Faithbase

Hey everybody, this is the Full Vantage Podcast. My name is Trevor Lovingood, and this is my attempt to share the lessons I've learned over the past decade of building and creating community from scratch because relationships really do matter. And I'm in a new city right now, and I'm starting over again. So how can you begin wherever you are and build those types of communities, cultures, and relationships? Here we go, let's have some conversations. So we are on the Full Vantage Podcast. My name's Trevor, and I am so excited because I have my Gramps, Charles Tollett, here with me. And I've actually been looking forward to this conversation for a long time because Gramps was tweeting before there was Twitter or X or whatever you wanna call it. He was making statements, coaching people, growing people, helping people, having good conversations before it was, really before it was a novel idea or a good idea in general, he was doing it. So here we are, and man, Gramps, I really have been looking forward to this. You've put a lot of pressure on me. I don't know if I can follow up on that. That's okay, no, it's okay. I've just been looking forward to talking with you in this type of setting because we, you're a storyteller. My dad says you have more degrees than a thermometer. How many degrees do you have? You ended up with eight, seven? I'm not sure, I believe that's correct. Something like that, something like that. Vanderbilt, what's a few of the places? Vanderbilt, Carson Newman, Ole Miss. Tennessee. Tennessee, Georgia. Yeah, that's enough. Yeah, so honestly, one of the smartest people, if not actually the smartest person in my life, who knows what his IQ is. But in general, I've always loved being around Gramps or being around Charles, being around you because of just, I just wanna be like you. I wanna think like you. I want to live life like you've lived life. And so maybe I think a good place to begin because I think the impact that your life could have in mine and others is just making sure that people could just, I think storytelling is a great place to have it happen because out of stories, we can get a moral or an idea or a thought. I think just thinking is something you've taught me, like always keep growing. So with that being said, like why, or like what's the earliest memory you have? Maybe that's what it is. Maybe what's the earliest memory you have or how did you, like why that many degrees or why is, just tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, first of all, I was born at home rather than a hospital. And I've been asked over the years, why were you born at home? And I said, well, I wanted to be close to my mother at a time like that. And that's where she was. I don't know, Trevor, it's just a way of life. I don't know where it began. I know my birth date, date of birth, but. How many brothers and sisters do you have? Well, I'm the 10th of 11 children in my family. So you have one younger brother than you, Dan, and how many are still alive? The two of us survive the years and that's all we have remaining. Wow. And you're 37 years old. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. I put a half a century on that. I was gonna be pretty correct. 87, right? You're 87. 87. And my youngest son, Zeke, was born on the same birthday as you. And that's really cool because we went with Charles as his middle name, which is pretty awesome. I felt pretty honored that you chose to do that because to most people, their children are pretty special. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're super special to me. So if you could encapsulate life, could you give everyone a quick overview of born at home, maybe a little bit of college, and then what happened a little bit afterwards, maybe a little bit of what you've done just over the years? Well, I was, as you mentioned, born at home and I went through the rural school in Cumberland County and on to Cumberland County High School and then to Carson Newman College for my first college work. And I took a pre-medical course because I was gonna become a pediatrician. Now, had I chosen to do that, I suspect I would have been a bit more financially affluent than I am now. But while I was waiting to go to medical school, the local superintendent said, our chemistry and physics teacher has gone to Florida because they pay more money. Is it possible to get you to teach here until December? Then you can go to medical school in January. And I said, well, sure, I'll do that. So I taught chemistry and physics at Cross Cumberland County High School. And the dye was cast when I got into teaching it. I knew that was it for me. And so I spent the rest of my early career in education one way or another. How did you know that it was teaching for you? Because you said like the dye was cast or whatever, by chance you found exactly what you were looking for. What was it about teaching and how old were you at this time? I was kind of young, I was 19. But anyway, I taught school and I say that this was the answer long before I knew exactly what the question was. I knew it was, what are you gonna do with your life? As one of my favorite poets says, what are you gonna do with this one wild and glorious life you have? And I love that poem and I love that thought because we all do have a wild and