What to Do When Your Circumstances Become Unlivable

Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone and today we are discussing the question, what to do when your living conditions become unlivable. You know, some people are fortunate enough to uh grow up with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouth. They know hardship only as paying their taxes or um you know, the car won't start or something trivial like that. and then they take care of this inconvenience. These aren't great problems to have, but you can live with them. Others aren't so fortunate. Perhaps you're living in a tough neighborhood where there's poverty or drugs or prostitution or bullying. Maybe these things are prominent in your neighborhood.

And it creates a context that's so toxic that it wears on your mind, your body, and your soul. And it feels like such a weight that holds you back from pursuing the things in life that you're most passionate about. Perhaps ever finding those things that you're most passionate about. Well, today on the Firestone Files, we're going to talk about what to do when your life context is so bad that it needs a reset.

When is it wise to stay the course? And when is it wise to leave? And how do you go about doing it? Well, the philosophy I want to start with today is comes from a term that I invented along with a former student of mine who has now become a major podcaster in his own right named Dr. Nathan Jacobs. He was a, believe it or not, an undergraduate student of mine in the uh late 1990s and early 2000s when I was teaching at Trinity College, just starting out. In fact, he was in my first class. I had four classes, I guess, u every semester, sometimes more at Trinity, but uh he was in that first group of students in the first class that I taught.

I remember the course um explicitly. It was an upper level course, believe it or not, called contemporary philosophy. I was a little overwhelmed teaching it as my one of my first course preps, but I do remember uh developing this terminology with him over the course of the couple of years I had him as my undergraduate student. He has since gone on to do a master's degree and a PhD and uh make movies and write books and has his own podcast and all of that now. But back in the day, we developed this term and it's called contexttologology.

I'll say that again. Antto contexttologology. We put a hyphen in betweento and contexttologology. And um the term refers to an insight that we came to regarding the dual nature of human growth and development. In order to find something, you need to know or to consider two aspects of its existence. Its inherent nature, that is describing what it actually is. And that for many people that's as far as understanding a thing goes. You describe it. What color is it? What shape is it? How much does it weigh? What are you know, what's it made out of? And lots of questions like that. And that's what I'm going to call this inherent nature.

And then there is the environment in which it exists. Now, I first came to this insight years before I met Nathan, but I think Nathan and I put it into words back when he was an undergraduate student. I don't know that I'd write a paper on it today or anything, but maybe I would. I do think there's a quite a bit of value here. And the reason I want to focus on it is that it's germanine to this question about becoming all that you were meant to be, becoming all that you can be and not allowing the environment in which you find yourself to define who you are.

Um, I first encountered this kind of principle when I was taking art lessons back in grade school in inner city Chicago. Uh my mom used to take me to um to um uh art lessons on Exchange Avenue down on the south side of Chicago and I think it was Saturday mornings we would go there and we would um draw stuff or be taught how to draw stuff. Typically it was still lives something like fruit bowl on a table or you know some of the classic stuff like that. Now artists I discovered even at that age um look at the world a little bit differently than say a lay person who's trying to draw fruit the fruit basket on the table. Um you know you're trying to draw it realistically.

You're trying to make it look like it really looks. you're trying to make it look like real fruit on a basket, in a bowl, on a table. Um, and you're showing its imperfections, its changes in color, it's proper shading and highlighting and so forth. Well, when I was like nine or 10 years old in this art class, uh, I would bring my sketchbook and cray paws and Nathan used to joke around because Nathan's a a fine arts painter. He's trained in the Maryland Institute of Art and so forth. Uh before he came to Trinity, he used to joke around cuz I'd tell my Craypaw stories and he'd say, "Cray?

Oh man, what kind of medium is that?" You know, he had been used to working with higher level ingredients, you might say. But be that as it may, I remember learning a lesson when I was sketching things and trying to fill them out with um shading and and so forth with crayons. And one of the things I remember was that there's kind of two elements to uh drawing a thing. You know, one was the sort of drawing and coloring and the other was the environment around the thing. If you want to make an uh say an apple appear brighter, you can add color to the apple or maybe use a brighter red or something like that. That's for rookies, you know. At least I came to find out in my art class. No, you want to make the apple brighter, then you make the background darker.

