting us into is it's a party of celebration for the desires that he has put inside us.