Why Your Mental Health is an "Embodied" Experience 🧬🙏

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian.

00:00:31
Speaker 2: You call to make a difference in mental health.

00:00:32
Speaker 1: Columbia International University offers graduate counseling degrees that combine professional excellence with Biblical truth from associates. Through doctoral program, CiU prepares you to bring healing and wholeness to others through a biblically based framework of compassion and care. Whether it's their k CREP accredited Masters in Clinical Counseling or their PhD in counselor Education and Supervision, You'll learn from experience faculty who integrate faith with real world application to cultivate a kingdom in through disciples who counsel, teach, and train. Whether you're starting your journey or advancing your career, CiU's counseling programs equip you to serve others both professionally and spiritually.

00:01:12
Speaker 2: Visit CiU dot edu.

00:01:13
Speaker 1: To learn more about making a difference in mental health through christ centered education.

00:01:18
Speaker 2: That's CiU dot edu. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian.

00:01:23
Speaker 1: I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined by doctor Ben Matthew. Ben is a professor of counseling at counselor Education at Columbia International University, and we're going to be doing a series here on faith and mental health, and we're going to start by talking about an article that I actually had one of the authors on the show. So you can catch that episode if you'd like. I'll link it in the show notes. But it's an article that deals with what are called deaths of despair, and so these authors looked at how various sorts of different deaths of despair, suicide, deaths from alcohol and drugs, those kind of things were correlated to the lifting of what are called blue laws, or allowing to have retail on Sundays. And so found this to be really compelling and wanted to have been on to talk a little bit about let's differentiate what it looks like to be in despair versus just to be a little sad or have some.

00:02:24
Speaker 2: Depression in those kind of things.

00:02:26
Speaker 1: So we're going to start there and then we'll progress through the rest of the series talking about various different elements of faith and mental health. So Ben, welcome to the show again. It's great to have you back.

00:02:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love these conversations. Appreciate you having me back.

00:02:38
Speaker 2: James, Absolutely, I'm looking forward to this one.

00:02:41
Speaker 1: I found this article to be really fascinating and I'm just sort of wondering if you can give a little bit of your take on some of it.

00:02:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, like you mentioned, is trying to engage from both sociological and economic values, which I found in itself just fascin That's not my area, but man, was it just really interesting to kind of see how they were developing some of these ideas. How we talked about this earlier, some of these seemingly innocuous decisions on economics on you know, store hours have pretty large implications to society and things like that as well. For me, it was helpful, particularly to kind of then think through if there is this category that they call despair, what that kind of plays itself. Out in terms of the trajectory that gets to despair. That part is something that I deal with, whether it is kind of just the hardships of life and difficulties of adjustment to circumstances, or whether it gets into more of a clinical construct something we often refer to as major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders. But then there's this other category that they've bring up in their paper that's something a little beyond just the individual response. It's kind of this existential despair dread that is formed by societal realities, either disengagement from that or other implication. So I just it got me thinking in a lot of good ways that I'm sure it did with you, both the psychological theological. I mean, my economics professor would be very happy about this too.

00:04:27
Speaker 1: So well, it's fine, yeah, because they do deal with and I'm much more sort of I've thought through more of the sociological dynamics than I have the psychological dynamics, and so from a sociological perspective, I sort of look at it and say, this is really interesting, because you are hearing an awful lot I mean, everything from Bowling Alone, which I think was the late nineties or in early two thousands book All the way into Now you know John Bravaki's work on the Meaning Christ. You hear Jordan Peterson talk about this of the varying amounts. You hear all the crisis with boys.

00:05:06
Speaker 2: Young men, you know.

00:05:08
Speaker 1: And so when you're looking at those big broad cultural trends and I read an article like this, it's kind of like, yeah, all this starts to fit together in sort of a loose hodgepodge of oh, yeah, we've got cracks here, cracks here, cracks here, and it's all feels like it's crumbling apart. And so that that sort of social setting I'm envisioning then exacerbates individual psychological problems.

00:05:37
Speaker 2: But how do you see that connection?