If you darken the area around the object, it brings it into sharper leaf, makes it appear brighter. Now, if there's lots of optical illusions like this, you can find them online or the internet or whatever where changes in context can radically change the nature of a thing or at least the appearance of the thing. So, in this sense, hear me out on this. An apple is what it is. It's an apple. That's what I'm going to call analytic logic, analytic thinking. And then an apple is what it isn't. In other words, you can define the apple or make it what it is by changing what it isn't.

This is the difference in analytic logic and synthetic logic. I put a a little bit of that up on the board behind me. Um, in human terms, let me give you an example from athletics. If you want to be a great at basketball, skilled, sharp, you know, a super super contributor to the team, you can do two things. You can train in practice. I'm going to call that one thing that is to work on yourself. Had another buddy, John Ho, who loved playing basketball. We played a lot of basketball together. I got a lot of great stories of John Hoy and I playing basketball. But he was able to increase his vertical like I think like by 6 in or so by building his own um what do you call jumping machine in our apartment we had together back when I was in college.

Um and or back when I was doing my master's degree kind of transition between college and master's degree. He built this thing and I was truly impressed not only by his ability to build it but his regular use of it and the dramatic effects that it had on his vertical his leaping ability. So one thing you can do is to work on yourself. The other thing you can do is to go and play with the better players or the best players. Putting yourself in the context of basketball greatness can improve your skills in ways that mere training can't do.

John and I, for example, used to march around to various playgrounds in either in Chicago, Maywood, Bellwood when we moved out there, uh, where I went to high school and then on into college and inner murals. we would go to where the better players were both to test our skills but also to improve our training and our skills. One of the best things to do is consider both of these things simultaneously. The analytic task of working on yourself, knowing what you need to do to get yourself in the kind of shape that would be a great basketball player shape. And the other thing is to go where there's great basketball players, facilities, and so forth, which changes the context in which you find yourself.

Um, train now because you have that in your control and it's part of your everyday life if you're trying to become a basketball player. But get ready to move into a context that is more likely to achieve the desired results. Now, you know that in some ways that's so common or obvious, but in other ways not so much. And I guess I want to make the case that the two kind of work in tandem.

You work on yourself at all times and all places and trying to build in rhythms in your life that achieve desired goals but also go to where you will be in a sense blessed um with people, opportunities and contexts in which you can flourish in whatever it is that you want to do. Well, one of the stories I want to tell is kind of goes way back. I already mentioned um taking art classes on the south side of Chicago. I lived on the south side of Chicago um for about 11 years before my family decided to move out to Bellwood, which is a western suburb of Chicago, and move out from the southside.

and variety of reasons for that. It became progressively more difficult for me to attend school there on the south side of Chicago. Being the only Caucasian uh person, me and my brother, at the schools that we were at, we started at Bradwell Elementary School. Bradwell is a uh school on the south side of Chicago somewhere around 80th um um Avenue and maybe a little bit further like 80 82nd Avenue. I can't remember exactly where it is. It's been a few years, but Bradwell Elementary was an all black grade school, public school. And me and my brother were all white kids uh going to Bradwell Elementary.

It was pretty tough to go there. you know, I was six years old, he was eight years old or something along those lines. I was uh in in effectively in first grade. He's in third grade. And uh you know, he's uh like two years older than I am, two and a half years older than I am. We'd be dropped off by our parents who were heading out to work. And that's when the bullying would begin. and I'd walk behind my brother um so that I would uh lessen the odds of being kicked or slapped or hit in the face by a flying object or some such thing.

Um it just seemed like that kind of stuff just never ended. And uh here I was in first grade, didn't fully understand it, but I understood that I was under some kind of threat. And I remember walking behind my brother and holding his shirt, you know, and just kind of trying to get into the school, get into class. Um, the only clear memory I have of class was that the teachers would take attendance and that they would in general they would um treat it like a study hall. Sometimes they would even leave the room and when they left the room that's when all hell would break loose in the classroom.

I can remember being pounced on by students and and so forth. That was just not a great context. And uh I think I was too naive in experience to know any better. I just kind of thought this is the way life was. But I think my parents saw that I wasn't flourishing. My brother wasn't flourishing and uh that that there were things going wrong.

