A Life Full of Jesus - An Interview with A.J. Swoboda

Joshua Johnson

A.J., welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on. So thanks for joining us.

A.J. Swoboda

Joshua. Thanks for having me. It's great. It's a blessing to be here.

Joshua Johnson

Yeah. Hoping for a good conversation. Sweet, good. I'd love to just to get your perspective on your journey as you've been formed into the image of Jesus, your journey into learning, unlearning, and relearning things as you start to practice the ways of Jesus and become more like Him. What has that journey been been for you?

A.J. Swoboda

Wow, what a big question.

Joshua Johnson 

I know. It's a big, big question. I was like, I'm gonna start really big.

A.J. Swoboda 

Well, that should take us through the end of the podcast and into next week? My background, my story is pretty unique in the sense that I was not raised in the church. Nominally went to mass with my mom as a kid, but really I wasn't a church kid wasn't a Christian kid, I had a pretty dramatic conversion to Christianity when I was 16. And as a result of just, you know, being a convert, being new to the church. I didn't have much of a foundation. Joshua, I feel like my faith has been one large journey of discovering how wrong I've been. I mean, you know, when you go through iterations in your iPhone, or your computer where you have to update and you get a new operating system, you can't go back in the operating system. I feel like there have been countless operating system updates in my journey with Jesus. And those operating system updates have just, at times come at a blistering speed.

But yeah, you know there's a kind of humility that comes with being a Christian because it's one of the few faith traditions that we have in the world that that actually says the sign that you're on the right track is your willingness to admit that you've been on the wrong track. In one's willingness to admit their wrongness is the sign that they're actually following somebody outside themselves. I felt really concerned for my friends that are never wrong, because they are they are their own truth. And that's a really sad place to be when you are the metric for your own journey.

I've been following Jesus for 25 years and it's been one long journey of recognizing ways in which I am vastly, vastly behind and but Jesus is faithful and loving. It’s interesting, the Greek word for repentance is the word metanoia. Which, fundamentally, it just means to change your mind. And that I mean, metanoia change your mind, that that is a fundamental aspect of a Christian is our willingness to constantly update what we think about what is true about Jesus?

Joshua Johnson

Yeah. You know, my wife talks about that a lot is her journey of repentance. You know, it's not just the first time that she said, I need to start to follow Jesus to repent of my sins and move towards him. But, you know, she said, the first time that God opened my mind to his missionary heart, and that there is a world out there that he is drawn to himself and that she has a part to play in it was a step of repentance for it was a paradigm shift or a mind shift where now I have to go a different direction. Because yeah, actually knowing something new. And after move into a new new space…

A.J. Swoboda

Yes, I think who was it? It might have been Agustine in the fourth century. Somebody, I think it was Augustine who said, conversion takes a second but salvation takes a lifetime. Yeah, we experienced the moment of faith, almost as a gift instantaneously. But man, the process of being fully saved and sanctified and transformed takes an entire lifetime and the minute we stop doing it… Did you know this Joshua, this is one of the coolest things. I include this on one of the books that I recently wrote on the topic of doubt and deconstruction called After Doubt, in the ancient church, one of the last things a thinker would do, like Augustine, the last book that they would write is they would write a book called The retractions or retracted retractions. Essentially, your last book would be all the things you've been wrong about. And I’ve read Augustine’s Retractions. It's one of the most interesting books in the world because he basically says, Yeah, I've been just way off on all this stuff. And he goes, but there's some stuff I haven't been off on, like miracles, and the Holy Spirit is kind of cool. So he says that at the end of his life, he says, I still believe in miracles. I've been long wrong about a lot of stuff, but not miracles. So But anyways, that's in that cool, like, you would end by saying, this is all stuff I've been wrong about.

