Episode 413: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Andy Crouch, "Create More Than You Consume"

Andy Crouch's The Tech-Wise Family isn't about keeping pornography out of your home. It's about building the kind of home where you know what you actually want — and where technology doesn't quietly replace it. In part two of this conversation, Michael and Andy get into the ten commitments at the heart of the book, and they're not what you'd expect.

They talk about why the goal is wisdom and courage rather than limits, and how untethered access to technology quietly reinforces the fear of being known. They discuss what Sabbath actually looks like — not collapsing on the couch but feasting, playing, worshipping, and resting — and why Andy thinks it's the most broken commandment. They get into what kids say they actually want help with when it comes to devices, which turns out not to be pornography but sleep. And the episode ends somewhere no one expects: at the bedside of the dying, and what it means to be a family that knows how to show up, put the phone down, and stay.

Transcript

— Producer Introduction

Brian Beatty 0:00

Hello and welcome to Restoring the Soul with Michael John Kusick. I'm your producer Brian Beatty. Just a few more weeks left in our soul care summer as we look back at some of the most important episodes of our 10-year history. Last week we brought you part one of Michael's conversation with Andy Crouch about his book, The Techwise Family. And if that one made you think, this one is going to make you act. This is the second of two conversations that couldn't be better timed for the start of a new school year. Andy walks through the ten commitments at the heart of the book. From Sabbath and boredom to pornography and death. And every one of them is more about what we want and what we're willing to give up. Here's part two, and your host, Michael John Kusick.

Michael John Cusick 0:53

Andy, welcome back to part two of our conversation about your newest book, The Techwise Family.

Andy Crouch 0:59

Double trouble. Glad to still be talking about it.

Michael John Cusick 1:02

Yeah, there you go. In this conversation, there's there's so much to talk about. In the mid to last section of the book, you go deep into uh three decisions that you encourage people to do, and you've done this with your children and in your family, and then ten commitments. But before we jump into those, there's a quote that I think frames all this. And you have a section on sex and pornography online. And I really appreciated how you handled this because uh what I've written on and what I teach and work on is in sexual brokenness. But you talked about how you were very intentional about putting that at the end of the book because so many parents want to know exactly what to do about that and how to set limits. But you wrote this. You said the truth is that if we build our family's technological life around trying to keep porn out, we will fail. Pornography saturates our society even if you somehow manage to never click on not

— Welcome to Part Two

Michael John Cusick 2:01

for work websites. And and so it's this idea

— Start with What You Really Want

Michael John Cusick 2:04

of you're really proposing about how to build something into the hearts of kids and building something into families and marriages so that these other appetites don't have to be indulged. And will you talk about that?

Andy Crouch 2:20

Yes, exactly. This this book, um, you know, and in uh the previous podcast, I said, you know, it's not about limits primarily, because I think that's a very limiting way to live. It's actually about how to fill our lives with what we really want. And what we're going to find is we fill our lives with what we what we most desire when we reflect on what we want, on who we want to become, on how we want to do that together, uh, we then we then kind of discover the ways in which technology could prevent us from getting what we really want. And also, I think, and and porn is a very clear example of this, the way that it gives us kind of simulations of what we want, but not the real thing. So the whole book is about, hey, let's let's step back before we even ask, like, how much screen time should anybody have, let's ask what do we really want as a family, and let's build from there. And then we'll, along the way, we'll examine together how technology is helping or not helping. And because um there's so much anxiety and and appropriately so at in what at one level

— Building for Flourishing, Not Against Pornography

Andy Crouch 3:22

around porn, I didn't want to jump into that at the beginning. I wanted to set this bigger picture of a full, flourishing, fully relational life where we're all pursuing wisdom and courage together. We can talk more about that. And then in that context, talk about all right, now how do we handle the fact that, you know, flooding in like Harry Potter's invitation to Hogwarts are all these, you know, just through every crack in our lives uh are these sexualized kind of pseudo-sexualized images uh of an alternative life, a simulated life. Um, but but we've got to know what the real life is before we know how to resist effectively the simulation.

