Podcast appearances and mentions of john as

The RailsConf Scholarship Program (https://railsconf.org/scholarships) 03:12 - Tram’s Superpower: Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Per Night! 04:08 - Leah’s Superpower: Being a Companion to Long-Distance Runners 04:55 - Stefanni’s Superpower: Doing Things She’s Terrified of Doing 05:34 - Being Afraid and Grappling with Self-Doubt * Asking Questions and Being Vulnerable * Call-Out Bad Behavior 12:34 - Team Psychological Safety 17:20 - Education & Learning Environments; Tech Journeys * Ada Developers Academy (https://adadevelopersacademy.org/) * The Turing School (https://turing.edu/) 27:52 - Making & Noticing Progress; Comparing Yourself to Others * The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance---What Women Should Know (https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Code-Science-Self-Assurance-What-Should/dp/006223062X) Reflections: John: Finding new ways to be of service to other people. Leah: What can we proactively do to make our space safer and more conducive to diverse thought? Mando: It’s okay to make mistakes and not be perfect. Steffani: How common it is to openly talk about these things in the Rails Community ❤️ Tram: Representation matters! Humanization and inclusivity. Calling people out. Lending Privilege -- Anjuan Simmons (https://anjuansimmons.com/talks/lending-privilege/) Transcript: JOHN: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 235. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mando Escamilla. MANDO: Thanks, John. And I'm here with three RailsConf scholars who are going to be joining us today, which I'll like to take turns introducing yourself, maybe starting with Leah? LEAH: My name is Leah Miller and I’m a Platform Engineer at Highwing, which is an insurtech startup based out of Denver. Before making over the switch to tech, I spent almost a decade in the insurance industry primarily working as a production underwriter. In my spare time, I enjoy running and craft beer and frequently, the careful combination of the two. I’m also a new dog mom to a rescue pup named Orla. MANDO: Great. Tram, you want to go next, please? TRAM: Yeah. So hi, everyone. I'm Tram Bui. I’m currently attending Ada Developers Academy, which is a tuition-free coding program for women and gender-diverse folks in Seattle. The program includes an internship match with a Seattle tech company. So currently, for my internship, I work as a Developer Relations engineer and what this means is that I try to make it easier for Rails developers to deploy their apps to the cloud. Outside of coding, I try to maintain it and improve my high school tennis skills. I also like to read books and also, thinking about my next great public transportation adventure and volunteering for local nonprofits. And then Stephanie, I can pass it on to you. STEPHANIE: Hi, I'm happy to be here. I'm Stephanie and I've been working with Rails for the past 4 years, but now I'm trying to transition from dev full-time to having my own projects. And besides software, I also like to talk about plant-based diet, financial independence, and mental health. Also, if you have noticed my accent, I'm from Brazil, but I live in Vancouver, BC and yeah, I'm really happy to be here. JOHN: Awesome. Welcome to the show, everyone. So this is just a little setup here. Not every year at RailsConf, but most years at RailsConf, we do have a special episode where sometimes, we've got many of the panelists are together and so, we can record in the same room, which is obviously very novel for us. This year of course, it's all online. One of the things we’ve also done is bringing in some of the people who are part of the RailsConf Scholar Program, which is the program to expand access to tech conferences to people that are underrepresented and to give them some guidance on how to make the most of their experience at the conference. We always think it's great to get the opinions of people that are brand new to this industry and see what their perspective is on everything. So we're going to start off with our usual question which is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? We can go really in any order. Who would like to go first? TRAM: I can go first. So my superpower would be the ability to get 8 hours of sleep a night [chuckles] and I think I acquired this power – I think I was very just like, I loved nap time as a kid and I grew up knowing the importance of a good night's rest. I think for me to be my best self, that’s one of the big things that I need to have. I think growing up and going to college, it was very like, “Oh, sleep is not important,” but I always had noticed the importance of sleep and I think it does hustle economy, too. People are very fast to just cast aside and was like, “You can sleep when you're dead,” but I'm like, “No, if you don't sleep, you will die faster.” So I'm going to take every opportunity that I can do at least get a full night's rest. LEAH: I am so jealous of that superpower. [laughs] I think mine feeds into a little bit of the opposite of that, but my superpower is the ability to keep people company when they're running through the night during a 100-mile races, or ultra-marathons. So people running it 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM, getting really down, needing someone to lift them up, I can run alongside them and sing, or just be a companion to keep them motivated. I think I acquired this skill from being a middle child. I spent a lot of time just entertaining myself and being pretty independent and if you can entertain yourself, it's pretty easy to extrapolate that to others, keep people going, so. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: I would say that my superpower currently is a work in progress actually, but it's doing things even if I'm terrified of the way I always struggled a little bit with self-confidence. How I acquired that, I actually had to go to therapy first to build the foundation, but now I think I've been getting pretty good at it and the feeling of doing the things that you're scared at the end is a really good feeling. You feel like a superwoman. [chuckles] JOHN: Oh, those are all such great answers. I want to dive into each of them, I think oh, my thoughts are jumbling up because I want to ask questions to all of you. Well, I think I'll start with Stephanie. That's an amazing superpower and it's definitely going to serve you well. It's something that I've had to learn as I develop my speaking career at the same time. Even just thinking that it was possible for me to get up on stage and do that, that took a while to get there and then actually doing it also took a lot of practice. So certainly, that's going to be awesome. MANDO: Yeah. It's so easy to just keep doing the things that you're good at and try to ignore, or maybe push off the things that you're not so good at, or you don't have that confidence in, Stephanie, like you were saying. It's funny, I keep relearning this lesson over and over again, there's this project at work that I've been putting off and pushing the JIRA ticket over just because I kept telling myself that it wasn't important and that I could do – other things were higher priority. It's just because I was kind of scared, but I wasn't going to be able to do it as well as I could do the other things. I just had to sit down and do it and then I pushed up the PR and it got ripped to shreds by the other wonderful, [laughs] amazing engineers that I work with. But it's good. I didn't die. [laughs] So it’s funny how we have to keep learning these lessons over and over again sometimes, I think. JOHN: Yeah, that reminds me that there's a related skill in there also, which is realizing when you were afraid of something. Sometimes you think, “Oh, it's just not important that happened right now.” MANDO: Yeah. JOHN: As an excuse, but once you realize, “Oh, I'm actually afraid of how this is going to go.” It allows you to approach it differently. You can be like, “Oh, okay, well that's what this is. All right, then now I know how to like face it, head on rather than pretending it's some other reasons.” So I think that that's really important as well. MANDO: Absolutely. Yeah, and it took me a couple of days to [laughs] realize that that's what I was doing and it wasn't until that was the last thing I had to work on for the sprint after I had reshuffled and moved everything over and then looked at my other teammates, JIRA boards to see if they had any stuff that I could help out with [laughs] that finally I was like, “Well, okay, I guess I'll just do this one.” TRAM: Yeah. I think sometimes for me, the anticipation, or the thought of it is even scarier than actually doing the task itself. I've had this happen to me so many different times. For instance, with the podcast, I'm like, “Yeah, this is something that I want to do because I like listening to podcasts,” but I was like, the nervousness and the scariness of putting myself out there and just thinking about it leading up to this moment, it's so much scarier than actually being in the moment and talking with y'all. So yeah. LEAH: I think part of it, too is recognizing that your feelings are not existing in a vacuum. There's other people that experience the same insecurities, or just going through what you're going through. We were interviewing someone a couple weeks ago at my company and just talking about the stressors of being from a bootcamp and being hired into an engineering organization as either a junior developer, or a mid-level developer, or whatever level, but just knowing that your background isn't a CS degree, or it's just a little bit different than what other people have. And then having that insecurity of I'm pushing up a PR and then are 20 people going to make comments on this and then that gets pushed to Slack and everyone sees all 20 comments. Am I going to be laughed at, or looked at as less than? So it's just nice to express that to someone else and have them regurgitate the same feelings, or just reflect back to you that you're not the only one who's having self-doubt in that way. MANDO: Yeah, and it's tough for me at least to remember sometimes that I come from a very different place privilege wise than other folks on the team. So it can be a lot easier for me to do stuff like, just push this PR up and ask for comments because my experience may be very different than someone who doesn't have my same background, or the amount of experience that I have, or the kinds of relationships that I may have with other folks on the team. I strive to help create spaces whether at work, or wherever where people can feel comfortable asking questions and not worrying about people coming in and being overly critical, or negative, or whatever. But my lived experience is very different than others. That's something that I need to keep in mind that you can't always just assume good faith that everyone's going to treat you the way that you would maybe treat them and I have to actively work and actively communicate to people that this is that kind of place. JOHN: Do you find that there are specific things that you do to communicate that, or at least to make that ambiently knowledgeable to the other people in the team? MANDO: That's a good question. I think the easiest thing you can do is make sure that you're modeling both sides of that behavior like, asking a lot of questions, putting yourself in vulnerable situations, and then also, making sure that you always jump in and respond positively when others do that so that you can help set a baseline. I think of what the behavior should be and what behavior is expected, and then the second thing is always making sure to call out behavior that doesn't hit the bar. I can't remember where I first heard this, but my buddy, Jerry, he's the one who always drops the phrase to remind me, he says, “It's as simple as saying, ‘We don't do that here.’” It doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be a huge problem, or anything. Just when there's behavior that you don't do here, you say, “We don't do that – [laughs] we don't do that here.” It's as simple as that. LEAH: I love that. MANDO: Yeah, Jerry's awesome. JOHN: I think this is a really interesting topic because I'm always looking for examples of ways to make that easily communicated in a team environment. So have any of you had experiences where maybe someone else on the team was able to communicate some thoughts of psychological safety, or things that made you more comfortable being who you were on the team? LEAH: So I can speak to the team where I work. We're a startup. We have about 15, I think maybe officially 16 people now and we have, I think just hired our fifth female to join the team, or a fifth non-male to join the team. We have created just a private channel for all non-males on the team in Slack where we can communicate with each other and we've set up a happy hour once a month where we can meet. You don't have to drink alcohol. You can just sit and chat and we just have an hour set aside where no conversation topic is off limits. It's just really helpful to just set aside that time where there's no outside influence and it's just the five, or six of us, or however many there are right now [chuckles] who can join and just chat through what's a win for the week, or what's a struggle for the week. I think part of it is giving each other the space to express what's going well and also, express what's going wrong, and then see if others of us on the team can be a champion for the other person and just offer support where possible, or step in when something's happening that we need to maybe put a stop to. Our private channel is lovingly called The Thundercats, [laughs] which I'm pretty fond of. MANDO: [laughs] That's fantastic. You make it almost sound like a union kind of [laughs] where y'all can have this place where you have this ability to do collective action, if necessary. I think that's just fantastic. That's amazing. LEAH: And I should say that the men on our team are fantastic. So this is not like a – [laughs] [overtalk] MANDO: Of course, yeah. LEAH: Escape hatch like, we're all upset about stuff, but it's just nice. Regardless of how wonderful the men on the team are, it's nice to have a space for not men. [chuckles] STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think that for me, from my experience, the one that I was more comfortable with was at my first Rails job. It was still in Brazil and the team was totally remote and they did lots of peer programming. They did a great job in onboarding people, but peer programming was way more than onboarding. It was a common practice and I was just like, “Wow, this is so cool.” You could learn so much more beyond just a code and besides that, I felt really comfortable in seeing that no one was scared of doing anything wrong like, there was a really good communication. So I think that the main thing that needs to be worked at, when you're working in a team, is to make sure that everyone feels safe to do their stuff and they don't feel like, “Oh, I'm going to be judged,” or “I don't want to try this because I don't want to have to handle with anything from management,” or whatever. So maybe having that feeling, “Oh, we make mistakes here. We are humans, but we try to make the best to learn from them.” That's a good way to improve this team behavior, I guess. [chuckles] JOHN: So you were able to see the other people on the team, that you were paired with, making mistakes and being okay with it and just that became obvious to you that that was the thing that happened all the time and it was fine. Right? STEPHANIE: Yeah, and especially because I was also self-taught. I actually went for computer science for one year, but I dropped out. I always had this idea that people with more experience, they know everything. [laughs] That was like a mindset that I changed and it made me feel way more human, more than anything at first, and that's when I started seeing how much it's important to think of your team and how much that affects everyone and in your company as well. MANDO: First of all, shout out to comp sci dropouts. I made it just a little bit farther than you, but I know exactly where you're coming from. I had that same thing in my head for a very long time that these folks with their degrees obviously must know so much more than me and I have no idea what I'm doing. That's one of the things that I've always loved about the programs, like the RailsConf Scholars, is that for me, one of the things that helps combat that imposter syndrome thinking is working with folks directly who are earlier in their careers, or have less experience. So not only do you get to help them, guide them, and show them things and stuff, but it really does help serve as a reminder of all the stuff that you do know. There's nothing better than talking about something with someone, being able to explain it to them and help them, and then you walk away and you're like, “Oh yeah, I do know some things, that's kind of nice.” TRAM: I think in talking about dropping out of a major, or switching majors, my experience and my journey into tech. In college, I was quite afraid. I had a requirement to take a CS class, but hearing all these horror stories from other people made me delay taking it. I actually took my first CS class, my junior year of college and while it was really challenging, I definitely enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. But since I took it too late in my college career, I couldn't switch my major, or couldn’t minor, or major in it and that really stuck with me because, I think going and finding the ADA Developers Academy, which is a coding program, it’s like it was my second chance at doing something that I wanted to do, but didn’t have the time, or didn't have the confidence to do in college. One thing that is nice, that I keep thinking about, is that even if I did do a CS major in college, that environment instilled with the