Joshua Johnson

I think that's fascinating. I love that, that you're saying, I'm wrong about all these things. But there's holding to a specific tenant, how do we hold to the mystery of God? In the midst of things and we start to, and how do we continue to grow towards God? In the place where we know that we're probably wrong about a lot of things. But we're still saying, God is good, he's great. He's amazing. And I want to follow him and yes, become more like Him.

A.J. Swoboda

You used a really critical word: mystery. How do we embrace the mystery? Okay, so let me give a pet peeve here. And then I think I can answer the question as best I can. I do not like and there are a lot of Christians that do this, especially Christians in the theology world that I kind of swim in, who use mystery as basically a hall pass to not land anywhere. So we'll just say, like God, some mystery, so we don't have to land there. The point of mystery… Mystery is not the absence of knowledge. It's not that we can't know stuff. In fact, we are called to know the mystery of the gospel, Paul wrote a whole letter Colossians dealing with the mystery and the mystery, the Gospel, the mystery is not the absence of knowledge. Mystery is knowledge that takes an entire life to flesh out. Meaning to embrace mystery, does not give us permission to not… It's not it's not the absence of landing somewhere like I, I want to stand here and say, Joshua, Jesus is the only way to God. Yeah. There's no if ands or buts about it. If I'm faithfully holding forth the gospel, I hope I have to hold that tenant. But I also know it's a mystery. So I faithfully hold it with all my heart. But I also know that I don't know everything about it.

Okay, I have a theory about something. I think a lot of people right now, I've been working with a lot of people talking about deconstruction and doubt for a couple of years now. And what most people mean, when they say they are in a crisis of faith is not actually a crisis of faith. It's a crisis of understanding. Meaning, they thought that having faith meant you got to fully understand everything. When faith does not mean you fully understand. You can have full faith and still be in a crisis of understanding, but not enough to fully understand. I would argue that's a sign that you're loving the mysteries is that you believe them, and you don't fully get them.

Joshua Johnson

Wow. Do you think that's a condition of the times that we live in where we've gone through the space where we have our iPhones we have Google. Yes, we actually have our certainty, we could find the information and we can know the knowledge. And then once the pandemic hit, we realize, oh, this world was uncertain to begin with, and it never was certain.

A.J. Swoboda

Joshua, we are so informed, shaped and molded by enlightenment, thinking that we were ignorant to the waters that we swim in of this idea of knowing about. There is a fundamental difference between knowing about something and knowing something. To know about something we assumed to know about something means to know something. Okay, so, case in point, you could probably rattle off a lot of facts right now about my wife, or somebody could say, well, I know her name is Quinn Taylor's will vote she could give all these facts. To know about my wife is not the same as knowing my wife. Yeah. I know my wife. You may know about her, I know her.

The Enlightenment taught us that knowing about is the same as knowing. I think that's the fundamental heresy of the Enlightenment, is that knowing about is the same as knowing. This is the exact thing that Jesus spent three years of public ministry nailing into the minds of Pharisees and Sadducees. You have the scriptures and then you think you have life and yet you refuse to come to me, you know everything about me, but you don't know me. Even the demons dude. Their theology is impeccable. They know everything about Jesus, and yet they don't know Jesus. So the Enlightenment has just butchered the human soul and taught us get the facts down, man, be certain you're get to watch the YouTube click get the stuff and then and then… No, that's not the same.

Joshua Johnson

So what does that journey look like from moving from knowing about to knowing?

A.J. Swoboda

Okay, I just read a book. Walter Seismic, he was a Catholic priest, who was detained by the Red Army, the Russians in World War Two, when the army, the Russians would take over city. They didn't like the Catholics because the Catholics represented sort of the Russia, Russia is the orthodoxy, and Catholics represent capitalism. And when this guy, Walter Seismic was arrested… I’m trying to find this, absolute, quote, that incredible quote, he's talking about being imprisoned and this experience of living, you know, basically in a concentration camp for lack of better terms. And he makes a comment where he says, truth only serves those who are enslaved to it. Now, I think one of the most interesting concepts I have I have ever come across. And it's the basic ideas that's like, truth serves those who are enslaved to it that that truth serves those who spend their life serving it.