00:05:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was interesting. I think the article that actually had a figure in one of the later appendices about kind of the the downward trend of social connection and then around like the eighties and nineties you saw this other trend line going up regarding things. And I think the three categories they talked about were like suicidality, liver disease which is usually because of increased alcohol abuse, and some other indicators that as you saw less and less social engagement, whether it's religious church things like that you saw around the eighties and nineties, this trend line of those other despair indicators going up. Psychology has some interesting research that kind of validates some of this as well, that around the eighties and nineties we started seeing an uptick in a lot of what we call mental health disorders, particularly in the areas of depression and anxiety. This is then implicated by the increase of mental health services across the board, and then when we get into the two thousands, and then not too long ago at the pandemic, it just kind of took off on another spike, right. So the trend line and for social engagement is continuing to do this, but we're only seeing more of this kind of engagement. And it's interesting how that the research is validating itself, if not sociologically, in light of even like we said before, economic decisions. The psychology is continuing to highlight these realities. But one of the if I can say this all respectfully to my discipline, I think one of the things that we lack is appreciating some of those larger systems and how they implicate themselves into the struggles of individuals. We tend to then just focus on the person in the chair across from me, and that's a good place to start. Yeah, But what I liked about this research is it's trying to say, how about we concentrate on the person in front of us as well as the larger systems that may be contributing to the hardships of the individual in front of us. It's not an either or. The article was helpful for me to say, it's a both and and I think we need to appreciate both those elements.

00:07:58
Speaker 1: When you think about an idea despair. So the article was deaths of Despair, and it's arguing that these like I said, the lifting of these blue laws allowing retail on a Sunday then had this correlation to these deaths of despair and sort of the running thesis. And again, when I talk to one of the authors, you know, they're not trying to draw a hard trend line between these things. And so some of this is kind of interpretive on my part just from what else I've read and you know, some of the other things that I see. But basically what I took away from it was it does reinforce or give credibility to this notion that as we've lost that social connection, you're going to see individuals have a more difficult time dealing with society large. And so where my head sort of started to go with despair and some of these things was into structural evil and structural sin. And so I guess I'm wondering number one, when you think about it from that sort of psychological perspective, despair is but right, and then maybe we have a brief conversation about structural evil and how some of that would play together.

00:09:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And one way that that's a great question that I try to think through. Defining despair is sometimes in contrast to things like simple sadness or maybe clinically even more significant, like major depressive disorder. I think there's categories that we have for some of these things, and it's not like this TV dinner that they're all nicely portioned off.

00:09:28
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:09:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like christ, I mean, I think we've all experienced the realities of sadness, right, this this pain over loss of context relationship, and generally speaking, it's temporary, it's situational, and I think that that's a normal experience of the human condition, right, if you live in this world long enough you felt those realities and most likely will again. That the time that it kind of takes up a little bit more for me clinically is when I see that persistent sadness, sorrow that is not just situational, but it kind of goes beyond the situation and starts implicating itself into life in non helpful ways. Right, So we look for a couple of things as clinicians. How long has this been going on? Right? If this has been persistent for a couple of weeks, okay, that's going to be one red flag. Two? Is it starting to affect other realities of life like your work and your marriage, or your parenting or your church life. Is it could be something here in your life, like you know, your relationship with your spouse, but it's starting to have implications and negatively influencing the rest of.

00:10:43
Speaker 2: Your life as well. Yeah, and it's.

00:10:46
Speaker 3: No longer situationally connected. It's now somewhat holistically engaging with your life. And so when we start seeing that that that kind of bumps it up a little bit more. This is more than just some situation that's a normal human responsive sadness. Now it's negatively affecting your ability to live life well, and so that's why. And then we start looking for that. This this idea of despray despair bumps it up another level where there seems to be something about the loss of hope that has now implicated itself. Now it may start situational, it may start moving beyond the situation, but more often not. When I work with people who are dealing with situational sadness or even major depressive disorder, even with the most depressed, they want to find hope, They want to find meaning beyond that. They know this is not how it should be. You know, I'm trying to think of that that line, you know, not the not the way it's supposed to be. The vandalism of Shalom talks about right. Most of my clients who are dealing with depression, they know that, they know this is not the way it's supposed to be. There are some that I work with where they go beyond. Not only do they say this is not the way it's supposed to be, but I can't see any hope beyond it. And now it's taken on like this other level, this other existential level of abandonment of hope that has carried with it over time, to be sure, but to the degree that it's it's really negatively impacting not just life and relationships. But why should I even try? Like, what's the reason beyond even continuing to do this? That sense of despair really is one of the defining for me, one of the defining elements that I see in my clients where this has gone from sadness to this idea of maybe depression to now despair. When I see that lack of hope, that that's pretty significant.