possibly glorious life. What are we gonna do with it? And so that was, I knew when I began to realize the relationship I was able to cultivate with students that this is where my calling is. My calling was pretty important to me because my relationship to God was pretty important. And so I wanted to follow a calling, not just a vocation. And I saw the education as my calling. How do you separate those two? Because a lot of people, they vocationally do things to earn a paycheck. Generally speaking, when you start talking about a calling, the calling has to come from somewhere. And if you don't have anywhere for it to come, then calling is not gonna be the way you describe your choice. Yeah, so like a source of calling. If you would say, like if someone was to come to you and say, hey, I'm looking for my calling, what are some things that you would do to help them? I would suggest that they reconnect with the source of a calling that they might be looking for because if you're not aware that there's a source, you're not gonna be open to hearing the calling when it comes. So that's a ultra important matter in this case. And then you go ahead and prepare for, and in this case, I prepared for a calling that never came. I prepared pre-medical and I got a calling to education. So you go ahead and do the steps that would lead in the direction of that call, whatever it is. I love that because what you're talking about is potentially never stop learning either, which I think is a part of your life. Well, you've discovered that it's very much a part of my life. I wanna grow and grow and learn and learn and change. See, a lot of people say, when you get as old as I am, changes out of the question. No, every day I look for ways that I and the world around me can change to be more effective. Yeah, do you feel 87? I don't know what that feels like. I've never been here before. This is actually the oldest I've ever been in my life. Believe it or not, believe it or not. No, I don't feel 87. I don't know what 87 feels like. Why do you think you don't necessarily feel 87 or older? Or what is it about that? Well, our society talks about old people as people who are set in their ways and yada, yada, yada. That doesn't apply to me, so that's not something that I'm attracted to, a notion of acting old. Do you think one of the key reasons or ways for someone to stay young is to not be set in their ways? Absolutely, if you are always looking for a better way to do this, then life is an adventure, whatever your age. So speaking of life as an adventure, look, I know that my favorite thing growing up was not going on some random vacation, because I don't even remember going on those. But I do remember us going on adventures to where you were and to where you lived. So tell everybody maybe the few places that you've lived, because yeah, those are game changers. One of the few things we were able to do well, although I can't say that all of this was carefully planned, we tended to live in interesting places. And you were of such an age that you could visit us in those places. I guess the most dramatic one is that we were for five years in Alaska, the final frontier. And I believe that you came up to visit us five times while we were in Alaska. And I was the recipient of a number of frequent flyer miles, so you took advantage of those, you remember? Yeah, I do. You came in the summer and you came in the winter and we tried to show you our new home, Alaska. And it's a fabulous place to live. And then later we lived in Los Angeles and then later we lived in Washington, D.C. But if you go back, as you've done, and think about the places we lived while you were growing up, they were all great places to visit. They were amazing places to visit. And I remember having birthdays, Thanksgiving, we had Christmas, we had all of those places. And specifically, having Christmas in Alaska is just wild. That's like what you take pictures of. And so was the one in Old Forge, New York in the Adirondacks. And we were just building our house and it wasn't really finished, so we was staying with the neighbors. And we hauled the Christmas gifts on a sled, a wagon. We literally took the Christmas gifts on what you would see as a Santa Claus sled from one house to the next. It was the craziest. And the deer would eat out of your hand. You remember that? The deer would eat out of our hands at the... It was like, what is happening? Especially your little sister enjoyed having the deer eat out of her hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone even had... Did I put food in my brother's ear and the deer ate out of his ear or something like that? Well, you almost got in trouble about that one. Yeah, that was a few times. I put the food in Rowdy's ear and the deer ate it out. Take his ear next. We didn't recommend that. That was something you did. Yeah, well, you gotta get creative every now and then. I'm sure. You gotta get creative. As you think about the lifespan and having really a through line of learning and not settling, let's keep growing. What are some of those earliest contributors, maybe stories to that? Well, first of all, the greatest influence on my life other than God was my mother. My mother was an educated woman in a rural area where there were no educated people. My father was a local