Michael John Cusick 3:59

So you touched on what I uh said at the very beginning of part one of our interview, and that was this idea that this was really challenging for me. And it's great to think about, okay, I can do this and this and this, but you raise this question of you invite people to think about what they want, and that takes work, that takes time, that takes stillness. And um it it's so easy to want to be force fed or told what to do. But when you ask the question, what do I want? And what kind of family do we want to shape, it doesn't work that way.

Andy Crouch 4:31

That's so true. And I'm in the midst of this because uh I've my wife and I are in a in a big life transition. Our our son is off to college, our daughter is a senior in high school, and we're just beginning to kind of gingerly, or at least I'm gingerly stepping up to this question of what do we want for our marriage once it's not about daily raising of kids. And I will say, uh I uh not uh at all saying this is true for my wife Catherine, but I actually resist that quite deeply, the the work of

— The Work of Asking What We Want

Andy Crouch 5:01

identifying what we would want to choose together. I I have discovered uh how resistant I am to just even exploring that question because it's vulnerable, it opens you up to a kind of failure that doesn't happen if you just take the default settings and keep being entertained and doing the things you already like to do. Uh, but it's where I think all real growth starts there. And that is where I kind of start the book because I say, well, what what do you want family to be? What why did why do we enter into these covenants with people? Um

— Wisdom and Courage as a Family Mission

Andy Crouch 5:33

and I and I make the case that what we should want from family is to become the kind of persons we really want to be, which is people of wisdom and people of courage, and that we're very unlikely to become those things without family of some kind, whether it's the church family or our our marriage or our parenting or our extended family. And uh I try to make the case that uh that until you choose that, uh technology is going to give you a really great alternative solution uh or simulation, but it's not gonna give you the real thing.

Michael John Cusick 6:04

Yeah, and you touched on the three decisions. You also talk about shaping space and structuring time. Um talk about those.

Andy Crouch 6:12

Yeah, so these are kind of the I think the baseline or beginning steps we can take is to uh is to look at the space we live in and ask what kind of life is this nudging me toward or helping me uh embrace? And the reality is uh the device makers would like you to have lots of devices in that space, and they'll show you these amazing pictures of how happy your family will be if you have a TV there and if you have an Alexa and you have a, you know, fill in all the devices we want in our homes. In our home, we decided we wanted those things to be at the edges. So the things that sort of offered easy everywhere and offered kind of low-cost distraction, uh, eventually we did get a television uh and where did we want that to be? We didn't want that at the center. We wanted those things at the edges. So the TV is in the basement. The basement is fine. It's not, you know, it's fine to go to the basement, but it's just not the center of the house. And in the center of the house, we want things that rewarded creativity and skill

— Shaping Space: Devices at the Edges

Andy Crouch 7:06

and active engagement because we want our kids to sort of grow up without us even having to say it uh all the time. We want to create more than we consume. And when you walk into our home, uh what I think you'd see if you walk into our first floor where we spend most of our time is you'd see very few devices and you'd see lots of things that only work if you bring yourself to them. Uh so a grand piano and a crafts table and books and you know, kitchen where you can cook. Um so that's the space part. I basically say, you know, put the things you most want to be your your life to be about at the center of your space and put the things that are just easy and entertaining at the edges. And then the time piece is really comes out of this beautiful biblical idea of Sabbath. Uh, and we've kind of extended it. In addition to one day a week, uh, I think a good thing to aim for is one hour a day, also one day a week, and then actually one week a year, our family has tried to turn off all the devices we can. I mean, we don't quite go down to the basement and throw the main circuit breaker and disconnect the electric source. I have thought about that. Um, I do think refrigeration is a useful thing to just have going all the time. So I, you know, I want things to stay frozen, I guess. But but we do, like at dinner time, we turn off the electric lights most nights and we light candles. Uh it's dark at night, and instead of turning on the electric lights, we light candles. And turns out that changes dinner in really amazing ways. It's really cool. Uh so one hour a day, we turn as many of the devices off as we can. Certainly all the little phones and pads and tablets, all those things get put away. One day a week for us, that's uh Sunday, we do the same. And then one week a year during our vacation, which we're able to take in the summer, uh, all that stuff gets turned off. And man, especially that week thing, you go through quite a bit of withdrawal, but on the other side of the withdrawal, it gets so great because you discover all these fun things to do that don't require devices.