Um, I I remember one day when the teacher left the room and locked the door, you know, people started jumping on top of me and so forth and I tried to scurry off into the back room because there's like a little escape room back there where you could sneak out into the hallway and uh, you know, they all follow me out there. The class was basically dismissed at that point. I I don't even remember where we ended up going, but it was truly a mess. I I could do a whole podcast on the problem with Chicago public school system when I grew up with it, which was many many moons ago.

Uh hopefully it's gotten better since then. But uh anyway, you know, we had we got outside that classroom, we slowly we left the building and oftentimes we never even go back to class. And those are some of my earliest experiences of school. My parents kind of used a little onto contextology, if you will, synthetic reasoning. When they pulled me out of that context, they ended up putting me into a private Lutheran school called Emanuel Lutheran School on on the south side of Chicago in kind of the other direction, but still in the same rough, you know, roughly in the same neighborhood.

And uh again, this was another all black school except for us. However, they had one thing the public school system didn't have, and that was the paddle. And the paddle, I remember, was wrapped in foil. And uh to be honest, I got there kind of I guess midway in that in first grade um cuz my parents were seeing that the public school system was going nowhere and I was getting traumatized by the whole thing. And so um they put me in this private school and uh I think I got that paddle quite a bit that first year primarily because I had never been trained how to be a student.

I just thought it was a free-for-all, you know. I thought that that was the way school went. Um, and uh, yeah, students would sneak books in the back of their pants to try to avoid it. Of course, the principal or the teacher would see those books. Oh, come on, young man. Take that book out of there. And then whack. Um to be honest it may you know it was not pleasant you know it in sense terrified me in some ways but in another sense it created a context in which I could finally learn. It was orderly the classroom was bearable. Things were timely. We could actually read books, you know, pick them up, put them down, have a normal classroom experience.

and it made all the difference in the world to my learning and my growth. Um, you know, I began reading and writing and flourishing at Emanuel Lutheran grade school. It was a contextual change that made such a huge difference in who I could become and who I felt like I could become. So, I want to thank my mom and dad and I I you know, uh grandma and grandpa at the time of shooting here, grandpa's uh my dad's still alive and uh my mom passed about 8 years ago, but they saw, you know, the problem and they took action and this meant all the, you know, this contextual change changed kind of who I was and what I might become.

I stayed there at Emanuel Lutheran from first grade to sixth grade and uh my brother kind of went through, you know, a grade ahead of me. And uh it was an oasis in my life at the time. The neighborhood on 79th in Sagena where I grew up was pretty rough. My brother and I were harassed and bullied and beat up and antagonized on a regular basis, but we actually loved going to school. Um, I had a really good friend uh who who went to the public schools and I saw through him what the real difference was. Uh, he was my same age. His name was Andre Cole and uh, we were just the best of friends.

We played together all the time. We play cars, matchbox in the in the in the in the in the dirt behind my house. And, um, we rode bikes and we played basketball together. And uh it was many years later when I reached out to Andre, I think it was in my mid30s at the time to see how he was doing. And I brought him out to my house. Uh we had moved out not only to to out of the city, but we'd moved out into the country by the time I was 30 uh in my uh early 30s.

And uh Andre and I had two different life stories. He was caught up in a world down there that had made his life miserable. He looked 10 years older than me. He said, "Chris, you don't understand. I just I got into some things I shouldn't have." And uh you know, he complained about his life unraveling somewhat. I have not um been able to contact him or reach him since then. So, I'm not sure where he's at. Andre, if you see this podcast or hear of it, um do reach out. I'd love to have you over for lunch again or dinner or whatever and just get caught up.

But I think it would be a fascinating study of anto contexttologology to see how the change of venue in my life and your staying in those conditions in your life, how they have changed and morphed uh our our our personal identities in ways that uh um would be perhaps insightful. Um, so you know, needless to say, we learned different things. And, uh, you know, I that whole experience on the southside was really, really something. I remember walking into my kitchen one day cuz my parents in the summertime knew that we couldn't just walk the streets while they were at at at work.