farmer who was a great storyteller. He could tell stories with the Irish brogue and the Scottish dialect, and he would tell those stories and we'd love it. We love it for two reasons. Number one is when we stopped for lunch and he'd let us sit under the shade tree and the swing and all that for a while, and the longer we could keep him telling stories, the longer it would be until we got back to the cornfield. I had an experience there that was really very valuable. I didn't plan it and wouldn't have chosen it, but I had one of the last people my age who had the experience of plowing corn with a mule. Spend the day working behind the mule all day, and I've gone on to work with folks who are greatly reminiscent of working with those mules, so it was a valuable lesson. What was it about that that you carried with you? Maybe some attributes or aspects of like, because that's crazy, because most people have no concept of working with mules like that, not even a little bit. There's pictures maybe, but maybe even most people haven't even seen pictures of that. Well, my father, I would work behind the mule and we had a plow that we called a laying off plow that put the corn by, but then early in the year, we had a plow that would buy one row, and Dad wanted that row to be straight for whatever reason. I told him, there's probably more space in a crooked row. He didn't want it to be straight, but the lesson that I learned from him is that if you look down at the ground, you can't go in a straight line, but if you focus something way out there in the distance, you can focus on that and go toward it, and the line will be much straighter. That's a row would be much straighter. What, that's fascinating. What is that statement that you would make with that thought? Well, if you're gonna plan your life so that the future, whether that's important, you wanna focus on something way out there, not on your toes or your elbow or something like that. Yeah, and I love the crooked line part too because the quickest way to get from where you are to where you wanna go is focusing on where you wanna go. There may be more room and space in between a crooked line, which is a lot of our lives. If we have dreams, we don't focus on those nearly as much as we probably should, but we go to the right or we'd go to the left, but if we could stay focused on where we're going, we would actually get there quicker. Yeah, we all know from our math class or geometry, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Yeah, yeah. That's also an elusive kind of thing to find that straight line, but it has a life lesson that we can learn, but it also has one that's a warning. And that is that you don't always want to go the shortest distance between two points. Yeah. Sometimes there's a journey to be learned from wandering, but the other important point there is that if you take the right route, you can always get back to the trail no matter how far you're off. And I didn't understand it then, but I see it now because some of the people that I've had the chance to help and some people you've had the chance to help have somehow or other gotten off the main line. And so it's an important message to say, you can get back. Wow. How may I help you do that? What's like a main question or two to help them get back? What would you ask somebody that's like, hey, I feel like my life is way off course, or I feel like I'm way out in the weeds and I don't know how to get back. What would that, what does that mean? look like, maybe? Well, a better example of that than from my own career is my wife, Jane, she worked with homeless veterans. That's why we went to Alaska. And many of those homeless veterans, see, the society thought homelessness was a matter of not having a place to sleep. But Jane knew homelessness is not that. It looks like that sometimes, but homelessness is a lack of an adequate support system to get from where you are to where you wanna be. But what she found out, and she used this as a success map experience, what she found is that many people weren't sure where they wanted to go. So if you don't know where you wanna go, almost any road will take you there. But if you have a definite place, and some of her greatest success came in working with homeless veterans to draw a success map that showed the way they wanted to go from where I am down here to where I wanna go up there. So a lot of the lessons I learned in that was from her work with homeless veterans in building a success map. So you need to think about, you would say a person, before they even can know that they're off track, they need to think about actually, where do they wanna actually end up? Where do they wanna go? What is the dream, so to speak? The notion of being off track implies that there is a track. And if you don't know what that track is, I had a lot of experience growing up walking along the railroad track because there's a railroad track through our little town that we lived in then, which was Crossville. And we walked that railroad track. Well, there's a good time to be on the railroad track, and there's some bad times. See, I remember once we were walking on the railroad track and near this pond, and here came the train. So we decided to ditch it and get in that pond instead of being run over by the train. So that was a