Michael John Cusick 9:07

That's that's so cool. And I hope that uh for our listeners as well as for me, I'm gonna think those through and have conversations in my family about what that looks like. I love the thing about the candles, and I remember reading that in the book, and I I thought of how Jews start the Sabbath. How they you know they they light candles and they they break the bread. And um going back to what you said about being outside, I I really do think there's importance about sensory aliveness, touch, taste, sight, smell, sound. And when you when you shift the lighting and when you have candles, if there's a fragrance to it, and even the the warmth of it, there's something sensory about that that engages us at a different sensory level.

Andy Crouch 9:47

Oh, that's so good. I haven't thought of it quite in that way, but it's so it's totally true. And also it's simply a change, and that's good for us too. You know, it's uh and uh can candles also flicker, which I think is part of part of that. Like there's this variable quality to the light that's not true of incandescent or you know, whatever light. So that's really nice. Yeah, it's multi-sensory.

— Candles, Sabbath, and Sensory Life

Michael John Cusick 10:09

And so, Andy, I'd like to thank our sponsor, the Yankee Candle Company, for sponsoring this half of the show. Go to Yankee Candle.com on your device right now and get 20% off.

Andy Crouch 10:23

So let's jump into the Man, if the worst if if all that happened because of techwise family is uh a bunch more candles got sold, that would actually be a major achievement in my in my view.

Michael John Cusick 10:34

That's funny. Let's jump into the t uh the the ten techwise commitments. And you start with um the commitment is to develop wisdom and courage as a family, and you talked about that already. Is that something that you and your wife kind of started even before you had kids, or did you have to craft that?

Andy Crouch 10:52

You know, I m I think that emerged over time. A lot of a lot of what's in this book, you know, honestly, we're uh we arrived at kind of through trial and error. Um, and I talk about that some in the book, at least. I certainly don't try to present it as, you know, oh, we had this all figured out, and then we, you know, had our little ones and from day one had this approach. Uh we really figured it out as we went along. And I think along the way we realized we need to find a way to explain to our kids why we are making these weird decisions, like no video games, which was really tough for my son when he was eight or nine years old. Um, and I realized, well, Timothy, little Timothy, that was his name. Um, it's because we're trying to develop something different in you that we don't really

— Commitment 1: Develop Wisdom and Courage

Andy Crouch 11:36

think video games will help. I guess you can start from the beginning. If you're young parents with either no children or tiny children, you can actually say, hey, wisdom and courage is going to be our thing. And our some of our best friends have this beautiful family mission statement they wrote uh way before their kids were born. It's just a beautiful summary of what they want to be as a family. And uh honestly, we didn't do that except that we did kind of iterate and realize, oh, here are the values that we need to really make explicit for our kids to explain some of the instinctual choices we're making about what we do and don't use and why.

Michael John Cusick 12:10

Yeah, and and I'm not trying to be funny when I say this because I know we're doing a lot of laughing, but nobody wakes up in the morning and says, we want to develop foolishness and cowardness as a family and in our children. But but if you if you're not proactive and intentional about this and you just give untethered access to this technology, that that's really what can happen.