What would that have to do with your question here? There's a difference. There's a difference between the Wise men and Herod. They both do the same thing. They both search for Jesus. Yet Herod’s search for Jesus and the Wise men’s search for Jesus is different. They both search for Jesus. It's not enough to search for search for Jesus or to seek Jesus. Herod seeks Jesus to kill Him. The Wise men seek Jesus to worship Him. There is a difference between seeking Jesus for the right reason and seeking Jesus the wrong reason. We can seek Jesus because we want to use him. We want to use Him for our own political ends. We want to use Him for our own ideologies. We want to use Him to prop up all of our stuff. Or we seek Jesus because we want to bend the knee of our entire life at his feet and worship Him. Jesus serves those who are enslaved to him.

Listen, I'm gonna be the first to say there have been times in my life I have used Jesus. Yeah, and used his name to baptize my agenda. It's the breaking of the third commandment to misuse God's name. It's to use God's name for my gig. I am either going to worship Jesus, or I'm going to use Him. And, to me, that's the eternal call of discipleship: am I loving Jesus for who He is, or who I want Him to be for my purposes? That takes a lifetime to iron out friend. Truth, by the way, I am the Way the Truth and the Life Jesus himself is truth. Our culture is saying, talking about relative truth or something like that. If you ask Mary or James or Joseph, what they know about truth, they would say, Mr. Word, it's not the truth is relative. It's the truth is a relative. It's my son. It's my brother. It's the person of Jesus. Jesus is our truth. And we spend our entire lives seeking truth. Who is Jesus? That this lifetime judge…

Joshua Johnson

Wow, just sit with that. That's just incredible to start to walk through that place that truth is a person, truth is Jesus. Truth is the one that we gets to be revealed over and over and over again as to who He truly is. And that's, that's amazing. Because we often think truth is outside of the person of Jesus, and we've decided that truth is whatever we want it to be. And we're enslaved to whatever that is, we're, you know, we actually have made our own little kingdom to ourself, instead of being in the, the reign and rule of Jesus as King. And in His kingdom, and under His Lordship, we've decided that we were making ourselves King.

A.J. Swoboda

Can I say something? Carl Trueman has written a book in the last couple of years, on the rise of the modern self. This idea of what has happened to our sense of identity as people in this digital environment. One of the things he says that I'm really struck by it, it haunts me actually, is he makes the claim in his book that basically what you mentioned, phones, basically what the digital revolution has done. At the end of the day is it is so much more than a phone, it's so much more than a social media app. What it has essentially done is it has formed people into believing that they can arrange the world around themself. But his basic point is, is that it represents I'm using my own language here, but it represents eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yeah. Wow. That it represents displacing God as the one who has spoken truth to now I get to determine what is true and get the knowledge of good and evil, I get to determine what's right and wrong. And you know, I think it was Andy Crouch, although I use this years ago, I don't know who used it first. But I think it's really fascinating that when we turn our phones off, it flashes an apple with a bite taken out of it. Like, we're like we're back on the garden all over again. And we've been chewing on this food and I'm terrified as an undergraduate theologian, professor, who teaches not only at the doctoral level, but the undergrad graduate level. I'm terrified for this generation, who had been handed a little device that basically says to them, you get to curate the world around what you want. Yeah, terrifying. absolutely terrifying.

Joshua Johnson

Wow. I mean, so what practices can we do to detach from that? And to become people that actually are under God's rule, then?