pretty good decision. It was a good time to get off the track. Yeah, there are times to be off the track. Gosh. Because that was somebody else's route. We didn't lay that out for the railroad. Wow. Tennessee Central, namely. Yeah, and so sometimes we have to get behind somebody else who has been there before. Well, that's one of the favorite ways to go. And it's very powerful, except it has a limit, and that is there are a lot of people today that want to do things and don't have anybody who's done that same thing before them. You take people who are first-generation college students. They don't have parents who went, you know, you follow that leadership. You had parents who had college degrees, but everybody doesn't. So you have to blaze a new trail sometimes. There's something that I really do not like that I heard recently, and I want to see what you think about it. And I just now thought of it, but it's this idea that once you hit a certain age, that you can no longer innovate after that age. That's, of all the great absurdities, that's one of them. Yes. No, I totally agree with you. Not because of, you know, I've hit that age because I haven't necessarily yet, but because I've seen you and other people beyond that age. It's like, no, innovation is not a number. It's not a way that you, it's not even, it's not a destination. I've always thought innovation is actually a way of life, and it actually has a lot to do with the way that you think. So what would you say to somebody who's trying to do something maybe they've never done before or they've never seen modeled for them before? What would you say to them? Let's be as clear as we can about what this is and how it might look when it comes along, and then we ask the question, what else do I need to know to do that, and how may we help you learn what you need to know? Because there's a huge aspect of the unknown when it comes to innovating, doing things you've never done before. I don't know how this is gonna work out, but if we just keep trying, we could figure this thing out. So some of the folks who've been far more innovators than I would say that that's part of the excitement of being an innovator, doing things you never really thought about much before. Yeah, and isn't that like another definition for adventure or journey, a destination you've never gotten to before, but this idea of between where you are and where you wanna go is wandering, is straight line, is tracks from other people versus bushwhacking, I guess, or like blazing your own trail through the dense forest One of the things that people have trouble with today that I was just thinking about very recently is stress. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what happens is another related but not identical thing called pressure. You feel pressure to do something, you have no idea how to do it and you aren't willing to learn, that's stress. Yeah. And that's not conducive to high performance. But if it's pressure leads you to consider and do the things you need to do, that's performance, that's stress, you're using pressure to perform. So there's a different, so explain that a little bit more. There's a different point on stress than there is point on pressure. Absolutely, see stress is defeating, pressure is motivation. I'm feeling a little pressure, good, good, good for you. Yeah. I remember when I was a teacher, I would have a student say to me, you know, I don't understand this. And I said, what is you don't understand? They, well, da, da, da. And I said, well, good, that means you're about to learn something because you've identified what it is you don't know and that's a powerful step to learning. I was reading the other day an amazing story where Jesus sat down with a bunch of guys or people and he began to say things that they couldn't understand. And I began to think about, okay, how do I process things that I don't understand? Do I shrink back from it or do I lean into it to try and figure it out? And then I thought about, when you're trying to build relationships or a community, and you look at the, let's look at the spectrum or the range of emotions you can have, no growth happens in the middle where everything is lukewarm, if you will. But if things are hot, if things are positive, if you will, if things are pressure in like momentum or energy or excitement, okay, those things grow. But also if things are cold, they also can grow. Like meaning like if things are negative, if things are stressful, if things are kind of on that negative spectrum of energy, but only growth happens on the outside, whether it's compelling or propelling or what do you think about that? I was just kind of working through. I have a little trouble understanding that. Now I do know that following the example of Jesus, was very important to me. And I know it was very important to you as you grew up. But if you read the 14th chapter of Matthew, you see, what did Jesus do among other things? He created a community of compassion. Now, if I'm gonna follow Jesus, I may not be up to doing that, but I can certainly see the value of it. I believe that's something that is driving your work, Trevor, because I think you've decided that that's something you want to be involved in, building a community of compassion that helps people. No, totally. It totally