So, they would put us in summer camp. And, uh, summer camp did not have the paddle associated with it. a little bit more like Bradwell Elementary than it was Emanuel Lutheran, you know. Um, I remember walking into the kitchen one day and my parents said, my brother was sitting at the kitchen table and my parents were sitting at the kitchen table and it was very somber mood and they said, "Um, Chris, sit down. Have you been playing hookie?" I said, "Huh?" I was playing dumb. Hookie? What does that mean? I know what you're talking about. Are you not going to the day camp? My parents had put us in this camp, you know, to get out of the, you know, the streets as it were.

And we had taken to being dropped off and just skipping the camp and running away and doing our own thing. So, we were wandering the streets. I remember hanging out at laundromats and and and dime stores, you know, uh and uh and they they apparently the day camp, you know, called us out on it. called the parents and said, "Hey, your kids haven't been showing up." Um, in other words, that kind of accountability, that kind of context makes a difference. And having parents who are monitoring it makes a difference. That's the context side of your growth, your identity. Um, it's no, it's um, you just don't work on raising kids.

you sort of develop them by trying to put them into context where they can grow and become what they were meant to be. So, one of the things that actually happened is by the time we're I was in sixth grade or getting out of sixth grade, it became clear to my parents that the context that we were in was no longer livable.

we were going into the upper um you know you know into junior high school at that point and then on into high school and our our our opportunities were limited to in terms of the context in which we could flourish and so they decided to move out to Bellwood Illinois and there the schools were much better they were mixed schools which is you know kind of a breath of fresh air for me I wasn't the only Caucasian guy around. It was pretty much a a a healthy mixture of kind of cosmopolitan environment. I went to Roosevelt Junior High School and then Proviso West High School in Hillside, Illinois. And there I was able to stretch my wings a little bit. I definitely continued to to play sports.

I learned, you know, that sports get harder and harder the higher you go up and your commitment to them has to be there or you need to find something else to do with yourself. I learned to play chess while I was there and uh I really had teachers who believed in what we could become and they tried to train us accordingly. You know this was a revolution to me.

A lot of my training before that was um you know strong discipline opportunities to read and write and grow and so forth and I'm very grateful for that Emanuel Lutheran school but in in a normal sort of developed high school you know it it really blossomed for us and there's all sorts of stories of personal revolution in high school for me that I hope to tell someday. Um but uh really I want to stick to the moral of the story and that is a change of context. After I left um after I left Proviso West High School, I was better prepared for school but just not fully prepared.

Uh there is a real value to having, you know, good education early on in your life. And I had gone from bad to okay to good, but I never really saw excellent. And even though I was a pretty smart kid in high school, I was still kind of a C student because I didn't really know how to flourish as a student. And so, um, I ended up spending some time in junior college to try to get my grades up. And then I tried to get into a good school.

And I got into the University of Illinois at Urbana. And the reason I went there is because a number of my uh, high school friends had gone there. I knew it was a really good school and I wasn't ready for it for the first year or two of my college experience. But as I've kind of began to figure that out, I made the jump to the University of Illinois. And um from that point, I got two bachelor's degrees, one in mathematics kind of that was my I would call that my instrumental degree. I was good at math, but I really wasn't interested in math. But that's where I found philosophy as my first love was at the University of Illinois.

That's what sent me to a master's program at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. It was there that I found a place where I could study philosophy and faith in a sort of harmonious and um and uh a congenial context. And it's from that point that I was able to work on myself, work on my skills and really blossom as a student and uh decided to go overseas from there. And in my overseas journeys, I'll tell you about more later, but I ended up in Hong Kong and then pursuing a PhD in Scotland and then coming full circle back to Chicago. All that to say was that going and changing my context and working towards new contexts meant all the difference in the world.

um you know you you really it's it's hard to um it's hard to express the importance of just doing it of getting off your douff um changing your circumstances and doing whatever is necessary to get out of the old and into the new. Um, now as a Christian thinker, Christian philosopher, I do recognize that this is a kind of a, how do I put it? Two-step process. In Christian jargon, it would be salvation and formation. Uh, in other words, you need to change who you are. Um, because if the Christian worldview is right, we're all born into sin. We have a sinful nature.