00:12:52
Speaker 1: When I see that, it's interesting because when I think of when I was reading through this slat voice came to mind. He's a postmodern philosopher. I'm sure if it comes to everybody's mind when they do this. He had he had a lecture. It's called why we Might Need a Better Chicken, I think, is what he calls it. He's kind of a strange guy anyway. He talks about ideology and he says, part of the problem with ideology is that it raises real problems, but the way that it addresses those problems is actually a part of the problem itself, and so what you end up with essentially within ideology from his perspective, is this sort of cyclical problem. Anytime you're trying to solve the problem that the identity, the ideal ideology identifies in the way that the ideology suggests you should solve the problem, the problem never goes away and it just exacerbates, And so you have this sort of you know, flywheel basically, right, a really bad flywheel, right. And I find that fascinating because I think when when I was thinking through, okay, what's the space where it's this lack of hope because you're essentially on the hamster wheel and you're like, I can never get off. This is the way life is going to be from here on through. And that's just it, you know, it's it's a difference between seeing a transition to a phase.

00:14:16
Speaker 2: Right, like.

00:14:19
Speaker 1: You know, okay, you know, I'm almost fifty now, Like I know my body's gonna hurt for a while, but eventually I'll get to that point where you know, nobody will have any expectations for me and I can just get fat and where a Spiito's is the beach, right, Like it's fine, you know.

00:14:33
Speaker 4: Like just embrace it, right, this will pass, right, It'll be okay, you know so, but you have that sort of transitional concept, right, like this is a even though it's a.

00:14:44
Speaker 1: More durable sadness or durable depression, it feels like there's something on the other side of it, like something will switch at some point You're not sure when, but it will versus being on the hamster.

00:14:56
Speaker 2: Wheel like this is all I have left. I just have to run on the wheel. That's what.

00:15:01
Speaker 1: That's what the pictures that kind of came to my head when I was thinking through despair.

00:15:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and again I do want to give space for that, I think, and you know this, there's biblical language for this, right, I mean, the Psalmists particularly give us some really helpful means of being honest with that not just sadness, but despair. It's sometimes maybe connected to my enemies surround me, strong bols ofvation surround me kind of idea. Yeah there, but there is this like existential heartache at the at not just the situation, but where's God in the midst of this? How do I find meaning and purpose? But to your point that oftentimes the Psalmist speaks to himself, right, not just to his situation. Where does my hope come from? And so there is at least a spiritual working through it. It needs to go through it though, Right I just said this to a client yesterday, Good Friday. We're coming up on Easter here soon. We have these terms called Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday because we have the benefit of looking back, we know the story as it were. But the disciples Good Friday was not good for them, nor did they have necessarily the hope of a resurrection Sunday. To be maybe, in the most kind of clear way, Saturday sucks, right, yeah, And in the midst of that, it's actually some of my Catholic friends who have kind of helped me embrace that idea of what Saturday means is this moment in between death and hope. But for the Disciples at the moment, they didn't really have that, so I can understand it. But to live there constantly the hamster wheel that you talked about, Yeah, that's an incredibly heavy burden to continue. Hence, I mean, not to get too philosophical, the difference between a Kirker guard and a Nietzschee. Right, yeah, we talked about some of those existential dreads that come upon right, are you willing to take a leap of faith and trust that there's actually something on the other side, not necessarily rationally but ontologically, or let's just forget it, like God is dead, like it's not worth trying because the futility of it all that those are real struggles.

00:17:18
Speaker 1: Do you think we could say that despair also has a notion of abandonment of agency. So when we talk about loss of hope, right, there's a way we think about that where it's like a mentality, Right, these things will pass, I have to grip my way through them, but there is something better on the other side, like that.