A.J. Swoboda

Okay, so immediately, a few tidbits come to mind. Number one would be to practice what my friend John Mark Comer calls digital asceticism. What he what he means when he says that is have intentional seasons of your life where you disconnect entirely from your social media. And these intentional seasons are like fasting, digital fasting. It's like saying, I'm going to take a month and I'm going to return to the obscurity of the voice of Christ and the Holy Spirit. I am not suggesting that we become Amish sort of, you know, burn, burn it all to the ground. I'm not I'm not suggesting that there aren’t tremendous goods to the digital world that we live in. But if we don't have seasons of regular detachment, it will end ended up controlling us. Either we control it or it will control us. So I would say seasons of digital asceticism.

I'd say another one is intentionally go to a church that has people in it that you don't like. And find a church that proclaims Jesus and holds the Bible up, preaches it. But there are people in the church that you really, really can't stand. And and here's what I want you to do: sit next to them and, and greet them and love them. Because the ultimate expression of a world where we surround ourselves with what we want, is that we eventually end up surrounding ourselves with the people that we want. And when we do that, you know, Jesus's words to people who only greet those who greet them, is quite harsh. And is form of love requires that we go out of our way to embrace people that that drive us mad.

I live in the Pacific Northwest. I do not like the kind of weird nationalism that I'm seeing a lot of Christians embrace. And I've also got to say, I don't like the kind of syncretistic gospel that a lot of my progressive friends have bought into. Yeah. And I gotta say, on both sides, it's a really funky time in history, because I'm not, I'm pretty much mad at both sides right now. And I could do, you know, I could try to go find some church where everybody agrees with me, but I just don't have it. And I don't get the privilege of getting to pick a church where everybody's up with me. I have to go somewhere where I have to love people. Eugene Peterson's whole thing about the greatest enemy of the church is the church that you wish you had. And Gosh, find a church where people drive you mad, and love them, and spend 30 years doing that, and you'll be formed into the image of Christ.

Joshua Johnson 

Wow. That’s  such an important word. Now, in the last couple years, there's so many people that have moved into different camps and saying, I'm just going to be surrounded by the people that I agree with, or I like and even though that we're all part of the body of Christ, that I don't like this, this part, you know, you're a part of the right hand, I'm part of the left hand, and we're not going to interact. And so it's such a good word that we need to say that we're actually rooted in a place of unity, with one Spirit, one Lord, one baptism, one Father, who is in all that works through all and is for all. How can we stay there into a place where even through our diverse perspectives and views say, we actually are connected with something greater than ourselves?

A.J. Swoboda

Yes, I, Joshua, I just happened to put this, I'm giving a preview for my next book, I just put a whole section on this in my, my book that's going to come out with Zondervan in a year called The Gift of Thorns, the way of Jesus through our wayward desires. How do we follow Jesus with all the desires that we have? I've been reflecting on this, like, so much. The first thing the man and the woman do when they sin is they cover over their body parts. Now, when you look at the man or the woman, they're both different. The man and the woman, the body is different. They have different bodies. First, a, I'm struck that God creates difference. And it is only through difference that the giving of life can happen. Life is the result of difference coming together. That's astounding. I mean, that is just mind blowing, that God has created a world where the only place where there is life, is where different comes together, is astounding. But the second thing is that the man and the woman, the first thing that they do in the world after the fall, is their first move is to cover over their differences. And make it look like we are the same.

Joshua Johnson

Wow.

A.J. Swoboda

God has created a world where a man and a woman come together and out can come a child. Likewise, our churches should reflect different people who come together in the spirit of Christ. And out of that is life. You cannot have a church create life where everyone is the same.

Joshua Johnson

So good.

A.J. Swoboda

I mean, there's so much to that. But isn't that true? God's mystery?

Joshua Johnson

God's mystery. Yeah. And it's a mystery. I'm just reflecting on my church. here in Kansas City. We actually have a network of home churches we gather once a month all together all of our home churches come together. So we're one body. And I'm just reflecting on the the actual life that there is in the body right now. And where there is the most life is where we see people have differences coming together. Yes, there's some ethnic differences that people are saying we're actually in this together. There's all sorts of differences that we have. But the life that is actually flourishing more than in places where people are homogenous. And they're thinking the same. It's just interested in that just reflecting now in my own church, I see that, and I see that just as a practical step to saying yes, that is, that is true. That's amazing. I love that.