competition of it and instilled with, I guess, people who may think that they know more than you may have not been conducive for my education. But what I really enjoy about the current coding program that I'm in is that it's all women, or gender diverse folks and we all come from all different walks of life. But one thing that we have in common is being really empathetic to each other and that environment, I think made all the difference in my ability to learn and to see that there is a community that would champion me and that would also try to uplift other people. JOHN: Yeah. I think that highlights the importance of that initial learning environment. If your first exposure to tech is a weed-out course when you’re trying taking CS in college, you're probably never coming back to it. But having an environment that's specifically designed to actually be supportive and actually get you through learning things can make all the difference, really. MANDO: Yeah. My oldest son is going through a computer science course, or computer science curriculum at UT Dallas here in Texas and his experience is a little bit different, I think because of the pandemic and he doesn't have that in-person structure. Everything's different. He's not having in-person classes. So it's forcing it to be a little more collaborative in nature and a little less kind of what you were saying, John, like waking up at 8 o'clock in the morning to go to some 300-person weed-out class. I think it has served him a little bit better having things be a little weird in that regard, but it is funny to see how little the curriculum and set up around getting a computer science college degree has changed in the 20 years since I took it. That's a shame and I think that that's why the places like ADA Developers Academy and other folks who are showing people and especially employers, that there's different ways for people to get these skills and get this knowledge as opposed to a strictly regimented 4-year, whatever you want to call it, degree program. Leah, you came into technology, you were saying, through a different path other than your traditional computer science degree? LEAH: Yeah. So I majored in math in college and wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with that and when I graduated, it was 2009, to age myself. [chuckles] It was 2009 and the economy was not doing very well and a lot of my peers were really struggling to find jobs. I went for a leadership program at an insurance company and ended up staying there and moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, which I had no desire ever to go there, [laughs] but it worked out fine. I ended up in this insurance company for almost 10 years. Met some really wonderful people and I got to do a lot of really great things, but just kept having that question in my mind of if it hadn't been a poor economy and if it hadn't been whatever factors, could there have been another path for me? I just kept thinking about what I enjoy doing at my job had nothing to do with the insurance side of things. I found that I got really into writing Excel formulas, [chuckles] those were the days that I was having the most fun and I was working remotely, living in Charleston, South Carolina at the time. After chatting with a few friends, I found the Turing School of Software & Design out in Denver. So I quit my job and moved out to Denver and two days after I moved there, I started the bootcamp program. After an entire week of school, I still hadn't unpacked my bag of socks and several other things from my car. So it was just kind of a whirlwind, but I picked Turing because they had an emphasis on social justice and that was really important to me and I think it served me very well as far as being able to meet a lot of people who are like-minded—who also picked Turing for similar reasons—just wanting to better the community and be a force for good with technology. So yeah, that was my rambling answer. [laughs] MANDO: I know that I struggle a lot with knowing the “good programs” and the not-so-great bootcamp style programs. Like anything else, when stuff becomes something that's popular, it attracts folks who are speculators and usurious, I guess, for lack of a better word. [chuckles] So you hear these horror stories about people who go through and spend all this money on bootcamp programs and then can't find a job, don't really feel like they learned the things that they were supposed to learn, or were told they were going to learn. It's nice to hear good stories around those and some good shoutouts to solid programs. LEAH: It was definitely stressful and we had a hallway that we deemed “the crying hallway.” [laughs] But I think it did serve me well and has served many people well in the several iterations that Turing has had over the years. MANDO: Yeah. Just because it's a solid program, or a positive program doesn't mean that it's easy by any stretch. LEAH: Totally. MANDO: I remember one time I was talking with an old coworker and she was telling me about her experience going through the CS program at Carnegie Mellon. This woman, Andrea, she's easily one of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life and she's fantastic at everything that I've ever seen her do. So to hear her talk about going through this program and finding stairwells to cry in and stuff as she was a student really shook me and made me realize that the stuff's not easy and it's hard for everybody. Just because you see them years later being really, really fantastic at what they do doesn't mean that they spent years trying to build those skills through blood, sweat, and tears. LEAH: Yeah, I think one of the things that was hard, too is you have no idea what playing field everyone is starting from. It's easy to really get down on yourself when you're like, “This other person is getting this so much faster than I am,” and come to find out they've had internships, or have been working on random online courses teaching themselves for years, and then finally made the decision to go to a school versus other people who haven't had that same amount of experience. It's another lesson and [chuckles] just level setting yourself and running your own race and not worrying about what other people are doing. TRAM: I totally agree with that, Leah. I feel like sometimes I compare my starting point to someone's finish line and I'm like, “Oh, how did they finish already? I'm just starting.” It can be really hard to think about that comparison and not get down on yourself. But I think it's also really good to keep in mind that we only know our journey and our race and it's so hard to have all of the other information on other people, how they got there. So it's just like, I try to remind myself that and it's like, I think the only one that I'm trying to compare myself with is me a month ago, or me a year ago instead of someone else's journey. LEAH: Totally. JOHN: Yeah, that's actually something I'm trying to build into a conference talk because it's so hard to see your own progress unless someone points it out to you. Especially as you're grinding through a curriculum like that, where it's like you're always faced with something new and you're always looking ahead to all the things you don't know. Like, when am I going to learn that, when am I going to get to that, when am I getting to know all these things like everybody else? It takes extra work to stop and turn around and look at, like you said, where you were a month ago, where you were three months ago and be like, “Oh my God, I used to struggle with this every day and now it just flows out of my fingers when I need to do a git commit,” or whatever it is. Being able to notice that progress is so important to feeling like you're not completely swamped and struggling the whole time; that you're always looking to the things you don't yet know and never looking at the things you do know, because you don't have to struggle with those anymore. They don't take up any space in your mind. STEPHANIE: Yeah. I can relate to that as well. Something that I've been doing that it's working a lot is okay, I look to others, but I try to see what they did that I can try to look forward. Like, “Oh okay, so they did this and this looks like something that I want to do,” but I only compare myself to my past self because it can be really – I don't think it does a lot of good to anyone, in fact, when you compare yourself to others, just for the sake of comparing. But if you do see that as an inspiration, “Oh, look, this person is showing me that what I want to do is possible and that's great because I have now more proof that I'm going the right path.” It definitely takes some time to change this little key in your head, but once you do, it gets so much easier and so much lighter. You see even people in a different way because you start asking, “I wonder if this person is struggling with this as well because it's not easy.” [laughs] So this is something that it's helping me. MANDO: Yeah, that's something that I'm struggling with right now with my daughter. She plays high school softball. She's fantastic, she's an amazing athlete, and she's really, really good, but she's a freshman on the varsity team at the highest-level high school team. So she continually compares herself against these other girls who are like 2, 3, 4 years older than her and have a lot more playing time and playing experience and they're bigger and they're stronger. I keep trying to look for a way to help her understand that, like you said, Stephanie, she can compare herself to herself yesterday and she can look to these other players as inspiration as to what's possible. But what she can't do is get down on herself for not being there yet. That's just not fair at all and she may never get there. There are a lot of other factors, outside of how hard she works and what she does, that will contribute to how she's going to finally be. That's another thing that I have to [laughs] work on just me personally is that we all have our own built-in limitations and we all make choices that set us down only so far down a path. I choose to not keep my house completely spotless because there's only so many hours in a day and I would rather go watch my daughter's softball game than deep clean a bathroom. I'll eventually clean the bathroom, but today, [laughs] it's not going to be cleaned because that's the choice. But yet for some reason, I still get down on myself when I come home after the game and I'm like, “Ugh, why is this house so dirty?” STEPHANIE: Yeah. I think now that you mentioned that you have a daughter, I remember this chapter from this book called The Confidence Code. It’s a really, really good book and it talks about all the reasons women are the ones that more self-confidence and how we can put ourselves to compete. There is a chapter for parents and how you can help your daughters to not go through the normal route because it will happen. Not that much anymore, but we are still, in terms of society, expected to behave differently and the book brings you really good tips for parents. I think you would be nice for you. It looks like you want to learn more about that? MANDO: Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Stephanie so much. I'll take a look at that and we'll include a link in the show notes for that and some of the other stuff. Any and all help [chuckles] is very much appreciated. JOHN: We've come to the time on the show where we go into what we call reflections, which are just the takeaways, or the new thoughts, or the things we're going to be thinking about that we've talked about on this episode that really struck us. So for me, it's a couple of different things. First Leah, you were talking about being a companion to long distance runners, which is something I had never thought about being a thing, but of course, the moment you say it, I'm like, “Oh yeah, if you're running a 100 miles, it'd be nice to have someone keep you a company.” That sounds great and it's something you need to be suited to. You need to be able to run and talk and so, finding new ways to be of service to other people, I think is really interesting part of that. I think the other thing that struck me is we're discussing different ways of increasing psychological safety on the team and the ways that you can communicate that to the people that are there. Those are the things I'm always keeping an eye out for because I always want to be able to provide those to my team and so, hearing your examples is just always good for me just to have even more different ways of doing it in the back of my head. LEAH: Well, thanks, John. Yeah, I think the big takeaway for me is just what can we proactively do to make our space safer, or just more conducive to diverse thought? I think, Mando, maybe you asked the question of what we were explicitly doing at our companies, or if anyone had ever done something explicit to make us feel safer, or invite us to participate fully in the community of developers? I think there is a lot more that can be done to help people feel as though they're a part, or that their opinion matters, or their belief matters and their contribution will only make the team better and stronger. MANDO: Yeah. I think that was John who asked that and then I rambled on for about 20 minutes afterward, so. [laughter] LEAH: Sorry. MANDO: But that reminds me, or that that leads into my reflection. Stephanie was talking about the one of the things that helps reinforce that psychological safety for her was seeing people make mistakes and having it be okay, and having that general attitude that we're going to make mistakes and bad things are going to happen and that’s okay. It's something that Leah, like you, I work at a really, really small startup. There's five people at the company total. So the pressure to make sure that everything is done right the first time is pretty high, the pressure that I put on myself, and it can easily spiral out of control when I start thinking about how long I've been doing this and then the should start to come out. “You should know this,” “You should be able to do this,” You should get this stuff done quickly, or faster,” or “It should be perfect.” I need to keep reminding myself that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to not have it be perfect the first time, it's okay to not be perfect. So thank you for that reminder, Stephanie. STEPHANIE: You're welcome. I have to remind myself every day as well. [chuckles] It is a daily practice, but I can guarantee you that it's so much better, things like life in general is so much better, so it is worth it. I think that my takeaway here, not only from this talk with everyone, but also from the RailsConf in general and the Rails community is how common it is to talk about these things at our community. Like, yesterday at the keynote, I saw the diversity numbers and I was like, “Whoa, wait a second. I think this is the first time that I go to a conference and someone is talking about this openly.” I think that's one of the reasons why the Rails community is so important to me and I want to continue the legacy. I think that talking about these names is what makes our community unique and I'm really grateful to be part of the community. TRAM: Yeah, I think my main takeaway is what I've been reflecting on the past few days and this conversation is one thing following the psychological safety theme of how can we have more inclusive and safe environments and like Leah said about representation matters. The people you see around you and the environments that you are in can help you to feel a certain way and when there's such a monolith of people in a certain company, that can make me feel very scared and open up to what I think, or my thoughts are. So I think the diversification of type is very, very important, but also just humanizing people and that's one thing that we can do today is highlight, be open about our mistakes, but also have an environment that is inclusive enough where people can speak up about their mistake and that inclusivity begets inclusivity. You're not going to just say that you're inclusive and don't have actions to back it up. Also, I think what Mando said about calling someone out. Sometimes being a newcomer to a company, I don't feel like I have the power to do that and sometimes, it's uncomfortable for me to do that. So having someone who is in upper management, or someone who has a little bit more power showcase that that's something that they have the power to do, but something that I can do also is really helpful. So that's something that I would try to reflect more on and act upon because it's been a really wholesome conversation and I'm glad to be a part of it. JOHN: Wonderful. Yeah, and to your point, Tram, there's a talk that was actually at RailsConf a couple of years ago by Anjuan Simmons called Lending Privilege. One of his points is that those of us who have the higher levels of privilege, we can wield it for good and we can do things like putting ourselves out there to say, “No, that's not okay on this team,” or to lift someone else up and say, “Hey, you just talked over, what's her name.” Like, “Please Stephanie, say what it was you were going to say,” or like, “Stephanie mentioned that idea tenured 10 minutes ago and we ignored it.” So using that privilege, or the position on the team. I've been at my company for 10 years so I have a lot of social capital; I can use that for a lot of good. I'll post a link to that talk as well in the show notes because I think it's really important concept. All right. Well, we've come to the end of our show. Thank you so much to all of our scholars who were able to join today, Leah, Stephanie, and Tram and thank you, Mando for being here. This was a wonderful conversation. MANDO: Yeah, thanks everyone. LEAH: Thank you. MANDO: It was fantastic. STEPHANIE: Thank you! TRAM: Thanks, ya’ll. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Special Guests: Leah Miller, Stefanni Brasil, and Tram Bui.