is. And like, I just think you need to share a little bit about your journey at Old Miss because when I think of compassion, that's a lot of times what I reflect on when it comes to like people. And if you could reflect on who you had become up until that point, I think it would be important for us to listen to. I had begun to teach, as I mentioned earlier, science and physics and chemistry at Cumberland County High School. That was about the time that Russia launched the first Sputnik. And so, as one fellow said, that Russia has caught the American science with their, we've caught them with their plants down, but anyway, they passed some laws to encourage people in the U.S. who are teaching science and math to be better prepared. So I hopped at that opportunity and applied for a fellowship to go, and I had four that accepted me, and I went to Old Miss. I'd like to say it was for some worthy purpose, but the difference in the four where the Old Miss was the cheapest place to go and the Mount was the same, so I thought my money will go farther here. I went to Oxford, Mississippi and attended University of Mississippi. How was I to know that at the same time, a black man named James Meredith had made the decision to go to Old Miss, to go to school. And, oh, we had some dramatic stuff. The governor of Mississippi would stand up and say, the University of Mississippi will never be integrated. Y'all, I had the buttons that were said never to kind of remind him of that, but anyway, James Meredith was at Old Miss the same year I was in graduate school and he was finishing his BS. And when I saw James, I identified with him. I said, you know, here's a guy that don't seem to have very many friends and he has a lot of federal marshals, but that's not much help to him. And so when I saw him out at the student union and all like that, I went to talk to him and all that and be friendly. And do you know, there were five young men from the Delta, Mississippi Delta, who came to visit me in my dorm. And what they said is, how may I help you? And they said, we saw you talking to James Meredith this morning over at the student center. I said, well, that's good. I was talking to him and they said, we don't like that. And they say that bullies are cowards. I don't know exactly how that all works, but I do know that I had a roommate from Oklahoma who had a 38 special in his desk drawer in our room. So that gave me quite a bit of courage, maybe all of it, but anyway, they said, we don't like this, we came over here to give you a lesson. I said, how do you plan to do that? I said, I only see five of you. And still, Jerry's sitting over there at his desk. I know he's itching to get that gun out, but anyway, they said, we cut back and forth a little bit there and then they said, come on, fellas, I think we scared him enough. And they left. But what you see is the best and worst in people in a period of crisis like that. Yeah, yeah. And who was to know that I would get myself elected to the Student Senate from my little dorm and be on the Huntley Brinkley report. I had 20 seconds on Huntley Brinkley because they were deciding that the editor of our local paper, a girl from Memphis, Sidney Brower, that she had been too favorable toward integration and not critical enough of the feds, da, da, da, da, da. And so they sent a motion in the Student Senate to censor her. So I was the only male that, several girls spoke against it, but I was the only male that spoke against censoring her. And so sure enough, our news, our local story was covered in the major, and there was a number one program in the news in the country was Huntley Brinkley then. So they clipped me in a little speech. People saw me from all over the, hey, I saw you on TV. But anyway, that was an interesting story. But it's because you were promoting for, you were promoting diversity and you were promoting equal rights all at the same time, but that wasn't necessarily your background. No. But your background, meaning like, that wasn't something you were even aware of necessarily, but you knew it to be right. See, I went down there to complete a master's degree in science and math and ended up having that opportunity to practice a little compassion. Yeah, and have character. Yeah. So I didn't go down there to do that, but it worked out that way. And isn't that so funny because some of the biggest things and stories and ideas and thoughts that we can have can come out of just us pursuing the, trying to get something accomplished. And along the way, we have this opportunity to have compassion and character both revealed when it comes to people. What makes somebody stop moving forward and recognize that there's some other really, really big things around them to be a part of? Well, one of the things I learned from that and other experiences, one of my favorite ways to express it is that life is something that happens while we were making other plans. Yes, yes. Who can testify to that? Right. We all can. Yeah, and you know, many plans are always made, but who actually accomplishes them or where do they actually come from or where do they go? And does it really happen the way that we think it's gonna happen? With that in mind, what is, maybe what's one of the most difficult things that you've had to go through and that you've grown