We try to do, you know, we may try to do good and so forth, but we can't help ourselves but go wayward in one way or another. And um we need a new disposition. That old sinful one needs to die off. We need to take on a new one. We need to have a revolution in our person. And so I'm not discounting the what I'm going to call the analytic side of the equation. That is understanding your own identity. Once you take stock of your own identity, you realize you're not the person that you want to be. And you need to change. And for the Christian, it's about believing in the person of Jesus Christ, killing off the old self, taking on the new, pursuing God because of a right relationship made possible by Christ's life, death, and resurrection. Now, all of that goes into this fundamental identity change that I'm talking about.

And it's all there's a chicken and the egg component to it because if you've been raised a Christian, you know, some of us I was raised in the Methodist church and then was baptized as an infant and confirmed as a young adult, that identity was sort of built into me. Um, I went a little bit weward, you might say, in high school and I reaffirmed my faith in my early 20s when I was a little bit more put together and realized how much I needed God and needed a change of disposition because if I'm left to my own devices, you know, and creating my own context as it were, it's all going to go sideways.

And I kind of knew that and I made that change and for me everything changed after that. So identity is important. Recognizing who you are before the living God, that is important. At the same time, a change of context is also important. I think as a Christian I recognize the value of bringing the unbeliever into church because the context itself exudes um the gospel narrative and you get into life rhythms that recognize that we need to repent, we need to change, we need to uh band together with other believers and grow together in order to have the kind of full life that we really would want in this world.

So um there's this interplay between identity and context and that's what I was calling here at the outset in the sort of philosophical part of uh today's show onto contexttology recognizing that there are two components that make us who we are the ontology that is the identity the essence of who you are and that can change and you know this is a little different than the Greeks Because some of the Greeks, let's say like Plato, thought you were born with gold or silver or bronze in your soul or maybe it's, you know, tin. Uh, he didn't say that, but uh, you know, you're born with a kind of um, you know, for Plato, you're born kind of predetermined to to to to excellence or not.

and um and uh in the Christian worldview that's only half true. Yeah, we're born with certain innate talents and gifts. But we can have a revolution in our disposition when we take on the person of Christ grafted into as it were the vine that is Christ. um we can develop courage, we can develop perseverance, we can develop uh uh Christian character and so forth. And so that that I think is important to realize that the onto or the identity component um is indeed uh up for grabs as it were as we make life choices and uh that can go good or bad.

And if the Christian worldview is right, we have a tendency to be weward and we need the tendency to be good that is only found in the one who is good, the only one who is good and that is um Jesus Christ. And of course Jesus died uh lived died and rose again and has left his spirit for the church. And now we ac access these things this new identity through the holy spirit and with fellow believers in the form of a church. That's the onto that's the identity component of it. Once one becomes a Christian or once one chooses to be a basketball player.

I mean, there's an analogy here. Or once one chooses, like I did, to become a scholar. You've got choices to make about your growth. You can, as it were, throw those seeds on, you know, concrete or gravel. You can throw them onto, you know, thorny areas, or you can throw them on the fertile soil. And I guess I'm advocating the fertile soil. Go. There's a there's a there's a guy, let me I'm just remembering this now. There's a guy in seminary who had this strange statement and that has always stuck with me and I've forgotten his name, but uh he would say, you know, I was a young man. I was I was I was dating. I was trying to find somebody who could go on life's journey with me.

And u and uh he said, "Chris, you need to go to where the blessing is." I go, "Go to where the blessing is? What? What? What does that mean? You need to put yourself in places that increase the likelihood that you will find the significant other that you're seeking. Now, fortunately, I was already at Trinity. I ended up meeting my wife who was an undergraduate at Trinity. I was doing a master's degree at Trinity. And so, I'd already knew this principle, at least intuitively, but he put it into words. Go to where the blessing is. And if you go to where the blessing is, it increases your likelihood of finding what you're looking for both in yourself and in your relationships.

And there's a principle there that I think is fundamentally important to our opening question. You know, the opening question was um what to do when your living conditions become unlivable. Well, there is one piece of wisdom here that I think goes right to the heart of the matter. go to where the blessing is. If it's unlivable, then go to a place that's livable. You know, if if you're living in squalor, if you're living in poverty, or you're living in places that are leading to temptations, you got to find a way to get yourself out of that. Now, as a Christian, I think step number one is to believe in the person of Jesus Christ.