You know, we walked through this, I think one of the other practices, something that we we probably should do is to put things down. As you know, you wrote about Sabbath a lot. And the Sabbath is really important to come through it. I mean, you wrote about it before the pandemic and once the pandemic hit, everybody said, oh, yeah, we should rest. Yes, this is what happens, right? So I'm 2023 saying, you make me lie down in green pastures. Yeah, God made us lie down for a little while. And we finally realized, Oh, we actually have to lie down. Yes. What is it about Sabbath all the way throughout Scripture that really, I don't know, beholds the mystery of this into a formation towards Jesus?

A.J. Swoboda 

Okay, great question. So there's two dynamics to this. The first dynamic is that we are in an unhealthy way overly pragmatic. What I mean by that is, we only do things if we see the benefits to it. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I'll do it, if it like it makes things better. So when somebody says to me, why should I keep a Sabbath? What they're really asking is they're asking, What are the benefits of doing this? And if they are coming to practice the Sabbath, only because of the benefits, then I will not respond to their question. Because ultimately, they're, they're doing the obedience for the wrong reason. Yeah. And, and I do not want to prop up obedience for the wrong reasons, because it ultimately will just disappoint us all the more.

By the way, there are absolute crazy benefits to Sabbath keeping. For example, the healthiest religion in the world are Seventh Day Adventists. Who are, I would say, legalistically committed to the Sabbath. They also don't eat bacon. But if you're Seventh Day Adventist, on average, you live seven years longer than anybody else. Wow. You're talking about pragmatics? Are there reasons to keep a Sabbath? Yes. But if you do it for those reasons, then you're doing it for the benefits, not for the obedience. So I would say number one, we are overly pragmatic, and we only do stuff if we have a good reason for it.

It is striking, when you go back to Genesis one and two, when God tells the man and the woman don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, He does not explain himself. Yeah. He doesn't tell them why. He doesn't say like, these are the reasons why you should do this. This is the rationale. He says, Trust me, obey me, just trust me. I don't need to give you a reason. Trust me. It's the same thing when I say to a couple who's having sex before they get married, and I look them in the face and say, stop it. Like, well, why we're living together? Stop it. Just trust me. Don't get into the whole rationale. Trust me. That's what God is doing is He's saying, like, just trust me. And we only do stuff if it pragmatically makes sense.

So I would say on one hand, there's that there's the second element is when Jesus says, love your neighbors as yourself. It strikes me that nobody says, Well, what is what's the benefit to that? Like, I've never heard somebody say, like, well, what's like, why? We know that loving somebody in and of itself, regardless of what you get out of it is the Jesus thing to do. Yeah. So my question is, why don't we apply the same thing to Sabbath? Yeah. Why do we have to have a reason to do it? When God said to do it? Yeah. And then the answer is, we get to do it. Because God is the one who frickin made our genetic material. And He knit us together in our mother's womb, and He knows us best. And He's telling us, it's not he's not giving us a rule. He's giving us a gift. We are the only people in the world who will bicker with God over a gift. Like what God will only take the gift if we get a good reason for it. Have you ever taken a day eating pancakes and had coffee and gone on a walk and watched a movie and enjoyed a day of rest? And and had to been explained why it was good for you? No, it's great because it's a gift. It's incredible. We are the only people in the world who will bicker over a gift. It's the greatest gift in the world man. I mean, we literally worship the God who invented the weekend, man. Yeah. Yeah. What? How much more good news do we need? Yeah, it's every week.