In 2008, the economy had tanked and John McDonald was left at a crossroads. Rather than withdraw into comfort, he took the opportunity to do something a bit crazy. John was a woodworker who spent time at trade shows, and someone once suggested that he make cabinet doors that fit with IKEA cabinets. With nothing to lose, John launched Semihandmade to do just that. Now, a decade later, Semihandmade has seen consistent double-digit growth year over year and has been featured in countless blogs, interior design social posts, on the feeds of influencers worldwide, and in the homes of tens of thousands of people. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, John tells the story from start to finish, including how he built a successful ecommerce custom cabinet model on the backs of the IKEA brand, and how he’s now launching into the DTC space with the first US-made custom cabinet DTC offering, BOXI. From finding the right partners, to building an omnichannel approach that doesn’t handcuff your resources, to challenging yourself to strive for more, you’ll learn something from John and his story that just might help you level up your ecommerce business, too.  Main Takeaways:Perfect Partners: For ecommerce brands taking on an omnichannel approach, there is no reason to tie up a lot of your resources into retail spaces and showrooms. Instead, exploring partnership opportunities with other brands in a similar category might be a mutually beneficial way to expand your brand, the brand you partner with, and offer an in-store experience to customers who seek one.Meeting the Moment: The world of home furnishings and interior design is changing rapidly, especially as A.I. and VR technology enter the marketplace. With that tech, users are gaining more flexibility to design their own spaces without leaving home, which means there is an opening for DTC companies that are tech-first. Step Up or Step Out: You can’t let competition scare you, let it inspire you to raise your game. By surrounding yourself with the best and forcing yourself to compete against them, you have to level up to simply survive, and succeed expectations to grow your business in a meaningful way.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, Cofounder at Mission.org. Today, I had the pleasure of chatting with John McDonald, the Founder and CEO at Semihandmade and also Boxi. John, welcome.John:Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.Stephanie:I'm really excited to have you on. Before we get started, I was hoping you could give me a little background, and for anyone who doesn't know what Semihandmade is and also Boxi, how did you start it? What is it? How do I think about it?John:Sure. Semihandmade is a company that's been around, I guess, just over 10 years now. We're based in Southern California. We make doors that fit IKEA cabinets. What that means is, if you want to buy a kitchen, bathroom, closet media system, IKEA, for the most part, gives you the amazing flexibility of not buying their doors. For a kitchen, you'd buy the cabinets, you'd buy the interior components. Then we have over 40 different options from entry level doors to some really high-end, one-of-a-kind offerings.Stephanie:I love that. Do I think of it like white labeling? You take IKEA's [inaudible] and then you can add like rose gold fixtures on it, yeah?John:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The credit, obviously, goes back to IKEA. This is an ever expanding ecosystem that's been around probably for 15 years now. People that make amazing slipcovers that you can put on their sofas. People that make furniture legs, companies like us that make fantastic cabinet doors. It's a way to get a really high-end look for a really mid-level price.Stephanie:Cool.John:I'm even fortunate to grow quite a bit with that.Stephanie:That's great. How did you come to this idea?John:I'm always honest and clear that this was ... It's a spectacular idea that somebody gave to me.Stephanie:Who gave it to you?John:I think his name is David Stewart. I think he's a photographer. Look, I'm 53. I don't know if I'm older than a lot of the people you talk to.Stephanie:A little.John:I came to things a little bit later. I had moved to California from the East Coast when I was 21. Well, wanted to get rich and famous, work in the film business, didn't really have any kind of plan, bounced around with that, was writing, not making any money like everybody else I knew waiting tables. Then I woke up in my early 30s and said, I got to do something with my life. It was post 9/11, which is a wake-up call for a lot of people. I tried a bunch of different things. Then I somehow landed in woodworking and furniture making at first and cabinetry. I got good at it.John:Through the late '90s and early 2000s, that's what I was doing, Southern California based custom furniture and cabinetry company called Handmade. I worked hard. I approached it like a business into my late 30s, which was different than a lot of other people I knew, the craftspeople, spectacular artists, but just no head for business, no interest in business. I always looked at it like as a business like any other. That's what I was doing through, again, the early 2000s. I was networking and blogs just started to happen. I was doing a lot of woodworking shows but also design shows. At one of those design shows in 2008, I think somebody came up to me, this guy randomly and said, "Have you ever thought about making doors for IKEA cabinets?"Stephanie:Was that something that others were doing? Why did he have that idea? Then was like, I'm going to tell John to do that.John:It's interesting. Again, I always want to give credit where credit is due. On top of him, there was a company called Scherr's based in North Dakota that has been making doors for IKEA cabinets just a little bit prior to that. People are always making their own doors as well. It is because IKEA lets you not buy doors when you buy their kitchens. I don't know why he mentioned it. I think part of it was because when I did those shows, it was a show called Whelan Design, which is a great show in Southern California at the time and back when Dwell magazine was really in its heyday and just an iconic brand.John:I was always like the one off independent company. It was me and all the big brands. It would be like Kohler and Caesarstone and Sub-Zero. I was there alongside them with my little custom furniture setup. I don't know if he took a liking to me, but we just spent that day, the Friday and then the following day just talking about it. I had no idea what he was talking about at first.Stephanie:That's awesome. Then for people listening, I know when I first heard of your brand and was looking through it. I'm like, oh, it's just like a small thing, a big thing. Then I was looking through some of the stats and you've been named like the fastest growing private company every year by Inc. magazine [inaudible].John:Well, yeah, one of. Yeah, one of many. Inc. 500 originally, we've been on that list, I think, six or seven years now.Stephanie:You've had double digit growth for almost a decade, year every year.John:Yeah. It's exciting. It's, again, one of many things. I try to be candid and clear, but I never expected this. I never thought in a million years I'd be doing this. Every year that we were fortunate to grow, even my ambition or dreams, it got bigger. It's like get to a million, get to two million, get to five million. It's been exciting. Believe me, I don't take it for granted. That's why I enjoy doing things like this, because I always ... At 40, I was newly divorced. I didn't have any kids at the time. I have a son now. He was nine. I lived in my shop for a year, because I got divorced.John:I didn't have anywhere to live. I had options, but I wanted to hide. I lived in my woodworking shop. I lived on my sofa with my dog. I just said, I got to do something else. It was a huge wakeup call. Then that's when the conversation I had, I think, six to nine months prior. It was like, maybe I should try this. Again, in terms of the second acts in life, whatever, I was 40 and had no clue. 10 years later, more than 10 years later, it's different.Stephanie:Yeah, that's very inspirational. Cool to hear about and cool to see where you can start and where it can grow to. How did you grow the company? From starting out where you're woodworking, you're building stuff, and then you're like, okay, I'm going to buy IKEA stuff and make it better. How did you get in front of people and be found in general?John:Like anything, Stephanie, it's like you look back on it and as much as it was, a long journey at times were so challenging, whatever. You get through it, and you gloss over it. It's only when conversations like this that I do get an opportunity to look back. The reality was, again, I had a nice custom furniture cabinetry business. I had some really good clients. I work with some good architects and designers. Then in 2008, the market tanked. Everybody went in the dumpster. I had to do something else. Things had slowed down.John:I started saying to a couple designers and architects, "What if we try to do integrate some IKEA cabinetry into the custom project." Because at the end of the day, a box is a box, and you're just going to see the outside of the beautiful panels and the doors. There were a few people that took a chance on that. That's how it ... It's like anything. I was 100% custom in 2009. Then it's like, okay, you can start mixing it in and starting to organically ... I don't even know what kind of ... I wasn't doing advertising. Blogs had just taken off.John:Apartment therapy had seen see me at a design show and written about me, which was amazing. That was a really big deal. L.A. Times did a story on me, which is incredible. Yet it was always organic. Through 2010 and 2011, it became, okay, now we're doing half custom, half IKEA. Then every year, it's a little bit more headed towards full IKEA. The truth is, I don't know when it was, maybe 2013, when it was fully just making doors for IKEA. It was fun. It was always a steady progression, always growing every year.Stephanie:Yeah, sustainably growing, which is a lot different than a lot of the brand.John:Yeah, profitable every year. Beginning, doubling every year, which, again, was not what I expected. Part of that, what's funny too is I have a lot of incredibly supportive family, but also friends, guys that I grew up with. When I was in California at 21, or 22, or 29, or whatever, they were amazing. They love me. They were supportive, but they probably had no clue where I was headed. I didn't either. Now, it's fun. I gave them a hard time constantly about the fact that they probably gave up on me.John:Not in a bad way, but it's just ... I mean, I do think that there is a time to cash in your chips. It's great to have dreams. There was an interesting like Scott Galloway kind of thing recently about if you should follow your dream. His overly simplistic thing is definitely do not follow your dream. Because unless you're willing to pay your bills to start because following just exclusively your dream can be incredibly impractical. The people that you admire, suddenly, the people that I admire weren't these head up in the clouds kind of people. They worked really hard. I geek out on founder stories, things, podcasts like this. I'm fascinated by that. It's never an overnight thing, or at least it's rarely. Again, I'm 53 now. This is all house money.Stephanie:Wow, that's awesome. When you started, getting more money, you're doubling growth, more revenue, obviously. Where did you invest? How did you think about investing that? Because I'm sure you're like, woo-hoo! I'm going to go have fun now.John:No.Stephanie:No?John:It was never like that, no. It's interesting. I would say I like nice things like some people do. I'm pretty frugal. In terms of the business, everything lives inside the business. I had a partner at that point. Up until three years ago, we made everything in-house. I was the original guy making the doors and packing them up and then shipping them in New York or different places. Then my partner at the time, Ivan, came on board. He was the guy cutting the doors. Now, we were fortunate to grow.John:Eventually, we had close to 35, I think 35 or 40 people that were working in production. Up until three years ago, we topped out at 75 people and half of them were making products. Now I'm proud to say we don't make anything in-house. Everything, it's made around the US, some at the top manufacturers in the country. That was a huge shift. To answer your question, everything is in the business. That's why you see revenue numbers are different than other things.Stephanie:Yeah. What were some mistakes maybe that you remember where you're like, ooh, I would have avoided this if I were to do it again, or especially in the more maybe the past five years or something. Not early on when you're just ...John:Right. If we're going to say 10 years ago, the mistakes that I made were unavoidable in the sense that I was creating this out of thin air. Ivan and I were just making stuff up as we went along. We were two guys. He's a little bit younger than me. He came out from Boston. I came out from Philadelphia to be writers. In some ways, no business starting this kind of business. In the last five years, it's probably the mistakes that I've made are ... I don't know, maybe waiting too long to really build up the team, which is not to say that we didn't have good people, we did.John:Part of my job now is just looking at the next 12 months and 18 months and say, hopefully, where are we going to be? Where do we think we're going to be? What are we going to need then? As someone who is ... Again, I think pretty honest about their limitations or whatever, we only thrive with people that are smarter, better, or more experienced than me. That's one of the biggest changes in the last at least six months, where we really just hit the gas and brought in some really amazing complementary pieces.Stephanie:Yeah, cool. How do you think about building on top of another company? What if IKEA changes their cabinet line or does something different, did that ever worry you, building a business that's ... I mean, a lot of businesses are built on another businesses, obviously. How did you think about that?John:We've always been after market. With IKEA, it's pretty well documented. We've gone up and down with them. I think in most ways, they appreciate what we do. Certainly, it's undeniable that we sell kitchens that people wouldn't normally buy if we weren't available. They also, I think, hate a little bit that we're there. I don't know this is arrogant or anything to say. They're not going to change their model because of us. They're never going to not sell doors. Even if they did, I would say to people like, "Then just buy the doors that literally cost $2."John:Then we'll pay for them and recycle. Their model is that a la carte wide range of pricing. We've always been respectful. Again, I have immense respect for them and what they built. It's extraordinary. Even when my fiancé and I moved into a new house and it's like going there, buying the basics for the house, it's just nobody can beat it [inaudible].Stephanie:Yup. I'm doing that now as well. I think, like you said, you're opening up a market that they probably wouldn't have access, otherwise. When I'm about finishing this house now, I honestly would not have thought to go to IKEA to get cabinets. I don't know. Then when I saw you guys, I'm like, oh, well then you can have the finishings and the colors and the things that I actually want. I don't actually care what a cabinet is like inside or behind the scenes, but I care about how it looks. A lot of the IKEA stuff does look like you know sometimes.John:Yeah, it's understandable. Because at that scale, you can't get that fancy and creative. This is the part where I drop names, just in the sense that what I do love is we work with some really cool people that do make IKEA more accessible. It is people like Karlie Kloss and Coco Rocha and all kinds of celebrities and high end designers and influencers. They, more so than us, have normalized IKEA. That's good for everybody. If design is supposed to be democratic and accessible to everybody, there's nothing more accessible than IKEA. Obviously, Amazon, Wayfair, and things like that.Stephanie:Walmart? Walmart is coming back. I have bought rugs now, a little egg wicker chair. It's from following influencers. I'm like, Walmart is coming back.John:You're right. It's funny, because the same thing with my fiancé, Stephanie. Yesterday, she was looking at different coffee tables. She said, "This is ... " She showed me a thing. I was like, "That's awesome." She said, "Oh, it's like the Kelly Clarkson line." I was like, "This is great." It's true. Look, certainly, you can make the argument that some of that stuff is more disposable and it's going to go into a landfill and less sustainable. I understand that. The reality is, not everyone has the same access to disposable. If you can get cool stuff, it's reasonably priced and it lasts for a few years. I don't know. It's hard to turn that down.Stephanie:You mentioned that you partner with influencers and celebrities. How does that relationship work?John:Yeah. I think that's always been a huge differentiator for us, one of several things. From the start, I always felt no self-consciousness about reaching out to people. Whether it was blogs, I would say, "This is what we're doing. Here are some photos. I'd love for you to write about us." Or even influencers. The biggest one and the one that we worked with the most is Sarah Sherman Samuel. We've had a door line with Sarah for three years. That's a situation where, god, I think 2014 or 2015, she reached out and said, "Hey, I bought a bungalow in Venice. I love IKEA cabinets.John:I wonder if we could partner on some doors." We did a small collaboration, gave her a tiny discount. She painted the doors. She styled everything. She took photography. The kitchen went completely viral. It's one of those kitchens that is everywhere. I think a really cool Farrow & Ball paints, brass and mixture of this light green and white. That just opened the door to all these other relationships. People saw that and started reaching out to us. It's been an amazing thing. The truth is, we've gotten to a point where we've had to pull back on that because it's just a different way to market the brand. It can be expensive. It's definitely grown us, there's no doubt about it.Stephanie:Have you thought about Netflix series? I'm just thinking, wow, they should be on a home remodel type of show. How perfect is that? People always trying to do amazing things on a budget on like the HGTV [inaudible].John:Yeah. We've talked about that stuff in the past. I like that stuff. Again, I don't know. I do think it's interesting our growth. That's how I always look at things, behind the scenes of how businesses grow, especially within that. I do like someone we haven't worked with in a while, the Studio McGee, the Netflix series, which is great. That's really interesting, especially after listening to another podcast like our friends at Business of Home, where ... I left the podcast with so much more respect.John:Because my interaction with them was a long time ago, and then I just see the photos and the beautiful stuff. Just the growth that they've had and the behind the scenes, and again, hearing their story is really extraordinary. I enjoy watching that stuff. I don't know if I want to watch this. I get sick of hearing myself talk. Maybe if it's everybody else, that might work.Stephanie:Yeah. I was just thinking like, wow, that'd be a really good partnership strategy. I always bring up the Container Store partnership that they had on the Netflix series and just how much Container Store sales went up after that series.John:[inaudible]Stephanie:I can see why, same thing with cabinets and stuff.John:Yeah, it's interesting. Because even that, again, I'm a lot older than you, but in the early '90s, whenever Trading Spaces came on and that was huge like ...Stephanie:I watch Trading Spaces, just to be clear.John:I mean, even in the '80s, the godfather of that is like Bob Vila in this old house. That's definitely before your time. That was restoring amazing New England homes and stuff. It was master carpenter, Norm. I think Norm Abram is absolute craftsman. That was the start. Then you had Trading Spaces. Even now, you would have thought, after 10 years, that goes away, and it hasn't. That's the thing. Is it the ladies like Home Edit and stuff like that? I don't know. It hasn't evaded, it just only grown. Obviously, Chip and Joanna Gaines and the dynasty that they have built. It doesn't show any sign of stopping.Stephanie:Yeah. It seems like the world is now just moving to a more curated collections like I'm going to look for someone who knows my style, so I don't have to waste time looking at everything. Whereas before, it's like, oh, I'm going to go to Target to get this, and then I'm going to go to Dollar Tree to get this. I make it up. I think, 10 years ago is very much about DIY, but all over the place. Now, it's like, okay, I'm going to follow Chip and Joanna Gaines, their line at Target, whatever that is, and follow the people that I know are my style and be ready to immerge myself in that brand.John:Yeah. The interesting, whether it's the 180 to that is the amount of growth that Restoration Hardware has had, where it's just almost like meteoric, being a complete luxury brand and selling the whole experience. It is like the Ralph Lauren of today, and now as they move towards hospitality restaurants and sounds like hotels. Part of your brain thinks, man, you