Have a changed position disposition that empowers you to make changes. But I don't think it's you know you know the sole bastion of Christianity. I think a non-Christian can change their context and live a better life. So it's a universal principle. It's not just a Christian one. The dual nature of the identity or the anttoontexttologology I think is a kind of distinctly Christian thing. But anyway um at least it can be.

But go make those changes. make a make make a an actual physical move. When I talk about synthetic logic, that's essentially what we're doing. When you're analyzing something, you're not moving. You're stationary. You're looking at something and then you're unpacking its component parts. That's analytic thinking. You're thinking about yourself. You're working on yourself. You're working on your room. You're working on your environment, your immediate environment, so forth. Synthetic logic is about mental movement, mental gymnastics almost, where you pick yourself up and move into a different context. And sometimes when you move, it jars new possibilities for your person, for who you are, who you might become.

You see new things. I would have never known philosophy was a thing unless I got myself into the University of Illinois. Um, I was at a junior college. I'd been really good at math. Didn't realize that when I took that philosophy of religion class with Dr. Robert McKim, that was going to like that was like a watershed moment in my life because I had picked up and moved and went and did something with myself and I saw there a vision of who I could become.

those that then led me to the master's degree where I saw a guy named Cliff Williams and that guy that's the guy I want to become. I want to become a philosopher at a college. Then I realized my master's degree wasn't going to be enough to to to accomplish that task. I needed a PhD, but I couldn't really stay in the States because my pedigree to that point wasn't going to put me in the kind of solid context I needed to be formed into the person I needed to become to become the person who I had envisioned myself to be. And so I went overseas and ended up doing a PhD in the United Kingdom and in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh.

again, got up, moved out, went to where the blessing was, and by God's grace became what he would have me to be. And uh, you know, that has uh that has really made all the difference in my life, you know, getting up and moving and getting out and doing. And so that I say I would submit to you is is um is part of the takeaway here. Um, in other words, there comes a time where packing up and moving is the wise thing to do. I know this is not easy. I'm not saying people who live in squalor, who are living in these tough conditions, um, are somehow at fault. I do think that sometimes we start looking inward.

We have self-pity, you know, we have a victim mentality. I've certainly been there in my own life at various times and by God's grace he's either brought somebody into my life or he has given me an insight that says stand up young man get up and move and go where the blessing is. Um you know part of uh maturing means pre preparing yourself to let go of the familiar of the convenient and to find a new environment to put down some roots and to learn. Put yourself there's another way in philosophy I I like to put this put yourself at the feet of people who can form you into what you were meant to become.

I put myself at the feet of Robert McKim of Harold OJ Brown of Dr. Kevin Vanhuser of Dr. Nick Adams you know was a was another supervisor of mine at the University of Edinburgh. And then I ended up coming over and getting a job, the job I'd always dreamed of at Trinity International University, you know, sometimes called Trinity College. Um, it made all the difference in the world that I went to where the blessing was, put myself at their feet, and became who I was uh meant to be. Now, notice the pattern here.

Get your commitments in order. I guess that would be first and foremost. Sometimes we're grappling, struggling to understand the full nature of our commitments. You know, I was a young Christian, but I didn't have kind of all the pieces together. You know, in some ways I still don't, but I feel like I have a better grasp on my commitments now. and then change your context so that you can grow and fill out those things you don't fully understand to become uh you know a little bit more put together if you will in your commitments in your faith and then go to where the blessing is and when you get there be flexible.

It's going to it's going to be a change but you need to be flexible. You need to be teachable. Sometimes we use the word meek. You need to be teachable. You need to be resilient. That is you're going to get knocked down a few times in process because anytime you make a move, you go to a different culture, a different context, you learn by trial and error. And uh sometimes it's more air than uh success. But you tend not to make the same mistake twice. you tend to learn and grow and uh and become in a sense resilient through that process.

And the last point I want to make is be a finisher. There's a there's a couple principles here. I may talk about these more later on, but there's two things that I I learned in my PhD sort of quest. And that is what I would call the principle of initiation and the principle of culmination. principle of initiation is all about starting. It's all about taking that first step. I think Confucious says the uh journey of a of a thousand miles begins with one step. Something like that. Nothing more important than realizing where you want to go and taking the initial step. In business, they call that going zero to one.