Joshua Johnson

It's every week. It's good. Yeah, keeping Sabbath has actually really transformed the way that I've been living and working. It also helps me keep boundaries in my life. And it orders my days in my week in a place where I don't feel like I'm always playing catch up. And, you know, if I don't take a Sabbath, I feel like I'm behind. If I do take a Sabbath, I feel like I'm caught up. It's an interesting dynamic for me, where I feel like, Oh, I could actually trust God, and it doesn't really depend on me. Yeah. Things keep going. And it doesn't revolve around me anymore.

A.J. Swoboda

Okay. Joshua, first of all, that you're doing it Praise God. Secondly, Sigmund Freud, when he would, he was a really interesting therapist, counselor, because he would take these, just like incredible notes on his patients. And he would always comment in his journals, whenever he would meet with a Jew, when he would meet with a Jewish person, that they would always on the Sabbath feel what he called it in his journals called Sabbath neurosis. Or Sabbath shame. And the idea was, people would Sabbath, but they would feel like on the day, they weren't being productive. They felt like they were failing or something like that. And we've got to remember, this is the greatest news. We got to remember that even shame is work. Yeah. And there is no shame on the Sabbath. Like to take a day, we get to that, that voice that says in the back of our mind, like you could be doing more for the kingdom right now. You could be reaching more people for Jesus, you could be preaching better sermons. You get to say to the voice of Pharaoh, shut up. In the name of Jesus, I am free. And I am no longer in Egypt. And you don't get to shame me into honoring and obeying God's voice. Isn't that liberating to get shame to go to its place, you get to go somewhere else today, because you don't come in here.

Joshua Johnson

I mean, that happened to me. I was actually at a gathering in Belfast, Ireland. Recently, I was walking around, and I opened my phone, and I read an email. And all of a sudden, the spirit of shame just came over me and I felt, well, I felt shame. I felt like I was not good enough. I felt like I wasn't doing enough. I felt all sorts of things. And I, in about 15 seconds later I said, this is not from God, this is not His voice. This is not who I am. And I said, all right. Be quiet. And God, I need you to tell me who I am and remind me who I am again. And it was in that reminding that God said, Okay, this is who you are. I have called you Joshua for a reason. You are my son, I love you. That I actually decided, Okay, I am okay now and I can start to walk forward again. And get rid of those thoughts in those times of shame. When those shame thoughts come up, and you could tell the voice of Pharaoh to shut up? How then can we reassess and actually live into a different space and not just a space of shame, but a space of knowing who we are in God and Christ?

A.J. Swoboda

Well, we remember the order of creation. And we remember, we go back to our theology. I mean, you're talking to theologian here, bro, like you go, you go back to theology, and you go back to Genesis one and two. And you go back to when God told the man and the woman that they were to rest one day a week, which was day seven, and you remember what day that was? It was day seven. Yeah. What does God make on day six? God makes humans on day six. So, what were Adam and Eve doing on their first day of existence? They were resting. Meaning they didn't work six days to get a day off. They started with rest. And then they moved to work. The order of Sabbath is never earned. It is never after six days, it is always you start with it.

I mean, you look at a baby, my son's 11, he was in my wife's womb for, you know, nine months. And I can tell you what he did for nine months inmy wife's womb, I'll tell you exactly what he did. He didn't work. Yeah. And he's been out for 11 years, and I can tell you what he's been doing for most of his life. He has not been working. He's been eating my pancakes, and playing Legos for basically 11 years of his life. And the way God has ordered the universe, the way God has structured our design, is we do not work first, we rest first. And out of that rest, we work. That's the first image of the Gospel. The Sabbath is that you begin with: this is not a God who treats people like slaves. This is a guy that treats people like children, and he gives them the rest first.

I read this guy Henry Blodgett, who's a French theologian who says, Can you imagine what the man and the woman's first impression of God would have been like? When somebody makes a first impression, you make you it's pretty hard to shake that first impression is, you just always remember the thing. Their first impression of God was take a break. And I mean, just like what that would have been like to, to experience that God before they've done anything. So when you and I are trained in our mind to listen to Pharaoh more than we listen to God, we need to remember what Adam and Eve's the man and the woman's first impression would have been. And we need that, that we have been weren't impressed by Pharaoh more than we have been by God. And we need to undo that move from that impression, and move to the impression of the God of the Bible. And make Goodness gracious front. What great news.