00:17:40
Speaker 2: Sort of sense of hope.

00:17:41
Speaker 1: But then there's also almost like in the way that we would think about faith, right, in terms of more cognitive belief and then working out an action, hope has that similar dynamic where you'd say, no, even if I don't think things can change, it doesn't mean I'm abandoning my entire agency within this situation, Like I'm going to make the best of it somehow, and there sort of that internal motivation. Do you see that as coupled the despair? Am I overreading that?

00:18:08
Speaker 3: I think there's something to that the loss of hope, that that dread that kind of comes upon. Here's the way that I often hear it with my clients, why even bother? Like, why should I even try anymore? But when I hear them talk about themselves in that way, not just the situation, not just the the existential dread, They're talking about themselves now in a way that is essentially implicating that that autonomy, I can't do anything, like there's no movement, there's no course of action that I can take that will actually find not just resolution, but even a path to resolution.

00:18:50
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:18:50
Speaker 3: So when I hear that phrasing why even try?

00:18:53
Speaker 2: What?

00:18:53
Speaker 3: Why am I even doing this? That I think there's something too that that definitely play plays into that sense of there's nothing I can do. I'm no longer an autonomous, actionable individual in the midst of this pain, and that's becoming more prevalent as we have a loss of shared meaning, and this is going to be something we're going to be getting into more. It's not just my meaning, it's shared meaning. What does that mean to be part of something more than myself that not only communicates the meaning but validates it. Be As we become more and more isolated onto ourselves, that becomes harder and harder to rationalize.

00:19:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that goes, you know, to sort of pull in at theological point. It goes to structural evil, and it goes to you know, sort of social sin.

00:19:45
Speaker 2: However, we want to.

00:19:46
Speaker 1: Talk about that, but there is more beyond just individual sin that we're dealing with. And I think sometimes when we think about structural evil or social sin, you know, people may have a bad taste in their mouth about that just because of the way it's you know, we hear about these structuring problems of society and all that kind of stuff. But I don't think we should be so fast to dismiss it just because we don't like the way some of it's applied. I think these things are real. The pressures and tensions are real. The way people feel and respond to the pressures of life are very different. And no matter how you slice it, some of us have I don't know whether you'd say, through you know, God's grace, through hard work, through you know, through a number of these different factors, we built up resilience. I can remember, I'll just give this illustration, but I can remember at one point Kim and I were going to go on a weekend away. And this was when we were first married, so we were dead broke. I mean, it was like we didn't have any money, and we got this bill in the mail. Evidently in Chicago, they don't read your meter every month. They sort of guestimate it and then they come by and read the meter and then and then send you a bill based on you know, and if their estimate was low, you're getting a big bill. So we got this six hundred dollars bill the day before we're going to go on vacation.

00:21:10
Speaker 2: Oh man, and we're kind of sitting there like, what do we do because we don't have we.

00:21:15
Speaker 1: Don't have this right and you know, the vacation, the money's already spent, like we're we're already ready to go, and now you're just adding that six hundred dollars on top.

00:21:23
Speaker 2: We're both just like, man, what did we do?

00:21:26
Speaker 1: But at the same time, you know, we had we had family resources, we had other people. We could have talked to you to figure this whole thing out. I was employed. I had a decent enough job, right like, so it wasn't like, oh my gosh, we're out on the streets. We knew that wouldn't happen, but it was still this moment where it's like we really don't want to ask people, we don't really want to do and it's more of like a socially uncomfortable thing we want to get base ourselves than it is like a catastrophe going, oh my gosh, we're going to go bankrupt. We don't have this, you know, the power is going to get shut off or what have you. Like, we didn't have that, but a lot of people do. Yeah, and so you know, we like, I think we just have to understand that at some point these pressures, no matter what it is, these pressures that produce despair sometimes are very real pressures.