Some of the best startups never kind of materialize because they can't take the first step. And uh I would submit to you if you find yourself in doldrums, poverty, in an environment that is not healthy for you, then you need to take maybe childlike steps to initiate a change. And when you initiate that kind of change, you can expect that you will be formed and reformed in the process. And so this principle of initiation is super important. You need to get started. You need to walk out the door and you need to walk into a new door.

And that initiates a new experience. coupled with the principle of initiation I would suggest to you is the principle of culmination. Let's call it finishing. Try not to start anything that you don't plan to finish. Now, when you're younger in particular, sometimes even when you're older, you make false starts like you get in a little bit over your head and the best thing to do is go backwards and re and reboot. Don't deny that. I'm particularly a person who uh has made mistakes in this regard and realized it pretty quickly. It's kind of like in the Bible where it talks about don't stay in debt but pay your debtor off as quickly as possible.

This is the same thing when you make mistakes in initiation. If you take that first step and can't sleep that night or there's something wrong with it, step backwards and get out of it. There's usually, it's like buying an airplane ticket, at least here in the United States, the time of filming. You got 24 hours to pull your ticket back uh before you're obligated to pay the price for it and go or not use the ticket. Similarly, initiate well. Use your best judgment, assess the situation, and take a step of faith and go.

And um I mean there's all I I mean I got a thousand stories I could tell you about how that very act meant all the difference in the world to me. Um the couple uh the principle that is coupled with that is culmination. Always finish what you start. Um there's a lot of different reasons why this is important. Um culmination is the way of putting the money in the bank, right? You you you may acrue interest, but until you actually take it and bank it, it just sort of sits out there.

Um, you need to in the principle of culmination, you know, it's like when you start a degree, an undergraduate degree, you either need to pull the band-aid off and get out of it and go become a plumber, or you need to finish what you start. And there's great value in being a someone who follows through. So, you get on a job site, let's say you are a plumber, you get on a job site and you realize, man, there's more to this than I thought. Don't be that person that leaves a mess, pulls out, and never shows up again. You said that you were going to fix that thing. Fix it. Get to the finish line. Similarly, you started your degree.

Finish that degree. Do what's necessary to get it done. If you're flourishing, you can take your time. If you're not flourishing, get it done. Or I suppose you can move to a different context. But at some point you're going to need to finish culminate what you initiated and that actually puts it on your CV your curriculum vita sometimes called a resume and you have that on your resume you have now banked it as it were and banking stuff means you finished you culminated you said you were going to start something and you finished it and that builds rapport with people that builds reputation and that builds form in your person that you're not just a starter, you're a finisher.

And uh that's true in the Christian life. By the way, my goodness, we get knocked down. You know, I like C. Lewis. He said, if you ever tried being uh if you if you think being good was easy or is easy, then you never tried. In other words, you stepped out in faith. You know, you may get knocked down. You may find yourself caught in sin. and you may find yourself making a stupid mistake. You knock down, you get back up and you finish the race and you achieve the prize and that is what culmination is all about. So you may begin with an impoverished uh impoverished spirit, but you develop into a god-honoring power person for the kingdom ends when you initiate well and you culminate what you've initiated.

Knowing who you are and becoming who you were meant to be is of the utmost importance to all of us. Um you notice that that this whole process I'm talking about onto contextology is the answer to one of the biggest questions of philosophy. Who am I? Who am I is the b one of the you know if you're going to take a top five question in philosophy that one is who who am I is right up there. And you're only going to know who you are if you have identity change. In other words, you know yourself in the presence of the living God.

And then you form yourself in mission for kingdom ends by changing your context and going making disciples of all nations as it says in Matthew 28. Um, and that's the final answer. And uh, it's what we're all looking for in philosophy in the answer to the question, who am I? A lot of us in this world will go around asking that question for the rest of our lives and just kind of leaving it open-ended and yet the answer is right before us. So anyway, that's really all I have to say today on that question. Um do um when your living conditions become unlivable, make a change.

You can do this. You can step out and uh it makes all the difference in the world. I'm going to have more to say. There's a kind of a tangential question here uh about working hard or hard work. I'll talk about that one uh in another podcast. But I think that they uh but those kinds of contextual changes make all the difference in the world.

All right. Well, that's it for now. All the best to you, blessings, and I'll see you next time on the Firestone Files. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions and remember the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.