through? Well, hands down, the most difficult, if you talk about pain and sorrow, is the loss of our 19-year-old daughter in an automobile accident. Yeah. Kelly was going to Carson Newman and all this kind of stuff. She was killed, she was a safe kid. She wasn't a big risk taker, but she was killed in an automobile accident when she was 19. Well, my mother had just died, but she was 90. People die when they're 90, but they don't die when they're 19 and die before their parents. And so, that was one of the most bitter pills we ever had to swallow. I was talking to Jane about that this morning and she said, I was just really down because there within the span of one year, we lost two of the people that meant the most to me, our daughter Kelly and my sister Dale. And I said, well, what was it that helped you to get through? And she said, well, I was working on my dissertation. She had a PhD in nursing. I was working on my dissertation at that time, and I got word within a year after their death that my daughter, Rachel, had just delivered our first grandchild. That being... That was me. That being you. That was me. And so she dedicated her dissertation for her PhD in nurse to you. Not many people have that to their name. Here along, this worst thing that happened was paired with one of the best things that happened. Wow. And life is that way. And if we prepare, and we're looking for opportunity, there's a mixture of the good and the bad. And so we can learn to sort those, keep the good and throw the bad away. But what we do in our society, we have more pain and sorrow than we've ever seen in the whole world, because we have more people to have pain and sorrow. But in any event, it's easier for people to look the other way than it is to go out and try to do something about that pain and sorrow. And you have chosen your focus in your work now to do something about that. And so there's a serious question that I would ask of you. What motivates you? What drives you to be able to do that? Because it's so much easier to walk away and look the other way. And a lot of people in the situation you'd be in, you're trained to be a pastor in one of the leading denominations in America today, da-da-da-da-da, but you've chosen to not go that route. And I think it's because you've recognized one of the great truths throughout the Bible is that Jesus, the prophets, the writers of the New Testament gospel have chosen to be at the edge, the edge of life. And one of my favorite expressions to refer to people like that is edge walkers, edge walkers. That thin ledge between traditional... What does my personal experience tell me about that, that might be a disconnect? Yeah, yeah. Well, like for me, people are the most valuable thing in this world because they last forever. And so if you view the difference between a finite game and an infinite game, I'm trying to play the game that lasts forever, meaning making the most impact, making an eternal one and then just like as we are a part of life change and as we are a part of people finding life, it's just the most valuable thing that we can be a part of, at least for me. And so that's the thing that gets me excited is like, hey, who is on this journey with you? And then who have you been able to make an impact with or on as you're together with them? And togetherness, I think, is something that no one really thinks of first. But when they need, they're always looking for someone. See, we have so many people who've become disconnected. Yeah. Disconnected. That's why loneliness is an epidemic, right? That's what loneliness is, it's disconnection. And like I was saying about Jane's work with homeless veterans, homelessness is not the lack of a home. You can give a home, it's not having a connected support system. Yeah, you said that at the beginning and I was like, oh my gosh, that's such a community point. See, we have a number of churches, for example, who decide we're going to do something about the homeless problem. And so they said, well, we can serve soup and we furnish. And they very quickly, many of them, became discouraged because it didn't work. It didn't solve the problem. Homelessness is a symptom of being disconnected from a support system. And I learned that from Jane's work with homeless veterans. But what a powerful point because no one views homelessness like that. And that's why so many of our programs don't work. Totally, but it also identifies the statement of home is where your heart is. Home is where your people are. Home is not a location, but a group of networked people that are actually together. So as you're thinking about that bitter pill of Kelly, who I never really got to meet, who I've just heard about in so many pictures and so many stories, incredible tennis player, all the things, how were you able to overcome that? And sure, maybe life, I was born, which is pretty cool and stuff, and I think it's cool. But what does growth beyond that look like? How did you do that? Just a little bit after that, we were in DC. Jane went to work at the headquarters of the VA. And we were going to church at First Baptist Alexandria. The pastor said, we'd like you to speak Sunday morning as a personal testimony to how you dealt with the loss of your daughter. Which was a lot of years after, right? How many years was that