Andy Crouch 12:31

It really can happen. And it it is happening. I mean, uh Sherry Turkle studies uh college students primarily and how they use devices, uh especially media, texting, and social media. And they all prefer to text in their relationships rather than talk because when you text, you're in control. And that's the the principal reason they give is you you know exactly what you said, you get to decide when you say it. There's no nonverbal messages that you don't have complete control over. But underneath that is a is fear, right? It's a fear of being known, it's a fear of not being in control. I I hesitate to call it cowardice full-blown, perhaps, but it's it's not courage.

— Nobody Plans to Raise Foolish, Fearful Kids

Andy Crouch 13:12

And uh and and the idea that we can just in some neutral way just add these devices to our lives and they won't reinforce that deep desire in all of us not to be known, not to be at risk, not to be out of control. Uh it would be very foolish, actually, to think that these things won't reinforce the worst in us if we're not very intentional.

— Technology Reinforces the Fear of Being Known

Michael John Cusick 13:33

Yeah, I I love the fact that your books, and especially in uh Strong and Weak, we had talked about this in the very first time we had a conversation, that you intentionally take risks and try to be vulnerable every time you speak. And so this whole idea of the vulnerability that you don't have to step into uh by communicating through technology, and and we often don't think about that.

Andy Crouch 13:57

Right, right, right. And we like it. I mean, it's appealing. Oh, this is so much better. Uh and and hey, for logistics, it's all good. I mean, I you know, if I'm scheduling where to pick up my wife when she gets home on the train, I'd much rather do that by text. But if I'm breaking up with someone back at my teenagers, or if I'm having a conflict with my wife, like the last thing we want to do is uh remove context from that, remove risk from that. Like those are moments when you really need to be um you need to be vulnerable in order to grow through whatever that experience is.

Michael John Cusick 14:31

So your next uh of the 10 commitments is we

— Vulnerability Requires Risk

Michael John Cusick 14:35

want to create more than we consume. And you talked about that in terms of rewarding skill and active engagement. But just comment on that, creating.

Andy Crouch 14:43

Yeah, just I mean, putting in front of, especially in front of kids, uh, opportunities to actually extend their skill in thick uh ways and in challenging ways rather than the easy rewards of video games and little little games on the problem with um all computer games is they're basically too rewarding. Uh if you really want to create, you need to meet significant resistance. Now, there are a couple kind of edge cases. I think Minecraft can be genuinely quite creative for kids, but I don't know. I mean, there's an opportunity cost that that child is playing Minecraft, could be out, could be playing with real Legos, could be out playing in the backyard. I I hate for them to miss out on that. So we want our kids to grow up thinking, uh well, knowing that their parents expected them to create things and to do things that were hard in order to learn how to create, um, rather than just to

— Commitment 3: Create More Than You Consume

Andy Crouch 15:33

kind of fool around. Um, so you know, we had a craft table stocked with all kinds of art supplies and it got really messy. It was designed to be cleaned up relatively easy. You know, one of the things about this whole approach um is creativity is actually much messier for the parent. So, like if you invite your kid to cook with you, you are going to be cleaning up the kitchen a lot for a lot longer than if you don't. And if you tell your kid to finger paint, like it's gonna be a mess. And and if you hand them that iPad and let them play a game, all you have to do is like take a little cloth and wipe the little fingerprints off it, and it'll be clean again. It's so much easier for the parent, but it's much less creative for the kid.

Michael John Cusick 16:13

Yeah, when my kids were little, the the thing was is uh put in a video and have them watch the video uh because of what's required otherwise. And of course, we never did that as parents very much.

Andy Crouch 16:25

I've heard people do that.

Michael John Cusick 16:27

I know I have a friend, a friend that did that once, or one of one of my counseling clients, but of course I would never do that. So the next one is you talked about this already, the rhythms of the hour a day, the day a week, but at the end of that commitment, you say turning off devices so that you can worship, play, feast, and rest together. And I I just wonder how radical that is for so many families.