Joshua Johnson

Really good news. Yeah, you've shared a lot of good news here in this conversation.

A.J. Swoboda

There's some bad news. You want to know the bad news? It's really sexy to talk about the Sabbath right now. And it's really hard to do it. It is really hard. I am getting a little frustrated that we have with myself and sort of broader Christian culture, that Sabbath has become a sexy conversation. And I don't see a whole lot happening as a result of it. And I I'd like to remind us and myself included, AJ, listen, this is not just a cool thing to talk about. Yeah, it's an obedience issue.

Joshua Johnson

Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. Yeah, a couple questions here. One, if you could go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give,

A.J. Swoboda

um, get into a counseling office a lot faster. And deal with your family of origin stuff. And don't wait until your mid 30s to start to look in your closet. Yeah. I found my first couple years of faith. Just I was convinced I could pray, pray all the skeletons out of the closet, and I couldn't. And I'm and I'm wishing that I had not over spiritualized childhood trauma. So I've heard too many Christians at this point, say, Why would I need a counselor, I have the great counselor. And I just think that's the crappiest theology ever. And then I think we have the Holy Spirit and that Holy Spirit is leading us to get help.

Joshua Johnson

Yeah. That's so good.

A.J. Swoboda 

One would be stop over spiritualizing my need to have a person in my life that I can go through childhood stuff with. And I would say, secondly, stop basing my entire identity in Christ, on whether I've done my devotions this morning or not. And evangelicals, treat devotions the way the Catholics in the Protestant early Luther era treated indulgences. They've become the thing that we base our entire identity on. And it's killing a generation of people that are basing their entire identity on Jesus on having not read their Bible this morning. And I think God, God wants to break through that and look us in the face and say, I want you to read your Bible. But you're my son. Yeah. Don't base your identity on that.

Joshua Johnson  39:53

All right. That's great. Great advice. Anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend?

A.J. Swoboda  40:02

Oh, well, sadly, I actually have very little to say by way of watching stuff. I've now I'm finishing for the 10th time my viewing of the West Wing, which is my favorite show. As do I, I would say the, the stuff I've been reading is all dovetailing towards my book that I'm writing right now, which is all on desire. So I would say a couple books that I've read in this research project that are just mind numbingly good you have to read would be Curt Thompson, Curt Thompson's book, The Soul of Desire. So his book on desires is just unbelievable. He's a neuroscientist Christian neuroscientist who writes about desire from a neurological perspective. Another book is not a book it's an author read every literally read every single thing that Ronald Rolheiser wrote. His book, The Holy Longing is the gateway, go through that and find your way into a whole new land. And then I would say thirdly, I've been getting really recently I've just been reading the book of Jeremiah, and I found the Bible is pretty awesome. So read the Bible. That's awesome.

Joshua Johnson

That's good. That how can people connect with you? You want to point them to anything?

A.J. Swoboda

No, no, I mean, you can buy my books and stuff and write nice things. I do have a website and a website, AJ Swoboda writes, but my podcast, Slow Theology, which I do with my colleague, Dr. Nijay Gupta, as a New Testament scholar is basically a whole podcast on theology, and it's really fun. You can listen to slow theology. I'm the worst human on Twitter. I don't do it. So don't follow me there.

Joshua Johnson

A.J. I so appreciated this conversation and I love just pointing people towards Jesus. And actually, what does it look like to be formed into His likeness? And actually say, we could actually spend time with people we don't even like, and that our differences make life. I love that. So thank you so much for this conversation.

A.J. Swoboda 

God's grace and peace to you. It's been a joy to be with you. Thanks.