after? Several years after, but I agreed to make that talk before I had figured out what we're going to say. So having that responsibility led me to go back and say, well, what is it that did happen? And you know, the thing I finally focused on in my life and also my testimony there was the healing didn't begin until I was able to say, thank you. In other words, gratitude preceded healing. And when I reached the point where not being angry at God for taking Kelly away, but thankful to God that he let us have her for 19 wonderful years. And it's like night and day, it's light and dark, and we were able to heal because we expressed gratitude. We moved from anger to gratitude, from sorrow and anger to gratitude. And that's my testimony on that. What do you think, if you had an opportunity to talk with somebody who was struggling with loss, how would you coach them or encourage them specifically with what you now know, like the gratitude? Well, fortunately, I've had that opportunity a number of times. I had it in that church because the preacher or somebody else would say, well, after your testimony, so-and-so told us that they had lost a child and we should talk to them. So I tell them the story that I went through and encourage them to find a story that they can live with. And it's not that difficult if you care enough to do it. Yeah, that's so good. Man, Gramps, like, I've heard a lot of stories. One of my favorite things is to sit around a campfire with you and for you to kind of hold court, if you will, with everyone that's sitting around, you know, after a little bit. And you always end up taking it to a point of emphasis. And I don't think you're actually waiting for that moment. I just think it just happens because you're working through, like, people that you love or care about being together. And there's so many things that I could ask you from you've traveled all over the world to, yeah, sure, you do have a ton of degrees. You've read a bunch of books. You're still learning and growing at 87. You're impacting my life. You're impacting the people's lives around you. You're taking care of your amazing wife, my Nana, Jane, through Parkinson's and everything. And you've just been so steadfast no matter what's happened to you. If you were to encourage Zeke with everything you've come up to, and Zeke is, he's two. He's my youngest. If you were to encourage Zeke with everything that you've been through and where you are, what would you encourage him with? He's already off to a good start because his mother told me earlier today that he has a perpetual smile and that he's the happiest child she's ever seen. He's already off to a good start, so one of the things I would encourage those around him to not mess him up, he's on the track. Yeah. Yeah, really. I love that. Just smiling, just in general. Well, if someone's wanting to grow or they're stuck right where they are, what's something that you would maybe even tell them? The importance of connecting, connecting with the Creator, connecting with other people, connecting with themselves. One of the powerful scriptures that I know is when Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, and he says, you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. And we have people who take that as the gospel, which it is, and they say, I'm going to love my neighbor as myself, but then there's some substantial evidence that they don't love themselves. This saying is, this command is, love your neighbor as yourself. If you don't love yourself, you're nothing to share with your neighbor. So one of the real things that's important, and very few people I know have done that, is come to a real understanding of the peculiarities of their own life and read those truly accurately and still lack them. Yeah. Yeah. If you find somebody like that, Trevor, you've got to keep her. Yeah, come on. That's good. That's good. I was, you know, like, as we're connecting and as people are connecting, I just love sitting down with you. I always love sitting down with you. But I just thought it was so, I just thought it would be so powerful to capture some of this while just personally, selfishly, for myself. And then maybe some other people could be encouraged, inspired by it, but you are encouraging, you're inspiring, and I love you. I love you, Gramps. I thank you, sir. And honestly, just to share this with you, one of the reasons that I called this Full Vantage podcast is because everyone's vantage point is different, whether it's a problem or a dream or a life or just their point of view. And I think the most powerful things that we can do is to surround ourselves with people that have different viewpoints, so we can get a fuller picture of life, of the thing, of how they view. Because I think the foundation of our future is our community and the people that we go through life together with. So I think you've taught me a lot of that, and I mean, I'm excited about it. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Gosh, I love you, Gramps. So this is the Full Vantage podcast. I feel like we should, this is our longest one, which is cool. I feel like we should maybe cut it up, and we'll probably have another one of these. Okay. It's awesome. Good to have you. Thank you. Amazing. That was one of your longest ones. Yeah. I think.