00:22:15
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And it goes back to what you said before too, like sometimes when we recognize the problem and then we are on this hamster wheel of trying to then deal with it, it actually compounds the problem. I do think your point of what's often referred to this individualistic lens and this kind of collectivistic lens. We're a little more individualistic in a Western context, right, And it's not a either or both, you know both and reality it's it's it's something we need to recognize. Different cultures have different ways of understanding that. But I do think we struggle with that in our content because if that six hundred dollars bill comes, I got to figure out how to deal with this like that. That's my knee jerk reaction is I've got to pull myself figure it out. I've got to answer this dilemma in front of me rather than thinking okay. And there's something both I think wonderful. I think it's it's led to some wonderful realities, particularly in our Western context, that we can applaud and celebrate. But you're right, I think we do kind of have this like we don't talk to me about systems, like we don't want to go there. That's that's Marxist, like we don't want to get into that area, right, you know, we throw the big M word around and then it just like shuts down all conversation. And I think you're right because while it can be abused, and we do have enough historical precedence where systems as the answer and the pin se tell everything becomes the end all be all, that doesn't mean we'd throw it out right. I grew up near Toronto and so the last World Series. Sorry for a sports reference here. When the Blue Jays made it to the World Series, I remember saying to some of my friends here down in South Carolina. I think it was, you know, Game four or five, Hey, we we won the game. We won the game. And one of my friends, you know who lovingly uses sarcasm as their lovelaneguage, they said, what do you mean we won the game? Like you ain't on the Blue Jays? Brother, Like, what are you talking about? Ask anyone who follows the sports team they love not just talking about the team, They actually identified themselves with the team. There's this communal identity that we tend to share in a way that is understandable. Right, We feel that connection, and that's something we need to be willing to help press into. I think it's deeply theological. I have a non Christian friend of mine who was really upset at the notion of the Gospel. So you're telling me, Ben, some dude named Adam, like thousands of years ago on the other side of the world, ate some fruit and now I'm messed up. I'm like, yeah, actually that's a good summary. It so angered him, and I understood why, right, he had no Going back to your other point, he felt he had no agency, had he had no say in the matter. And I remember then trying to highlight the atom, to which I was like, yeah, but wait, there's another guy that came years later. He took all the pain and suffering and punishments so we can have life. My friend actually got angry at that too. He actually said, no, no, no, I don't want him to work for me. I'll do it myself.

00:25:18
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:25:19
Speaker 3: So not only was he angry at the first atom for messing things up, he was actually angry at the second atom for doing the work that he wanted to do himself. And it was such an example of his individualistic constructs. Struggling with what I think is the engineer Eastern acceptance that there is this system that informs the Gospel, both the sin and the salvation that comes. On a clinical level, there is something that I'm trying to help my clients understand, helping train my students to help their clients understand. Yes, you are an individual, but you cannot divorce yourself from this system that you're in, especially when the system is moving in a direction is continuing to isolate self apart from community and the consequences of it. To our danger. We ignore the system and think, let's just deal with the individual, let's just help them. Things will get better. Spinning wheel man, it's not working.

00:26:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think the other side of it is I had this experience with my wife at one point we went out to walk in the evening in Chicago, and she just made the comment, She's like, this is nice because whenever I travel, I never get to do this, like she doesn't. Whenever she travels by herself, she doesn't get to do this. She doesn't get to go out and walk around a city at night by herself.

00:26:42
Speaker 2: She's just not comfortable doing that.

00:26:44
Speaker 1: Sure, And so you think about how like I embody the world differently than she does, and that doesn't bother me. But then if you flash forward to this trip we took out to Utah and we're doing this canyoneering stuff and like my kid to my wife are kind of going through these little crevices, and there was one point where I seriously thought I was getting stuck.

00:27:06
Speaker 3: I just got the image those little crevices.

00:27:09
Speaker 2: Oh it's bad.

00:27:10
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not a good small space guy anyway, but I mean I had scrapes on my chest in my back because this an area like I just couldn't fit.

00:27:18
Speaker 2: Through, and I'm like, this is not good.

00:27:20
Speaker 1: I may be stuck, you know, like you can imagine like the panic going through and it's like same body, different space, completely different experience. And so it's not a question of you know, does one way of embodying the world is it better than any other? You can clearly see in those illustrations, it's like, no, it depends on the situation that you're in and how this is embodied. So there is a point where it feels like people who might be in despair, if they could just somehow change their situation right like be in a different space and physically necessarily but just a different space, that this would help them gain a different perspective on life and sort of.