Andy Crouch 16:52

Uh it's the most broken commandment, I think, pretty clearly. I mean, maybe except for you shall have no other gods before me, which all of us do. But honor the Sabbath, keep it holy, you shall not do any work, your maidservant, your manservant, the alien in your towns, like so. It's this comprehensive economic system that has built in a way for everyone in the system to rest. Who does this? No, no one does this in

— Commitment 4: One Hour, One Day, One Week

Andy Crouch 17:15

our in our world. Uh the Jews attempt to keep it, and in some ways they do keep it. Um but us Gentiles and Christians who for whom this commandment applies just as much, we do not do this. Uh, but it is so healthy when you do it. And when you see Sabbath not just as exhausted, like collapsing after a week of toil, but you see it as this other way of being, and you have a day where you can make that recipe that takes too long during the weekdays, and you and and we abridge all diets, like we do not count calories on the Sabbath, we have ice cream on the Sabbath, we and then we worship on the Sabbath, right? And

— The Most Broken Commandment

Andy Crouch 17:54

we uh we go together to the house of God and are fed uh there as well. And this is just being encroached upon in a thousand ways, not just by devices, but by our whole culture as we exit the vestiges of Christendom. It's a great loss because if you don't have Sabbath built into your life, you are you're instead of living a life of work and rest, which which we're made for, you're you're ending up living a life of toil and leisure. And leisure is just kind of exhausted, or it's just inactivity, even if it's pleasurable. It's just like collapsing on the couch and watching a football game. And that's not Sabbath. Sabbath is this active, regenerative um change of rhythm and pace that's so good for people and for families and relationships, and none of us do it because we have forgotten the Sabbath.

Michael John Cusick 18:48

Well, the way you describe it, it sounds so life-giving, especially as you say play and feast. Yeah. And I just don't think we we think of it in those terms. Uh onto a more practical commitment. Um, and of course, Sabbath is actually practical too. But you say that uh we wake up before our devices do, and we quote, go to bed before our devices do.

Andy Crouch 19:50

Yeah. So this is just trying to deal with I I mean, honestly, uh, I think it's an epidemic of being entangled. Not it's not so much with our phones per se, it's with the world the phones bring into our bedrooms and into our the time that's meant to be rest. I mean, you know, the simp the principle of the Sabbath is usually thought of as one day a week, but there's also this basic circadian reality to being a creature, which is our need to rest. And the problem is our devices don't need to rest. Like they would happily glow all day, every day, all night. Um, they would happily keep notifying us through the night of whatever's happening, and we're now in a globalized world that's always got more things for us to read and be anxious about. Um and I think when you do that, you really disrupt, I mean, you literally disrupt sleep. And by the way, uh, you know, parents, when you ask parents what they're worried

— Commitment 5: Wake Up Before Your Devices Do

Andy Crouch 20:39

about with their kids and devices, they usually talk about sexual content and that they're they're right to be concerned about that. But when you ask kids what they wish their parents would help them with with their devices, the overwhelming answer that kids give is this is affecting my sleep, and I need help uh handling that, I need help managing that. And most parents have no idea how much is coming into their kids'

— What Kids Actually Want Help With

Andy Crouch 21:02

lives. Like at 2 a.m. in the morning, text messages are coming in. And those are full of euphoria and full of anxiety and full of all the things that teenage life is full of. And you used to come home from school, uh, and you would be, you know, you'd have that intense experience in middle school or high school, just it's relationally intense, it's it's bound up with all kinds of challenges, but you'd come home and you'd be insulated from it. Uh, and maybe you talk on the phone in my day, in my high school days, for an hour or two with your friends at night, but then you'd hang up the phone and you'd go to your bedroom and you'd be still, and that world wouldn't be in the bedroom with you. And now it's in the bedroom with you. And I don't think this is good for adults, and I know it's not good for um kids. And I think it's best if we just make it a family-wide rule. The devices sleep downstairs, they go to bed before we do. We wake up, it's not the first thing we do in the morning to check them. They'll wait. That's the other thing about devices, they'll wait. Uh, and we've got other things we need in our life beyond just the the stream of stimulation that these things would offer us uh all day and all night if we let them.