can't sustain that. How do you keep growing? There is a market for that. Even when you watch the Studio McGee, their services are not expensive. Amber Interiors, who we work with, people like that, incredibly talented, at the really high end of the market. They keep growing.Stephanie:Yup. Tell me a bit about your omnichannel approach. I saw that you had showrooms around the country. Then you're, obviously, online as well. Now you're moving into DTC. How do you think about keeping a cohesive story of your brand but also expanding and reaching a lot of people on different channels?John:I guess the biggest challenge, if it is the biggest, it's just the fact that what we're selling comes at a higher price point than the average online purchase. We sell certainly, if you're doing a GODMORGON bathroom vanity, that then may cost $150, $300, $400. We're selling cabinet doors and panels and complementary trim and things like that that can cost $3,000, $5,000, $20,000. Again, it's not buying a pair of Warby's or an Olay bag for a couple hundred bucks. There's a lot to it, a lot of back and forth. Excuse me.John:Showrooms we're always a part of we've got to show people our product, especially when we're asking them to spend that much. The benefit of IKEA is, even though they're still a privately held company, there are only, I think, less than 60 around the US. What I could say to people to say to you, Stephanie, or wherever, like you're in New York, go to one of the five local IKEAs. Then come into our mini ... I never want to call it a showroom, because it could be 200 square feet. It's got some cabinetry in it. It's got door samples, things like that. There would be a whole experience.John:I would always say, if you want to see a kitchen, go to IKEA and you can see 15 kitchens or see 20 kitchens. Want to see the doors? Come see us. We've had that in New York, in Brooklyn, in Chicago, obviously, in LA, Minneapolis, a bunch of different places. Again, trying to be reasonable about that. I don't want the overhead of signing leases if I don't have to. What we've typically done and we will continue to do even more so is partner with other great brands. It is like a multi-brand approach.John:With our lighting friends, with hardware companies like Rejuvenation, Fireclay Tile, upcoming collaboration with Caesarstone, it's partnering with Cambria in the past. It's just saying, let's do this collectively. Because the kitchen is, as someone said to me, "The base purchase, if you're fortunate to have him as a house, there's a car, and then maybe there's your kitchen." We're trying to grow the company that way. We started what I think is an amazing ... I got to [inaudible] blog anymore. It's that. [inaudible] stories that launched last summer.John:That was the idea that I wanted to bring together all these great writers, great content to help promote the brand, of course, but also expand us, again, to make that cliché to becoming a lifestyle brand. On the one hand, it would be enough to have a really successful cabinet door company. I just think we have the opportunity to do so much more. That's what something else we can talk about, is this brand Boxi, which is going to launch at the beginning of March. That really is direct to consumer. That's our own product, no IKEA. That's a whole different thing for us.Stephanie:Alright. Let's move there next after my one thought. I've many ideas when talking to you now.John:Awesome.Stephanie:What about having like partnering with IKEA on their AR app or developing your own AR app, instead of having to have a showroom, being going to IKEA, pull up your phone, and then you can swipe through the designs of ours, and you can see exactly what that trim would look like, what that doorknob or whatever, so then you eliminate showroom.John:It is interesting. Look, the thing with IKEA, they have partnered with people in the past. Obviously, places like Target have done an amazing job of that completely. As you said, Walmart too.. It always seem like the natural fit with us. If you were going to do it with anybody, it would be us. In terms of AI, yeah. IKEA has been slow and is put a huge push in the last couple years of their online presence and their economy. They have an app they launched last month. What we are doing with the new brand is working with a 3D AI company called Skip. It's going to launch in the next few months. That lets you basically not go in showrooms.John:There are ways to order this new line of cabinets, and one of them is to make an appointment and someone comes to your house and 3D scans your room. Then you design remotely. With 80 hours of AI and machine learning and everything else, it's compressing that and then presenting you with design options.Stephanie:That's cool.John:That's where we're headed. All has changed dramatically in the last year. COVID or not, it was headed towards that. The new iPhones have the camera technology where you can almost do that. Maybe in 12 to 15 months, you don't even need a guy to come to your house. You can do it with your iPhone. They're already pretty close.Stephanie:Yeah, I think it's fair. I have a little tape measure app on my phone and it says, okay, scan the whole room. You do that and then you can measure everything. The placeholders all around the room for you and [inaudible].John:Yeah, it's fascinating. Even brands like Primer that launched last year, which do the work with other brand partners, and you want to click on like the Hygge and West Wallpaper, you can hold it up to your wall. They'll show you different swatches and things like that. It's interesting. For us, yeah, that is part of what we think is a differentiator. IKEA is always going to have massive brick and mortar. Even though they move in some cities towards smaller footprints, it's still footprints that are 20,000 to 150,000, as opposed to 300,000. There's another cabinet line that's launching.John:It just launched, it's got a 30,000 square foot showroom on the East Coast and 100 kitchens. You go in and wear the AR or the VR goggles. That's completely different because you're looking at some space that has nothing to do with yours. It's kind of what you're saying. The point is, things are changing so fast. With Boxi, it is saying, can you make this as DTC as possible? The caveat being, it could cost $10,000 to $15,000, to $20,000. It's not like ...Stephanie:Okay. Tell me what is Boxi then since we [crosstalk].John:Boxi is the first American direct to consumer cabinet brand. It's a cabinet system for the entire home. It's basically taking the last 10, 11 years of everything we've learned from IKEA and saying, let's try and offer something. I don't know, if it's ... I don't want to say better than IKEA. Because again, I've huge respect for them. It's a more complete package. Certainly, the quality is there. The accessibility is there. One of many things that we're going to improve on is the fact that Semihandmade customers have to go to IKEA first.John:It's a two-part process where you've got to go to IKEA. You've got to order the cabinets and hardware. Then you've got to order the doors from us. Thank God that they do, but especially in the last year, IKEA, like a lot of people, has suffered horribly with supply chain issues. We have customers now, unfortunately, it's January, they're hearing, cabinet boxes might not be available for three, four, or five months because ...Stephanie:I ordered a couch from Pottery Barn and four months out. [crosstalk] order, I just didn't look, I guess.John:As a business, on a personal level, that annoys me because I want ... That's a whole thing. We have such ridiculous expectations because they're easily met or they have been up until now. Not to blame Amazon because that's too easy. I'm a hypocrite about Amazon too. With Boxi, we're saying, no big box stores. Somebody can come to you, things ship, leave the factory in a week. Part of what we're doing, you're from Palo Alto, I don't know if you're born there, but it's almost like an In-N-Out Burger West Coast approach. Meaning we're going to do a limited number of items, and we're going to do it great. If you want ...John:What they do is they're great. What's interesting about that is they ... I think just little background on burgers. I think the founder was best friends with Carl Karcher who started Carl's Jr., another big West Coast place. In the '50s, they open hamburger stands right next to each other. The In-N-Out guy's thing was always, I'm not worried about competition. You're welcome to open across the street from me, next door, or whatever, because I'm just going to bury you. I'll just be that much better. Not like in an obnoxious, overly competitive way. Just like, this is going to raise our game. With us, with Boxi, yeah, limited selection, fast turnaround ships in a week, never need to go to a big box store. It's built in the US at a really competitive price point. That's the idea.Stephanie:I love that it's built in the US. I think that a lot of companies right now are bringing things back into the US and some are struggling seeing how expensive things can be and what was happening overseas and maybe how it's just different here. What did you guys learn from IKEA that you're taking with you? Then what are you discarding where you're like, we're going to do this different though?John:Again, in some ways, I learned everything from IKEA. Look, I learned a couple things. One of them is you can't compete with them in terms of pricing. That's the most basic thing. I always say like, with Amazon, the same thing, you can't ... I mean, then the turnaround lead time. Up until recently, with COVID, you could buy a kitchen today and bring it home today. Nobody else could do that at a crazy price. Best of all, really high quality. IKEA, to their credit, pretty much every year, as long as I can remember, the last 10 years, is right at the top of like J.D. Power customer satisfaction in terms of quality, customer service, things like that.John:You could complain about certain products from IKEA and their quality, but their kitchens, I think, are inarguable. As much as I'm not affiliated with them directly, I always get defensive when people would slag them. Because it's also understanding that the product that they offer, and this blows some Americans minds, but it's a particleboard core with a melamine skin, a three-quarter melamine box. That standard in the entire world for kitchen cabinets. The most expensive cabinet brands in the world are constructed the same way.John:In the US, that's less the case because 70% of the market wants a frame around their cabinet. It's literally a face frame cabinet. The European style that IKEA is called frameless 32 millimeter. Again, I've learned everything. We're deeply indebted to them.Stephanie:Well, is there anything that you're changing though now that you are exploring DTC that's [crosstalk]?John:Yeah. We'll always have the ability. With Semihandmade, one of the differentiators were ... You'll always have this when you're smaller, we're microscopic compared to them. It's just being able to be nimble, to be able to get more custom, to be able to offer certain versatility that they could never do. Limited run doors, ability to do appliance panels for really anything. The Semihandmade, we could always do that. We can do upgrades with matching ... We used to do open cabinets that match your doors and things like that. We do less of that now.John:With Boxi, what will be interesting is because the hope is anybody to scale and to have short lead times, quick turnaround, we're not going to offer as much customization. We've learned like what ... In terms of people's taste. We have eight doors, which are basically the biggest sellers for Semihandmade. It's basic white, gray, black, and some wood tones. It's not saying like we have at Semihandmade of 45 choices. That's fun to me. Because if anything, you can have too many options and that is paralyzing.Stephanie:Yup. Just going to say that I appreciate when things are curated or you showed me something cute and I'm just like, "I'll have that." Whatever that is, the white, the gold, and the brown, perfect. That's what I want. Not choose every single piece of it. Which I think is for a lot of ecommerce, that's what I've heard throughout many interviews, is don't give so many choices, show people what you think or know that they're going to want based off of preferences or how they're interacting with your site or whatever it may be.John:That's part of if there'd been multiple challenges with getting Boxi off the ground understandably. I think the biggest one is like you said, with even a call today, there was seven of us on the screen and I said, "If the seven of us were the typical technology guys or girls that knew nothing about socks, but we're launching a socks brand, we wouldn't bring all this baggage to it about what we thought we knew." With Semihandmade, we have all this great knowledge, but some of it can get in the way with the new brand.John:Because the new brand, for it to really work, you can't do all the customization. There are certain things that Semihandmade where we'll make exceptions and we'll do things. Of course, you always want to service the customer, first and foremost. It's just recognizing that if the goal is for this really to take off and grow, which I think it will, we have to be a little stricter, a little more brand fidelity, like say, this is who we are, this is how we get to where we want to go, and then stick to that.Stephanie:Yeah, that seems tricky. Having two different hats where you and your team are like, we know what works, this is what works, we build a company that does this. Then having a slow creep where you turn the other brand into the same thing. Like you said, you have to really be strict about creating a whole new company with a new vision and making sure everyone's on board and not just let the old company creep in and [crosstalk].John:I think in some ways too, whether in a good way or a bad way, the fact that we've been fortunate to have growth and success for Semihandmade, it's either made it easier or harder to get the new venture off. Because it buys you certain time. If we were a startup, we raised funding. We've got 18 months to runway all these different things that will be different. Probably, things have taken longer. On the other hand, we wouldn't have been able to do it. When this launches, what we leverage is, yeah, it's 10 years of Semihandmade. It's 25,000 projects. It's incredible.John:We have 2,000 semipro designers around the country that are champing at the bit to offer this. It's relationships we've got with Rejuvination and Kaff appliances and Caesarstone that are going to be partners. I continue to remind people and even myself like if we were a startup, we'd never have this stuff. We wouldn't have five, six amazing influencer projects that you're going to roll out in the next six weeks with the new launch. You'd be launching and then keeping your fingers crossed.Stephanie:Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Alright, so let's move over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have one minute or less, prepare, get your water, [inaudible], shake it out, do what you got to do. Alright, are you ready, John?John:Yup.Stephanie:Alright. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?John:That's great question. Do I have a minute for this?Stephanie:Yeah, a minute.John:I think it depends. I'm cynical about the fact that in some ways, yeah, a lot of companies have taken off, Instacart and things like that, but even like Wayfair. I was reading Bed Bath & Beyond today. I think the question is whether or not that'll be sustained. When life comes back to normal, which hopefully, inevitably will, certainly, people will be more inclined to shop online. There's no doubt about that. The world is changing. It's not going to go back. There are companies that have gotten a little frothier or whatever that I think that artificial is going to wear off. It's normalized.John:It's great. There's stuff I would have never done. Even with not ecomm, but with Zoom, we hired a new president, Beth and Molly, who runs marketing and stuff. I hired three of our highest people remotely. They're based in New York. I would have never done that. I would never trusted people or trusted myself. Now, it's normal.Stephanie:Yeah. I was slow with grocery delivery and curbside pickup. It forced me to do that because I was the one who always want to go to the grocery store, look around with my friends, whatever it maybe. Now, I'm like, oh, I don't really want to go there anymore. There's no point. I'll save my time and do other things.John:It is amazing. To me, it's more interesting to see how those people make money. That's the part where it's one thing to do great revenue. Obviously, profitability is a thing, unless it's not your money, unless you have a thing too. When it is your money, it's much more of a focus.Stephanie:Yeah. We just had someone from Intel on who was saying that they work with a hardware store and they're struggling because contractors were coming in and placing 40, 50 item orders for curbside pickup.John:All of it?Stephanie:Because they're like, why would I send in my contractor and paid him to be there for two to three hours when I could just have you all do it. They're struggling with trying to figure out the program because they weren't really expecting them.John:Yeah, that's interesting.Stephanie:I'm like, that's scary. What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?John:Business wise or otherwise?Stephanie:Anything, whatever comes to mind.John:I guess the biggest cliché was my son's mom having my son. That's probably ...Stephanie:That's a good one. Having three kids, I appreciate that answer.John:I mean that from heart.Stephanie:Yeah, that's a good one. What's up next on your reading list?John:I constantly have five or six books I'm reading. That's interesting too, whether it's because I pursued writing for a long time. I haven't made the jump to eBooks. There are few writers that I correspond with on Twitter. Twitter is another thing that I didn't use that much before this. I've asked them like, "Well, what's the feeling on eBooks? Is it like cheating or whatever?" Of course, these guys and girls want to sell books. They're not considered cheating if you buy their eBook. The response I got from a bunch of them was, it's best in some ways for nonfiction.John:I read tons of nonfiction. I'm reading Say Nothing, which is a story about the troubles in Ireland. I'm finishing a great book on ecommerce called the Billion Dollar Brands book, something like that. That's spectacular. I've got so many. I'm reading a book on Chinatown, the making of the movie. I love a lot of different things. It is mainly. It's less fiction now. It is more nonfiction.Stephanie:Very cool. What is your favorite cabinet design? What's in your house?John:My house, it's interesting. Because in my house that I share with my son who I split custody with, we have a more contemporary kitchen. It's walnut. It's unique. We sell a fair amount of walnut and it is one of a kind. Every kitchen is different. That's a little more contemporary, even though it's wood. It's contemporary. In the house with my fiancé, where she lives, that's a more traditional. It's a shaker kitchen. It's got some really pretty hardware. I guess I'm very particular about what I like. In general, even when we she and I have arguments about furniture, I just say like, "Buy something quality and it'll fit with everything else." I know it's a copout, but that's where I'm landed. I love eclectic as long as it's nice quality.Stephanie:Yeah, cool. Alright and then the last one, if you were to have a podcast, what would it be about? Who would your first guest be?John:That's a great question. I like a lot of probably IKEA. I like a lot of different things. Even podcasts, same thing. I didn't listen to before, frankly, a year ago. I listened to one the other day. Marc Maron was really talented, funny guy who've been doing podcast for about 10 years. He had this guy, Daniel Lanois, who's a big time record producer, did U2 and all kinds of amazing people. I was amazed at the depth of Maron's knowledge of music. I don't have that. I don't know. I like diverse things. I don't know if I could do it.John:Because I like to think I'm a good listener, but I'm probably not because I'm always ready to say something. Obviously, like in your spot or whatever, to do it well, you should be listening to people. Again, I love screenwriting podcasts. I like anything. I like news, podcasts.Stephanie:Okay, so it'd be a little bit of everything. I like that. That's cool.John:I could do this kind of thing. If we're talking about remodeling, if anything, would always have an edge to it. If I were going to do a show, that's the thing. I gravitate less, maybe not towards Gordon Ramsay, but like Anthony Bourdain. There would be an edge to it. It wouldn't be ... Even when I was inside people's houses, I don't know if I was combative. I had very strong opinions about with architects and designers and homeowners and what I thought they should want. The one thing I don't like is when it's all sweet and sacristy and artificial. Totally with an edge.Stephanie:I like that. That sounds good. Alright, John, well, this has been a pleasure having you on. Where can people find out more about you and your work?John:Sure. Semihandmade, we can do semihandmade.com. Then Boxi, which launches March 1st, is at boxiliving, B-O-X-I-L-I-V-I-N-G.com.Stephanie:Okay, thanks.John:I appreciate the time. This has been great.Stephanie:Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. It was fun.John:Thanks for having me, Stephanie.