00:28:09
Speaker 2: Break that to spare up a bit. Whereas when we're.

00:28:13
Speaker 1: Isolated, and maybe this isn't the only mechanism or even a mechanism of this, but I think it seems plausible that you would say, if you're isolated, you really just have yourself. Your capacity runs out at some point and then whatever systems you're interacting with, you're just at your limit, like you can't go beyond that, and so there's a very real sense in which things are never going to change.

00:28:40
Speaker 2: Right. It's a really hard sort of moment to come to.

00:28:45
Speaker 1: But you think about what all the people around you actually do and the degree to which if you're more and more socially isolated, you have to rely on your own capacity more and more and more and more, and sometimes it's just not going to be enough.

00:29:03
Speaker 3: No. And again social science is recognizing this. I mean, most of the theories early on in modern psychology were very individualistic, you know, to be very stereotypical. The Freudian tell me about your mother, like, what was that kind of particular? Listen, we need to start somewhere right. And yet, I mean when I talk about this in developmental psychology, we talked about broffin Feffer's I'm gonna say this incorrectly braff and Brenner's ecological model of development, and what he talks about is, yeah, we need to deal with the individual, but there are these other meso systems, exosystems, there are these other realities around that need to be understood to help the individual and recognize the system as well, and to do to not do that work is a disservice to our clients to think that if I just work with you and just your inner thoughts and affections, that don't make life. But they're still in the system though, and if we're not understanding the larger family, church, neighborhood time frame, like one of them is a chronosystem. And he talks about how we need to look at different life stages. Sure, how you and I were with our wives when we're first married is very different twenty years later the grown kids that are in high school and college. We need to recognize those different systems to really bring help both to the individual and hopefully they even consider what does it look like for the flourishing of the cities that we're in, the communities that we're part of as well.

00:30:35
Speaker 2: Well.

00:30:35
Speaker 1: I think it's worth and we'll get into this in the next episode too, but I think it's worth just saying I wouldn't put the blame on the environment or the system necessarily. Yeah, I think again theological perspective, right, every broken system is going to have its own unique way of deforming us.

00:30:58
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right.

00:31:01
Speaker 1: One of my favorite narratives is first Anuel fourteen, because you know, the Israelites have asked for a king, and Samuel comes back and he's like, Okay, take your king, and then he says, but just remember you still have to fear the Lord, and if you don't, there's going to be trouble. It's like, we'll change the structure around, we'll rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, but you know what, both still.

00:31:24
Speaker 2: Got a float.

00:31:25
Speaker 1: Like at the end of the day, nothing's changed that much.

00:31:29
Speaker 2: You still have to do what exactly what you have to do.

00:31:31
Speaker 1: And I think this is sort of the flip side of that coin where I would say that despair can emerge in any system, and what we're what we're constantly trying to do is figure out how to relate to I would argue God, one another, and our environment in ways that push back that despair. Yeah, that and that requires meaning in life. It seems to me.

00:31:58
Speaker 3: There needs to be an outside agency, outside truth that actually can help reform to those systems. And that's often what I say to my clients. You're not determined by your system, but you are affected by your system, right. I think past models were very deterministic because your mom was like this, because your family was like this. Therefore you had to be this way, and I think that's just just a removes that autonomy, that that human agency that we talked about earlier. Now we still need people to show up and be responsible accordingly. Choose you this day who you will serve, regardless of whatever context is going around. You have to make a decision. But we don't want to go to the other extreme and say, well, your systems don't matter at all. No, they have a pressuring right. Do not be conformed by this world. The world is seeking to pressure and conform us in a certain mold, and we're naively, dangerously naive to think that that's not part of our reality as well, and to recognize both the individual responsibility and systemic constructs that we're in.

00:33:06
Speaker 2: Well, the next we'll kind of close that off.

00:33:08
Speaker 1: I think that's a good place to stop, and we'll start the next episode maybe talking a little bit about identity and dignity and just getting a little deeper into this idea of meaning. We're hitting on it right now, but we'll dive a little deeper into it in the next episode. So Ben, thanks for being here, everybody, thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.