Michael John Cusick 22:08

So is that what you do in your family? Is all the devices go downstairs? They don't even go into the bedrooms.

Andy Crouch 22:14

Well, so uh we haven't talked about this, but every chapter in this book, once it gets into the kind of practical stuff, ends with this uh uh little section called Crouch Family Reality Check, uh, in which I disclose all the ways in which our family aspires to this commitment, but doesn't always achieve it. So let me say a couple things. One is my wife often does bring her phone into our bedroom with her because she has a sane relationship with her device more than any of the rest of us do. And she literally just plugs it in. Uses it as an alarm clock and doesn't let it glow at her at night. So I do not have the self-discipline to do that. So I leave mine downstairs. With our kids, honestly, I mean our daughter's a senior in high school now. Um, as this dawned on me over the they both got uh kind of smartphones uh around uh the time they started driving, so 16. Uh it was not perfectly observed. And there was some resistance from the teenage members of the household. Although interestingly, just a couple weeks ago, I noticed that my daughter was taking her phone to bed with her. I said, you know, Aim, I think maybe we should really take this more seriously.

— The Crouch Family Reality Check

Andy Crouch 23:18

And she said, you know, you're right. And she's been plugging it in downstairs every night since then. Um and and I do too.

Michael John Cusick 23:25

Uh that's I think that's great. I'm you're inspiring me. And uh and not just to change my behavior, but truly, I I can't help but think of this this quote. I don't know if it was Thomas Merton or Ronald Rollheiser, but all Christian spirituality is uh rooted to what we do with the um unrest in our soul. And and so much of my draw and compulsion to check the news, to look for the text messages, to get one more email in, is I have to face this restlessness inside of me. And I'm not I'm not suggesting that every time I feel restless, you know, I quote a Bible verse, but instead um to be still.

Andy Crouch 24:08

Yeah, that's so good.

Michael John Cusick 24:10

So we're not gonna have time to go through the rest of these, but I've got to do two more. Um and number nine in your book is we learn to sing together rather than letting recorded and amplified music take over our lives in worship. Um that's really, really as I think about that, first place my mind went to was the Von Trapp family. And in in the Sound of Music movie, I mean it's just a joy. And um, I've met a couple of members

— Restlessness and the Compulsion to Check

Michael John Cusick 24:37

of your family, and I know there's m uh very musical, but what does that look like for you guys?

Andy Crouch 24:43

I mean, for us, we literally do sing, especially on Sundays. Um, we sing hymns uh as part of either some some mornings we're doing family church, as we call it, a time for kind of discipling our kids, and we sing as part of that, uh, and we make music together in other ways. Um I was worried about this chapter, honestly, because I know not everybody, I mean, I'm I'm I'm I'm a professional musician. My wife was trained as an amateur musician. I know not everybody was. Um, and I almost could have written a chapter that said we play sports together, you know, and then my family would be very awkward, and other families would be like, oh yeah, that's us. Um and uh but I think there

— Commitment 9: Sing Together

Andy Crouch 25:21

is something about singing that it's just been so totally lost, but it used to be totally normal, and it wasn't all von Trapp family. Um, it was just normal for families uh to sing, like before recorded music. This is what you did when you were together. And sometimes it was popular songs, sometimes it was religious songs. It was just part of ordinary life, and it is still part of ordinary life in many Christian cultures that haven't been fully technologized. I mean, some some of us have had the great privilege of visiting uh the nation of

— What We Lost When Music Became Something We Only Consume

Andy Crouch 25:53

Haiti, um, which is a very materially poor nation. But I tell you one way in which Haiti is not poor, and it is not musically poor, because Haitians can sing together in ways we we Westerners, we North Americans cannot imagine. I just think this is a very fundamental component of health. And I worry that it will make families that just feel like, oh, we don't have, you know, we could never do that, make them just feel guilty, which I don't intend to do. But I also just want to awaken in us this sense we've lost something that we used to all have, and now we have wonderful, endless recorded music, but we don't make music. And I think something is lost there. And and let's at least try to gingerly edge toward re regaining what we l what we lost.