That You May Believe | The Gospel of John || As we approach this moment in the upper room discourse, a theme within Jesus’ parting message to his disciples becomes abundantly clear – the Trinity. In John 16 we see that Jesus speaks on this complex doctrine because of the simplicity it will provide to his disciples who were with him and to the life of any future disciple to follow him in an otherwise confusing and broken world.

Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 & St. Matthew 11:2-10 by William Klock I am not a baker and I was never particularly good at chemistry.  I know that somehow when you add water to wheat, the gluten does something and that when you feed sugar to yeast under the right circumstances it makes bubbles and the gluten traps the bubbles so you end up with fluffy bread instead of bricks, but I don’t really understand the specifics: why one kind of flour works differently than another, why some recipes use water and others use milk.  Why do some use eggs and others don’t?  I’m not a baker.  But I don’t need to be, because we have a bread machine in our house.  The recipe book that came with the bread machine could be titled “Bread for Dummies”.  It’s foolproof.  But like they say, never underestimate dummies and fools.  The first time I used the bread machine I was in a rush.  I was under the impression that you just dump in the ingredients and the machine does the work.  Well, it does.  But you have to do exactly what it says.  The recipes are very specific.  They even tell you what order to put in the ingredients.  And so I was miffed when the recipe was very specific in saying to add room temperature milk and a room temperature egg.  I didn’t think I’d have to plan thirty minutes ahead with a bread machine.  What difference could it make?  So I poured in cold milk and plopped in a cold egg.  And the bread barely rose, because the dough was cold and the yeast didn’t activate until the very end of the kneading and rising cycle.  Instead of bread, the machine made a brick. It’s funny, too, how obstinate we can sometimes be when we make mistakes like this.  I asked Veronica what went wrong.  “I did just what the book said,” I said.  I was very insistent.  But as she pressed me for details, I admitted that the milk and egg were cold.  “That’s it,” she told me.  But I doubled-down.  I mean, shouldn’t the flour—the biggest ingredient—have brought the temperature up?  I was in denial.  My pride was hurt.  It makes you feel pretty dumb when you can’t even make bread with a bread machine.  But it also highlights why following the instructions is important. This is where our lessons today point us.  If the over-arching theme of advent is to be prepared, we’re reminded today, we’re exhorted today to be faithful in doing what the Lord has called us to do.  God’s people have always had a very specific calling, whether we’re talking about his people in the Old Testament or his people in the New.  Jesus has established his church to carry on what has always been Israel’s mission, ever since Abraham, but now to carry it out in light of Jesus the Messiah.  Now, there’s a lot of room for creativity in how we fulfil our mission, but Jesus also gave us very, very clear instructions and if we throw out the core of our mission in the name of creativity or flexibility or pragmatism, we’re going to fail. Last week I read Rod Dreher’s new book, Live not by Lies, and it had me thinking about this.  The last few years, Dreher has been writing about what the Church, particularly in North America, needs to be doing as we enter a new dark age.  I think that to anyone with eyes to see, he’s right that the North American Church is woefully unprepared to live as a minority community, let alone to live in an environment that is becoming increasingly hostile to us.  For the last couple of generations we’ve been failing to instil lasting faith in our children and have lost them to the culture.  In the last decade, our people, our leaders, and our churches have been falling like dominos to Postmodern apostasy.  And there’s a reason for this.  We’ve left the recipe aside and we’re trying to bake bread with too many shortcuts and with the wrong ingredients.  We’ve sidelined what Jesus told us to do and have put other things at the centre of what we are.  We’ve changed and watered down the message.  We’ve muddled the truth to the point that many Christians can no longer distinguish between God’s truth and the world’s lies.  And, all too often, we’ve stopped trusting in the Holy Spirit to do the work of converting hearts and minds and have been trying to do it ourselves. Our lessons today focus our attention on the faithfulness of God’s ministers.  The Epistle focuses on St. Paul and the Gospel on John the Baptist.  The choice of lessons is linked to the Ember Days that fall later this week.  The Embers Days come around four times a year and, at least historically, were the traditional times for ordinations.  With that in mind, our advent lessons today call the clergy to faithfulness to our mission and remind the Church of the importance of faithful ministers.  But even though today’s focus is on what we might call “professionals”, there’s a broader principle that applies to all of us, to all Christians, as ministers of the Gospel. Let’s begin with our Epistle, 1 Corinthians 11:1-5.  And we’ll want a little background to understand it.  The Church at Corinth had a lot of problems and a big part of it was that many were having trouble setting aside their old, pagan ways.  They had compromised much.  There were some serious sins in the church that needed to be dealt with, but weren’t.  People were justifying them by appealing to Christian liberty.  There were also divisions within the congregation.  Paul had founded this church, but the people didn’t want to listen to him anymore.  They’d become enamoured of other preachers.  There’s nothing to indicate these other preachers were preaching anything apart from the gospel.  The problem in Corinth wasn’t their fault.  The problem was that Paul was about the last flashy person you could imagine and when other preachers came along who were more attractive and who were better speakers than Paul—that was something the Greeks valued very highly—they kicked Paul to the curb.  Not only would they not listen to him, he wasn’t even welcome anymore.  They judged him a loser.  That’s what’s behind our Epistle today.  Let’s read: This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.  Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful.  But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court.  In fact, I do not even judge myself.  For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.  Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.  Then each one will receive his commendation from God.   I’ve always wondered how hard it was for Paul to write this, especially the bit about “This is how you need to regard me: I’m a servant of Christ and a steward of God’s mysteries.”  Good clergymen tend to err on the side of humility, even to a fault.  The only guys I’ve ever known to say things like this have been egotists who never should have been in ministry in the first place.  Paul had one advantage that only the apostles had and that was that they had known Jesus in the flesh and had been commissioned by him personally.  I can’t say that and neither can anyone else alive today.  That said, there is a place for God’s stewards to assert their calling in the face of unjust judgement.  Most of us, when faced with unjust criticism nod humbly, say nothing, and take it to God, but Paul reminds us that there is a time to speak up against these kinds of judgements.  I think that goes for every Christian, too.  We’re all minister of the gospel.  Increasingly the world hurls unjust criticisms at us.  I was reading an article on The Record’s Facebook page last week.  It was about some churches on the Mainland defying the shutdown order.  The comments were painful.  It was interesting that none of the dozens of nasty comments was really aimed at the defiance of the orders these churches were making.  The nasty comments were all more generally about how Christians are haters or bigots or racists or knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers and that the clergy are just in it for the money.  I’m sure plenty of Christians saw these comments, but there were no responses.  Yes, to respond is probably pointless.  People who have bought into Postmodern thinking don’t care about reasoning or facts; it’s all about their feelings and you can’t argue with feelings.  And yet, here we are, ministers of the gospel and stewards of the mysteries of God and increasingly we’re just letting the false judgements and accusations of pagans back us out of the public square.  We go silently and sit facing the corner like disciplined children—and I think a lot of the time we actually feel guilty when we hear these accusations, even though we know better. Brothers and Sisters, Paul stresses that ministers are to be found faithful.  That goes for apostles and for pastors and for all of us.  Yes, we need to weigh criticism.  We need to ask if there’s anything to it.  Sometimes there may be.  Maybe we’re not being faithful to Jesus’ instructions and we need to hear it.  But Jesus’ instructions aren’t hard to understand or discern.  As a minister, I’m called to preach the word, especially the gospel about Jesus, and to administer the sacraments.  It’s not quite that simple, but that is the core.  And for all of us, we’re called to proclaim the gospel about Jesus to the world around us and to live in a way that accords with being the people of God.  We proclaim Jesus and we live the life of the Spirit. We do need to reflect on our lives in light of that and ask if we’re being faithful.  This is one of the reasons we need to steep ourselves in God’s word.  If we don’t know what God expects, how will be faithful?  Think again of the bread recipe.  Are we following it?  Often time we’re not.  It’s not that we’re not well-intentioned.  We want to see things happen, but sometime we get impatient.  We take shortcuts.  Or we think we can make better bread by changing the recipe.  People out there don’t like to hear about sin, so we’ll tone that part of our preaching down.  People out there don’t like commitment, so we’ll make church commitment-free.  People out there don’t like liturgy and sermons, so we’ll have a rock concert and preach pop-psychology instead.  People don’t feel like getting up on Sunday mornings and driving to church, so we’ll broadcast it to their TVs and computers instead.  People want activities and they want to hear about themselves and how good they can be, so we’ll build our churches around programmes and self-help preaching.  These things can bring short-term gains, but in the long-term they’ve been a disaster.  We wonder why people won’t commit, why they’re still worldly, why we’re losing our children, and why we’re seen as increasingly irrelevant.  It’s like we’ve tried to bake bread by replacing the flour with glitter.  The end product might look exciting, but in the end it’s not only unable to nourish, it’s slowly poisoning us.  In contrast, the real work of the gospel is rarely flashy.  Sometimes it brings persecution and even martyrdom.  It means relying on God, not ourselves.  And it means being in it for the long-haul.  Consider Israel.  God called Abraham and it was two thousand years before Israel’s story culminated with Jesus.  And the in-between was as full of hardship, slavery, judgement, and exile as it was prosperity and growth.  And that was God working with a single, small people.  Brothers and Sisters, our mission is the world. So be faithful to the gospel, build churches around word and sacrament, pray and fellowship together, raise covenant children who know Jesus.  And as we do that, remember that the judgement that matters is not the judgement of other people or the world, but of God.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have an ear to the ground.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to the world’s judgements.  Sometimes we need to know how the world sees us—even if it’s false—so that we can better know what we’re up against.  So that we can better respond with the gospel.  And, sometimes, the world’s rebukes may have some truth to them.  Jesus promised that his people would be persecuted for his sake, but we need to make sure that we’re actually being persecuted for his sake and for our faithfulness to his word.  I know plenty of Christians who claim they’re being persecuted, but when you get down to it, it’s just that people don’t like them because they’re jerks, not because they’re preaching Jesus.  People will still hate us for preaching Jesus, but Friends, we do need to be sure that as we preach Jesus and as we stand firmly on the Scriptures that the world rejects, we are squeaky clean.  There’s a balance.  We need to live the gospel as much as we preach the gospel.  We’re to announce God’s judgement on sin, yes, but we’re also to announce God’s mercy to repentant sinners. This was John the Baptist’s struggle.  Let’s turn over to today’s Gospel.  John has gone from announcing the coming kingdom and baptising people in the Jordan to being locked up in prison.  He got there by way of criticizing Herod.  It wasn’t just some off-the-wall criticism.  Tied up with his announcement of the kingdom was John’s denouncement of Herod for marrying his former sister-in-law.  Herod couldn’t help but draw a connection between John’s fiery preaching and himself.  If John was saying that the King was soon to come, it meant John was saying that Herod wasn’t really the king.  So poor John is now in Herod’s dungeon and he’s frustrated and confused.  He’d been faithful in his divine calling to herald the coming Messiah—his cousin, Jesus—and he’s landed in prison.  No big surprise there.  He wasn’t the first prophet to offend a king and end up in prison.  But Jesus—the Messiah—was on the outside, preaching, teaching, healing, forgiving, having dinner with tax collectors and sinners, and leaving John to rot.  Something was wrong with Jesus’ priorities, or so John was beginning to think.  We’ll pick up from there: Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”  (St. Matthew 11:2-10) I don’t think John was really doubting whether Jesus was the Messiah.  I think this was his way of saying, “Um…Jesus.  Shouldn’t the Messiah be getting his faithful herald out prison?”  Of course, that also meant all the other things to go along with it.  A simple jailbreak wouldn’t do.  The jailbreak would have to be part of a wholesale overthrow of Herod and the Romans—which, of course, is what most people expected the Messiah to do.  Here’s what Jesus says to John’s men in return:  “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.  And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”  (Matthew 11:5-6) You see, John expected the Messiah to be like Elijah, confronting the prophets of Baal and calling down fire from heaven.  John wanted to see fire and brimstone.  There’s a place for that.  In a sense John wasn’t wrong.  Jesus is the Judge and, you can be sure, he will judge the world and everyone in it.  I suspect that being a fire-and-brimstone sort of prophet—and that is what John was called to be so there’s nothing wrong with that—I suspect that being that kind of guy means that you get fixated on judgement.  When your tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  Anyway, Jesus’ sort of responds by saying something like, “You expected Elijah…and you’ve got Elijah…but before I come in judgement, there are a lot of people…people like the widow of Zeraphath…people who need to know God’s mercy.”  As Jesus says in John’s Gospel: I came not to condemn, but to redeem.  Sinners already stand condemned.  Judgement is coming.  Announcing that judgement was John’s mission.  But before the judgement comes, what the Israel needed most was to know God’s mercy, to know his salvation.  This is why Jesus’ road to the throne had to be by way of the cross. So Jesus corrects John.  He sets him straight about the Messiah.  But he then turns to the crowd and praises John: As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?  What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing?  Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.  What then did you go out to see?  A prophet?  Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.  This is he of whom it is written, “‘Behold, I send my messenger before your face,          who will prepare your way before you.’ (Matthew 11:7-10) Even though Jesus’ mission was one of humility and of mercy, Jesus praises the faithfulness of John to his ministry as the fiery herald of judgement.  Again, John was expecting the Messiah to come like Elijah, bringing confrontation and fire from heaven, but what Jesus says—albeit a little obliquely for reasons that get beyond our lesson today—what Jesus says here is that John is the prophet like Elijah.  John is the fire-and-brimstone preacher.  John is the herald announcing judgement and calling the people to repentance.  Jesus quotes from Malachi 3 and confirms two things: John is truly the one sent to herald the Messiah and, two, that means that Jesus truly is the Messiah—the one whom Malachi said would come both to refine Israel and to make her offerings pleasing to the Lord and to judge the unrepentant. Now, in the short-term this was bad news for John.  It was bad news for Jesus, too.  Both the Messiah and his herald would be put to death.  But death was not the end.  As it turns out, it was by the death of Jesus that deliverance was bought and in his resurrection, he was vindicated and the unjust verdict on him overturned.  In his resurrection and his ascension, Jesus was confirmed as the Messiah, as Lord.  In that we see the faithfulness of God to his promises and knowing God’s faithfulness, we have hope.  As St. Paul wrote to the Romans: If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall surely be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).  This is one of those parts of the gospel that we often prefer to ignore or to leave out of our preaching, because it offends.  We’ve sort of got the opposite problem John had.  John was fixated on judgement and on fire from heaven.  Like so many Jews, he wanted to see God vanquish Israel’s enemies and he nearly forgot about God’s mercy.  Our problem is the opposite.  We’ve become so afraid of preaching about sin and about judgement, that we can’t even preach mercy and grace anymore—because mercy isn’t mercy and grace isn’t grace if we’re not guilty of anything.  And if we gut our preaching of mercy and grace, we can talk all day about the love of God, but there will be no depth to it.  We will make the cross of Jesus pointless.  Why?  Because we can only begin to plumb the great depths of God’s love when we see that he gave his Son to die for our sake—for the sake of sinners who would otherwise stand condemned to destruction. That brings us back to the recipe for bread.  Brothers and Sisters, bread is often kind of boring.  But made properly, it nourishes.  It keeps us alive.  There’s a reason why Jesus used it as a metaphor for himself: I am the bread of life.  There’s a reason why it’s a symbol over and over in story of God’s people for his faithful care and sustenance.  And it points to the way God works and the way his gospel and his word work in the world.  It’s rarely flashy.  And you have to patient, because it takes time to rise.  But like the Messiah, who humble himself to take on lowly human flesh, who humbled himself to be born of a lowly virgin, and who humbly went to death on a cross, the simple bread of the gospel, the good news that Jesus died, that he rose, and that he is Lord, brings life to the world.  To preach it faithfully means to preach it whole and to preach it pure.  Friends, be faithful stewards.  Stick to the recipe.  Preach the Lord Jesus, crucified and risen to give forgiveness and life to sinners.  Build churches centred on the faithful preaching of God’s word and the administration of the sacraments, where, knowing God’s faithfulness, God’s people sing and pray together, where they raise covenant, gospel children, where we live as people who know the hope of God’s life in the age to come. Let’s pray: O Lord Jesus Christ, who at your first coming sent your messenger to prepare your way before you: grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready your way by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at your second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in your sight; who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

The Letters of John -- As you walk in the truth, bring the truth of Christ into people's lives, but beware the sin of pride which seeks self and not the truth.

Getting a letter helps people who are feeling isolated & lonely. Composing and mailing our thoughts to someone connects us with them. That's the topic of today's episode. Hello everyone and welcome to today’s episode where today we consider a simple thing we can do to nurture our relationship with people. Some of us are doing better than others in coping with the pandemic we’re living through here in 2020. For those of us who are, and who want to help those of us who are not, you may find today’s episode helpful. I recently came across an idea you might want to consider if you have people in your life struggling with the isolation we are experiencing during these difficult days. Listen in as we consider an old-school strategy that research has shown to be effective in caring for the emotional health of people close to us. It’s an idea that comes out of a newspaper article by Jamie Friedlander in the Washington Post on September 15, 2020. entitled, “Who Needs Another Zoom Call? Why Sending Letters Might Help Your Loved Ones."It shows how getting a letter helps people who are feeling lonely and isolated. I’ll read a few excerpts from the article: Supporting friends and family who are going through a hard time used to involve meaningful chats at the local coffee shop, venting over a glass of wine on the couch or warm embraces followed by words of encouragement. Now, because of the coronavirus pandemic, those traditions are on hold. But we can take another approach: sending handwritten letters. The old-fashioned gesture could be particularly beneficial now: The pandemic is adversely affecting Americans’ mental health, and research suggests that being contacted by letter can lower the risk of suicide. Besides, after months of remote work and virtual communication, many people might welcome a tangible alternative to yet another Zoom call. Feel awkward writing a nondigital missive? No worries, we have you covered. If you know someone who is troubled, that person is not alone. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there has been a stark increase in emotional distress among Americans since the pandemic began. In June, nearly 31 percent of U.S. adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, while almost 11 percent said that they had seriously considered suicide. The prevalence of anxiety symptoms alone was about triple that of the same time period in 2019. One contributing factor to the national mental health struggle during the pandemic has been the ongoing social isolation plaguing millions of Americans. It’s the greatest concern of Amanda Spray, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “Social isolation is a symptom of depression,” she says, “and it leads to worsening of depression.” But getting a letter helps people. “[Letters] help provide social support, even if you can’t be there with your friend or family member, holding their hand and being by their side,” says Spray. Research indicates that such support can have a significant impact on recipients’ mental health. The medium is as important as the message. People consider letters meaningful, because so much effort goes into sending them. It takes time to find the right stationery, think about what to write, buy postage stamps, look up the person’s address and find a postbox. “It requires a kind of deliberation that is so lacking in our time of fast-paced messaging and media,” Lee says. “When you receive a handwritten letter, you reflexively start imagining the author sitting down and reflecting, thinking about you. . . . That’s why it’s so very effective at showing someone does care about you.” To support a lonely or isolated friend with a handwritten letter, keep these tips in mind: Don’t worry about finding the perfect thing to say. The hardest thing about having cancer was not losing my hair or those other things you hear about,” she says. “It was the loneliness I felt when friends and family didn’t know what to say and ended up disappearing as a result.” Lee emphasizes the importance of being as sincere and personal as possible, instead of focusing on writing the perfect message. “Sometimes, we get so distracted trying to find the right things to say, we don’t even realize that we sacrifice being absolutely genuine,” she says. Picture the recipient before you begin writing. Instead of thinking about yourself and what to say, envision the other person. What do you like about them? Why are you grateful to have them in your life? Have you ever learned anything meaningful from them? Focus on the future. If possible, share your hopes for something you wish to do or experience with the other person once the pandemic has ended. “That lens in the letter helps that person — and yourself — be a little bit more future-oriented,” Lee says. “It exudes some hope.” Remember the elderly. Not only are older family members less likely to be tech-savvy enough for a video chat, but they’re also more prone to loneliness, Lee says. “I think they’re especially vulnerable throughout this pandemic for so many reasons,” Lee says. “Letters could really impact their sense of loneliness and social connection in a powerful way.” If you forget everything else, here’s the one thing I hope you remember from today’s episode. Our show in a sentence: One effective way to care for someone feeling isolated and alone during our pandemic is to write them a letter. Here’s what you can do in response to today’s show. Since getting a letter helps people, write one to someone. I wrote one to my Aunt Lucille who recently turned 100 years old. Here’s what I wrote: October 21, 2020 Dear Aunt Lucille, I enjoyed talking to you a few weeks ago on your 100th birthday. After we talked, I started thinking about the many things you have experienced since your first birthday on October 5, 1920. You lived through the Roaring ’20s and Prohibition. You were only 9 years old when The Great Depression started in 1929. I wonder what that was like for you, living during those difficult days. And then there were the wars our country has been involved with since 1920. The bombing of Pearl Harbor that started WWII. You were 21years old then. Then the Korean War, Vietnam, and the wars in the Mideast since September 11, 2001. From Woodrow Wilson, who was in office when you were born, to Donald Trump today, you have lived through 17 different presidents. I find that amazing! Who knows, maybe there will be an 18th new president in a few weeks. You lived through so many cultural changes in your 100 years. And so many inventions, too. But in spite of all the changes you’ve seen in your lifetime, there are a few things that have been constant in your life. For example, one thing you’ve touched on when we’ve talked in the past, or letters you have written to me, has been your faith in God. I have so appreciated your reference to praying to God. That is one constant that puts all your other experiences in life in proper perspective. Another constant you’ve shared with me is your love for your family. You have written and spoken fondly of your children, Diane, Jean, Duane, Jack, and David, and you’ve given me updates of what is going on in their lives. It gives me a sense of being connected with my roots as I learn about my cousins. I wish I would have asked you more about Uncle Ray, though, your husband. I distinctly remember visiting you as a young boy before I was a teenager. You were very kind and gracious to my parents and 4 siblings during our visit. I also remember our family visiting you the summer after I graduated from high school and before I started college. That was a fun time. I also remember you, Aunt Virginia, and Aunt Rodell visiting my parents back in the ‘70s or ‘80s. I think Jean may have driven you from Wadena to Milwaukee. What a kind thing for all of you to do to visit your youngest sister, my mother. The visit I remember most distinctly happened maybe 10-15 years ago when Janet and I drove up to Wadena to spend a few days with you and Aunt Virginia. You were so gracious and hospitable to Janet and me. You made us feel right at home. I wanted to learn more about my family history and you were so patient in answering my questions and going through all the many photographs you had of family members, both living and deceased. It made me feel connected. During our visit, I also greatly appreciated driving past the farmhouse in Staples where you and my mother were raised. I have fond memories of visiting there when I was a kid. I never could have found that place without you giving directions from the back seat of our car. Finally, I just want to tell you what a wonderful aunt you have been to me. And for whatever years the Lord has left for you on this earth, may he continue to richly bless you. And may you look forward to many more years, even richer, and more joyous years, when you meet Jesus in heaven. Love, Your nephew, John As always, another thing you could do is let me and your fellow listeners know what resonated with you about today’s episode. You can share your thoughts in the “Leave a Reply” box at the bottom of the show notes. Or you can send them to me in an email to john@caringforothers.org. Closing I hope your thinking was stimulated by today’s show, to both reflect and to act, knowing that getting letters helps people. May you find the joy God intends for you through your relationships. Because after all, You Were Made for This. Our Relationship Quote of the Week When an old person dies, a library burns to the ground.  ~ African proverb That’s all for today. See you next week. Goodbye for now. If you missed last week's episode #74 on keeping our relationships healthy during the election season, click here to listen in. Who Needs Another Zoom Call? Why Sending Letters Might Help Your Loved Ones - The Washington Post, by Jamie Friedlander, September 15, 2020 You Were Made for This is sponsored by Caring for Others, a missionary care ministry. We depend upon the generosity of donors to pay our bills.  If you'd like to support what we do with a secure tax-deductible donation, please click here. We'd be so grateful if you did.