Michael John Cusick 26:39

Aaron Ross Powell, you know, uh people that might uh find it odd or vulnerable to sing together as a family wouldn't hesitate to pay a lot of money for a ticket to their favorite concert, the lights go out, and then they sing along. Yeah, that's true. There's a sense of belonging and almost family there. So the la last one, and this is what I I love the most because it was a summary, but also just so articulate. You said this commitment to show up in person for the big events of life, and that we learn how to be human by being fully present at our moments of greatest vulnerability. That sounds like if I if I could do that in and of itself, I'd I'd be a happy person.

Andy Crouch 27:19

Wow. Wow. You know, and in the last podcast, we talked about how technology does help with things like medical moments, where we need uh reliability and we need certain kinds of uh you know devices that really do help. But it has also inserted itself very profoundly in the two most profound moments of human life, which is birth and death. So many, many births now take place in a medical environment, and there are good medical reasons for this, and and both births of our own children took place in

— Commitment 10: Show Up in Person for the Big Moments

Andy Crouch 27:49

a medical environment, and many, many deaths take place in a medical environment, and there's less good reasons for that, to be honest. Um, I mean, with birth, uh there's real risk in childbirth that needs to be cared for, and we have good medical ways to do that. But when you're dying, you're dying, and we're not gonna fix that medically. Like we're not gonna make you live forever. And so there's a moment at which the medical efforts um have passed their usefulness and are not going to extend life in a helpful way. And at that moment, the hospital, which is the technological environment, par excellence, is the worst place to be. At the very moment when you need to be held

— Being Present at Birth and Death

Andy Crouch 28:30

by other people, when you need to be surrounded by people, and the last thing you need is these devices that are not going to do any more for you than certain basic uh pain relief, which doesn't require the whole panoply of the hospital to administer. And people are dying in unbelievable isolation, um, and in ways that none of us would choose if we had the foresight to really understand what it meant. Um, so the last chapter of the book is about birth and death and about our willingness to not technologically mediate those things, uh, but to actually be present for them and to discover that actually at these moments of great, I mean, just the greatest human mystery, uh, that devices can't help and they mostly distract. And what is really important is for us to be there with each other. Uh, and of course, the problem is technology is causing us to forget or never learn how to be present and how to be present with suffering and how to be present with waiting, whether it's the waiting of childbirth or the waiting that comes with the uncertainty of when a person will pass from life to whatever is in the life to come. So that's uh I there's one family that read my book, and the kids are like eight and ten years old, and you know, the last line of that commitment of that you read part of is we hope to die in one another's arms. And the kids thought this was hilarious, and they like they they they sort of chant it as this melodramatic, we hope to die in one another's arms. And I totally see why eight and ten-year-olds would find it funny. And I also think it's the most profound gift we could ever give each other is the the promise that at that moment when my life is ending, that you will be there holding me as my family, and we won't be sending text messages at that point, and we'll know how to do that for each other because we've been practicing it all along. That's I think what I really hope uh people take away from that last chapter.

Michael John Cusick 30:20

Wow. This this conversation, both of them, has just been such a gift, and as always, your thoughts and your writing are all about the flourishing of life and the human person. So thanks for what you do, and uh I hope it won't be too long before we have another conversation.

Andy Crouch 30:38

Thank you, Michael. It's wonderful to get to talk.

Brian Beatty 30:41

So thank you for listening to another episode of Restoring the Soul. We want you to know that Restoring the Soul is so much more than a podcast. What we're all about is helping couples and individuals get unstuck. You know how some people go to counseling or marriage therapy for months or even years and never really get anywhere? Our intensive programs help clients get unstuck in as little as two weeks. To learn more, visit restoring the soul.com. That's restoring the soul.com.