The Letters of John -- As a believer, you have been born again, this is obvious in the faith, love and obedience in your life, and the result will be that you will overcome this world as Christ overcame this world.

Walking in Truth || The book of 3 John || As we study John’s 3rd and final epistle and conclude our Walking in Truth series, we are reminded that in Christ we have everything we need to walk in truth.

The Letters of John -- As a Christian you know the truth of Christ- and so abide in him, but beware the false teacher.

The Letters of John -- As a child of God, you are not to love this passing world- but instead, in Christ, do the will of God.

Walking in Truth || The book of 1 John || As we continue our study through John's epistles we are reminded here in 1 John 2 that we as a church must pursue justice, not because the world is crying out for it, but because our God demands it and will deliver it. We must pursue love, not because the world is eager to redefine it, but because our God is the embodiment of love. And we must pursue truth because Jesus is the way, the truth, and the light. By Him we see what is and what will be.

It's a narrative that often gets repeated to parents of young children with disabilities: the more services the better. But John and Connie found a different way early on with their son Mark. Their family's dream was bigger. The vision they have for an ordinary life really gets to the heart of why this podcast started - to offer out ideas for families and people with disabilities to go after more in life than the expected route of disability services and segregated activities.As founders of the Plan Institute in Rhode Island 15 years ago, the Susa family connected with Starfire to learn how to launch community projects. They said that this way of bringing people together, over a shared goal like a community garden, generates a certain magic - almost instantly.If you are someone who wants to think seriously about how you and your loved ones spend your time, how to connect more deeply in community, and ways to make longterm relationships a reality, this episode is for you. GET THE PODCAST FULL TRANSCRIPT:CONNIE: - I have heard speakers talk about this concept as a way of healing the world and as we're in the midst of the COVID19 virus outbreak right now, I think the world could use a lot of healing, not only physically but also in terms of relationships. We have a new neighbor who shares that passion with us, and it has been such a joy to get to know one another, to have a real give and take. I can see how if this were multiplied throughout communities, and states and nations, the world would be a beautiful place. KATIE: Beautiful. JOHN - I'm John Susa. I think what moves me for a lot of this work is almost a therapeutic plan for me. I grew up very very isolated and I had very few interactions with anybody besides my family. And most people would have described me as being very introverted. When people asked me when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? My answer was always the same. I wanted to be a long distance truck driver. So I could sit in that cab and not have any human interaction for days. And if left to myself that's probably what would have happened. But instead I learned that if I pushed myself a little bit and started interacting with people and meeting people then I could change that desire to be a loner. And so I think the reason I'm so involved in all of this stuff is still mostly for myself to avoid falling back into be a loner. So I made pretty much a conscious decision that I was just going to change my behavior first. And of course after I changed my behavior for a while my attitude started to change.Fast forwarding then to when you and Connie met, and you had children and you were - down the road, you know, deciding how to engage as a family in the community, what were some of the things that you had to consider first to be connected?JOHN - I think for me the recognition that Mark developmentally was experiencing life differently than others made me realize it was going to be very helpful if I became more engaged in the disability advocacy world. I was kind of driven by two different quotes that were in my head that I learned while I was in the military. And they're very a-typical but they're very powerful. One is from Johann Goethe a German philosopher and he said, “Dream no small dreams for they have power insufficient to change the hearts of men.” That's been something that I've always come to recognize as a very powerful piece of instruction and advice. And I saw that there were people who were encouraging us in many ways to dream small, to be satisfied with what Mark is able to do, focus in on his disabilities, spend your time searching out services. In many ways that was dreaming small. There were occasionally people who would say, “No, no, no don't do that. Dream big. Dream like Mark's future is limitless. Dream like if you just provide him with all the opportunities that life has to offer, you will be amazed at how much he is going to accomplish.” And that is what I took from Goethe, dream big. And we have ever since. And that really has kind of put us into contact with a lot of other big dreamers. It's those big dreamers that really have changed the world works for people with disabilities.KATIE - Beautiful. MARK - Excellent.CONNIE: - For me in terms of community building, I think one of the greatest advances has been our church. Mark turned three at the end of December.MARK - Right. CONNIE: And three-year-olds were supposed to begin in what most people would call “Junior Sunday School.” When Mark was three, we were still carrying him - cradling him in our arms. Did you know when you were three years old you couldn't sit up by yourself? MARK - No way, really?CONNIE: Truly. Mark just kept attending our Sunday school classes with us and about two, three weeks into that sequence one of our friend's who taught the three year old class, the Sunbeam class, came to us in the hallway and said, “Why hasn't Mark been in my class?” And I said, “Edith - look.” As if seeing where Mark was at that moment meant everything. And she said, “Yes, but look at my role.” And Mark's name was there, without x's in the attendance boxes.And she said, “We really need him in our class.” And I said, “Edith he can't even sit up independently.” She said, “Well we could get a highchair and we could put pillows all around it so that he can sit up.” And I said, “We're not even sure that he can understand what you're teaching the other kids.” And she said, “That doesn't matter.” She said, “The reason I need Mark in my class is because all the other kids have so much to learn from him.” MARK - Really.CONNIE: And while we had been working seriously on stimulations and Mark had gone through early intervention and we learned about you know sensory stuff and what have you. We were doing that once a week, in a group and the rest of the time at home. But what Edith had said really started Mark and us on the path to community. Mark now…well, tell Katie what you do at church.MARK - A lot. CONNIE: - Some things that you're responsible for?MARK - I'm secretary. CONNIE: - Secretary for what?MARK - For attendance. CONNIE: - Yup, and you set up appointments for interviews.MARK - Set up appointments for interviews. CONNIE: - We were amazed, Mark was enfolded in the arms of these people who understood all about community because that fits the teachings that we have as Christians. Going back to what Edith had said to you that you know, diversity and having different types of learning in a classroom is really really really important and once you accepted that invitation, what unfolded in that first year? JOHN - What I remember is that it reinforced something that I came to realize, everybody became comfortable and it was now normal and accepted that Mark would be part of that congregation. Once people got to the point where they were comfortable because of exposure and experience they relaxed and they accepted Mark for who he was. And they didn't feel the need to treat him any differently than they would any other child. It reminds me of another one of my kind of guiding principles and this comes from a guy, Rudolf Steiner, talking about early childhood. Rudolf Steiner is the founder of the Waldorf educational system. Are you familiar with that?KATIE - Yes. JOHN - He said that, “There is nothing more therapeutic than normalcy.” That was a piece of advice that was given to us by a good friend, developmental pediatrician, when Mark was finally identified as having all these developmental challenges. The meeting at the end of the two-day evaluation process was nothing but a group of people who were very pessimistic about Mark. “He's not going to walk. He's not going to talk. He's probably not going to be aware of you. He's certainly not going to hear.” A whole bunch of things, they all at the end say “Well, good luck, take him home and love him.” That was their advice, which is good advice but inadequate. When they all left, their boss who was sitting at the back of the room observing asked us to go into his office because Connie was bawling. Sig closes the door and the first thing he says is, “Don't believe a word of what those people said to you.” And I said, “Sig if you say that, why didn't you stop them before they started?” And he said, “You know all those people in that room were doing or could do is describe Mark now, as they see him. They could not possibly describe Mark in the future. I believe if you believe them, that future will happen. If you don't believe and you adopt the approach that the best thing to do is to have Mark experience as much normalcy as possible he will become a different person. He will become more like the ‘normal kids' whatever that may be. Every person will develop depending on how much they're exposed to.” So he said, “I'm not going to let them label him because that will result in other people reading the report and it will only help them treat him in a stereotypical way based on his label. I'm just going to say he's developmentally delayed.” And his advice was, “Take him home and love him but then help him have every normal experience as other children.” And that kind of guided our thinking really from then on. KATIE - And you know, dreaming big in this instance is to dream ordinary, to dream normal. JOHN - Exactly. Yeah. KATIE - And sometimes ordinary is the biggest gift anyone can have.JOHN - Right, right. It's kind of counterintuitive because in the world of disabilities a lot of times people think that dreaming big means getting more services, the more the better, the more services the better. Steiner said think seriously about substituting every hour of normalcy with an hour of service because that hour of service is removing that person from normalcy. So it's almost in the disability world it's almost a flipping of thinking that that has to happen. CONNIE: - Be concerned if you were just going to services. JOHN - Be big in your thinking by vying for normalcy. KATIE - Yes, so even in services are... they're not normal. It's interesting. JOHN - They're not normal. CONNIE: - What's more important is that Mark participated not only in that class but every subsequent class. And when Mark was eleven years old we took our school district to a due process hearing because they had adamantly fought us for two years in bringing Mark back into district from a segregated day placement that was anything but normal, because they were sure that Mark would not act appropriately in a classroom setting. They were sure that Mark would be a disruption to other students, they were sure that he might even be self injurious or injury other people, because they were thinking in terms of stereotypes not in terms of who Mark is as an individual. And do you remember Jennifer Coats, Mark?MARK – Yeah. The one with the power.CONNIE: - She came to your hearing. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - And she told everybody just how you act in a classroom setting. That you raised your hand just like that, that you participated appropriately in singing time, that you sat with your class and no additional extra support. That you sang the songs that you answered questions, you gave talks. MARK - Right. Yes I did. KATIE - So it sounds like Jennifer had another piece of Mark and your family's story along this journey to dream big, to live an ordinary life? She made an impact during that hearing.I want to see if we can dip our toes briefly in the water of the day placement that you mentioned, that Mark was in, and how that was anything but normal. Can you explain how abnormal it was or what about it made it not ordinary?CONNIE: - Sure, the very fact that there were multiple kids with multiple disabilities just ate up so much of the instruction time. What else do you remember about it? JOHN - Everybody in Mark's class was just like Mark. Six little kids, wheelchairs. So the biggest thing I believe happened when he left there and went into a regular classroom is that for the first time he started culturally and socially experiencing life as every other eleven, or twelve or fifteen year old does. KATIE - You agree with that, Mark?MARK - Yes, excellent. KATIE - Yeah and I think that's a good segway to the phrase ‘a good life' that is something you hear a lot from Al Etmanski and Vickie Cammack. It's a big part of the PLAN institute model and you all have been involved with PLAN at Rhode Island for quite some time. So what ways has it helped? CONNIE: - John first heard Al speak, he recognized the wisdom in their model that we always acknowledge how deeply we depend on the work. When we brought PLAN (Personal Lifetime Advocacy Network) to Rhode Island 15 years ago we knew that we were standing on the shoulders of giants. The two things that we have focused on in trying to replicate their model is we help parents put all their ducks in a row, plan for the time that they are no longer going to be there or able to enrich the lives of their sons and daughters out of the love and the family history, the precious relationships. The much more important part of what they did in Canada and what we did in Rhode Island is to build a personal support network around the member. The family joins on behalf of their son, daughter, brother, sister and they engage with a facilitator to build and maintain that support network so that it's not just every individual having a relationship with a person at the center of the circle but it is all those people getting to know one another, to recognize one another's strengths, to trust one another. Between all those group gatherings individuals will do things with the members at the center, with our loved ones. And as parents we try to do that early enough so that we can fill in the important parts of the history. So the support network is really there to build a circle of support around a person, and yet also it's not just about the person in the center it's about everyone in the network joining together, being in relationships together, and in that way being in a community. Where are you now with the support network?CONNIE: - Right. Mark has had a personal support network for the entire time that PLAN has been in existence in Rhode Island. It really does take some time for relationships to mature that if we had to step off the Earth the next week, this would go on. MARK - Right.CONNIE: - And that it would provide Mark with people that he could depend on, people who were real friends, who had proved that over time. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - People who enjoy spending time with him. And we feel secure. In one of the questions that PLAN Institute seems to start with is what would happen to my loved one after I pass on, if I'm not around, if we're not there to help what will happen? And so starting from a young age it sounds like you guys have done a lot of work to build that support network so that in a time of disaster or otherwise that there is somebody there for Mark?JOHN - Right. When PLAN in Canada was first put together it was even before Al Etmanski, it was just a group of parents and they hired Al. They originally thought that they were preparing for their demise, the focus was on what's going to happen? What they quickly discovered was that yes they were doing that but they were also starting to develop a stronger sense of security and the feeling that their son or daughter was safe. There were some very positive benefits to the parents while they were still alive. And they figured it out that it was the existence of this network that provided that sense of security. And not only the sense of it but the actual security. KATIE - I love how you put that, that's very clearly stated for me and I think it's actually it starts as soon as you begin to community build: the benefits, the magic, the parts of it that are really just supportive feeling begin right away. And every parent needs that and we need to raise our children as a village. You all as a family have taken the brave step being able to say well even though some experts are telling us otherwise we're going to not believe that and in doing that we are going start this support network early and we're going to build and the more people who have joined in along the way it sounds like the more momentum has build towards this? Tell me about your family's leadership in the community as it relates to your street, and how your support network, Mark, how they were involved in that process? JOHN - So as we kind of navigate our life with Mark, I'm always looking for things that are in the way of him achieving greater independence. So this little project about looking at Warwick Avenue, Mark and his brother live about two and a half, three miles apart, they both require a wheelchair in Mark's case or a scooter in Frank's case. And so when Frank moved back here to Rhode Island we thought, “Wow wouldn't it be nice if these two guys could get together once in a while without Mom and Dad having to be the go between.” We started looking at this road and we recognized very quickly that this road was a problem. I've known that this road was a problem probably for at least fifteen years now, but I've not had a real strong reason for us to say, “Let's do something about it.” So we naturally thought that this is going to be something that is much more powerful if we have a group involved. We had a group, we had Mark's network, they all know him, they're comfortable with him. So we posed the idea, the project, people thought this is great. And the fact is that there is appropriated money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development every year for infrastructure maintenance. But the fact is also is that many states use that money for something else besides not worrying about wheelchair accessibility. So our complaint kind of brought this into the public eye and I'm pretty confident that we will be able to see some change and some action as we kind of work through the process. But it is also what ever you want to call it, karma, good luck whatever, that here we have our network and one of the powerful things about a network is the fact every member of that network has other connections with other people and within our little group we were able to identify somebody else who is not part of Mark's network but is only peripherally connected, kind of, who is going to be very helpful in resolving. And you never know who you may know until you start talking and working and interacting in community. Every network is a little community and every little community has a lot more resources than we certainly had by ourselves. Absolutely and maybe you can share how some of the other families you know in Rhode Island who have similar networks of support like you all do around Mark, how they've utilized their networks of support to do other projects in their communities with Starfire's facilitation support. What are a few of those other projects that have happened or sprung out of this collaboration?JOHN - So in about a month or so another network is going to do a project that is to create a mosaic welcome sign to this little town's community garden. It's prompted by a family who have a son who has very significant disabilities but who is a very very talented artist who is really good at sketching and painting vegetables. So they're going to take his work and they're going to create a mosaic welcome sign. This is a family I've known for quite a while, also been part of PLAN for a while, and they have dramatically really been able to bring their son like we did out of a special school into the real world and Sid has really blossomed as a result of that real world life experience. Why do you think it's important for families to lead efforts toward building community? And how do you think families are helping other people in the neighborhoods see the light of community building, the magic of community building?CONNIE: - We've been told for years on end that certain federal programs are underfunded and that there may come a time that those things are no longer available or that their support and services get shrunken and Mark loves people, he's a very social person. MARK - I do. CONNIE: - You do and you contribute in a lot of ways. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - And we're very proud of that. MARK - Right. CONNIE: - So just in terms of politics alone it's important that we give our sons and daughters opportunities to show that they can contribute to society. JOHN - From our own experience and from the experience of a lot of people we know that the amount of community, acceptance and inclusion that people with disabilities experience is really very much influenced by how much their family is integrated and included in their community. Our experience was that after Mark started going to special private school we spent more and more and more time at that school helping them with fundraising, helping them with all kinds of stuff and we spent less and less time in our community. We often meet family with children with disabilities and very quickly they'll say, “Oh, but we don't know anybody. We're not engaged in our community.” And without spending a lot of time we recently were able to recognize that that was because they were spending their time in a different world than their community. So we really really strongly encourage people to become more engaged and more involved. One of the ways is get engaged in a community project and all of a sudden you know a bunch of people, not all of those people are going to become part of their son's or daughter's network but some will. And that's because all of a sudden they know people who have common interests, there are all kinds of things that happen when you start doing things together. These projects are just ways people becoming engaged in their community, as a family, and then as time goes on for that family to be unique and having people have a relationship with that son or daughter who has a disability.Absolutely. And maybe we'll end with a quote here I think that is related to everything you just said. It's by Al Etmanski he says, “People are naturally ingenious when faced with adversity.” What ways do you think you all have managed to be ingenious?CONNIE: - With the COVID19 crisis, Mark's facilitator of Mark's support network is putting out requests with two things. One to ensure them that Mark is no more susceptible to this virus than anyone else in the community is. More importantly, because Mark has benefited so much from his contact with all the members of his network, she is going to ask them to engage with him regularly remotely as long as they cannot engage with him personally. He reads and he can enjoy texts and answer emails and appreciates post cards and greeting cards and phone calls.MARK - Right. CONNIE: - That's an adaptation that we're making right now. JOHN - We've learned that we really have to remain flexible. We have to depend on other people's creativity and let them interact with Mark in their way. In the beginning when he was younger people would always ask us, “What does Mark like to do?” And a long time ago we basically came up with the same answer, “Well I don't know, ask him.” Not only ask him but invite him. Mark surprises everybody with his ability to express his enthusiasm for things. KATIE - I love how you turned a question into a way to mobilize community to be more involved and be more inclusive. It's wonderful to meet and hear your story. JOHN: As parents we've benefited from such wonderful and powerful messaged from guys like Tim (Vogt) and Al Etmanski and David Wehterow and John O'Brien. There's a million of these messages that we've been lucky enough to try and hear and try and incorporate into what we're trying to do for Mark. That's what it's all about we're doing it for our family first - and hope that other families will see what we've done and will say, “Hey if those guys can do it so can we.” That's the power of this movement. KATIE: It's actually moving, it's doing something. That's the exciting part of it. Thanks for being movers, so great to meet you. MARK: Good-bye.

That You May Believe | The Gospel of John || As we saw last week, chapter 4 begins with Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman. The chapter then concludes with His encounter with a Gentile official. In this chapter we see a stark contrast; those who hear the word of God and believe versus those simply wanting to be entertained by signs and wonder. In this sermon we are reminded of the dangerous lie that you aren’t saved unless you have experienced signs and wonder in your life.

This week on episode 259 of the We Like Drinking podcast we’ll be discussing Viking Ale, tapping you beer, and holiday spirit galore, so crack open your beer, uncork that wine, and let’s get drinking. If by now you’ve already realized that you are listening to podcast gold, be sure to get yourself subscribed to the show so you never miss an episode. Visit WeLikeDrinking.com/Subscribe  Panel Introductions And What We’re Drinking Tonight we’re joined by most of our usual panel members, we have our California Sustainable Winegrowing Ambassador, and recovering Wine Blogger, Jeff Solomon, our commercial brewer and snake wrangler, John Ruyak, and I’m your host and certified specialist of wine, Jeff Eckles. Wine, Beer, or Pop Culture Reference McKissic Booze News  John - As it should be https://vinepair.com/articles/christmas-ale-viking-history/ Jeff - Tap dat can, or don’t - https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/beer-can-tapping-research-myth FFL Update Last call That’s right, it's time to break out your phones and give us a hand. Follow us on the socials, Twitter, Instagram and our private group on Facebook known as the Tavern. Search up the show on Apple Podcast and leave us a big fat 5 star review. And, if you enjoyed this episode in particular, share it with a friend. And, visit We Like Drinking dot com slash pledge to find out more information about becoming a patron of the show and help  You can also find the show notes for this episode with all the links to the stories or mentions we had at http://welikedrinking.com/episodes

Join me as I sit down with Mr John Harrison for a fascinating and heartfelt chat. John has an amazing personal story, and is incredibly well researched on the use of Ibogaine in treatment for opiate addiction. We discuss some of the neuro chemical mechanisms behind this treatment, and delve even deeper into John's approach of working with the whole human. John's approach in treatment is one near and dear to my own heart and work, as he emphasizes the need for a collage of methods that work specifically for the individual. From meditation, to hiking, to developing personal power--John is a skilled practitioner with a multi faceted approach in saving lives. I very much enjoyed our talk and getting to meet John in person. If you are a San Diego local like me, you can meet him yourself at his weekly meditation group with the Blue Dragon Zen Community! Join the community here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/womenbeyondrecovery/ Links and info for John: As featured on Tangentially Speaking podcast with Dr Chris Ryan: https://chrisryanphd.com/378-john-harrison-therapist-former-fugitive-from-injustice/ https://www.facebook.com/johnnycoyo Zen Blue Dragon Meditation Group: Wednesday 7pm 9025 Balboa Ave Contact John: jakaileb@hotmail.com More about John: John has enjoyed much of his time on the planet exploring both the inner and outer landscapes. A therapist with a practice based in San Diego specializing in Addiction Treatment and Personal Transformation, John was Principal Investigator for MAPS’ (Multidisciplinary Assn. for Psychedelic Studies) pilot study investigating the efficacy of the plant medicine ibogaine in the treatment of opiate addiction. John studied and was trained in Clinical Psychology at the California Institute for Integral Studies, and was formerly a resident at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Ca. A Zen Buddhist practitioner for over 30 years, John is the founder of Blue Dragon Zen Community in San Diego. An avid hiker and high altitude mountaineer, John is also a connoisseur of amazing and breath-giving sunsets! John Harrison has presented his research, both field and clinical, at over 35 international conferences and symposia, including Horizon's conference in NYC , Breaking Convention in London , the International Ibogaine Conferences in Durban, South Africa, Vancouver, Canada , and Tepoztlan, Mexico among so many others One of the earliest proponents of the importance of the integration process post psychedelic journey , John has long been a strong advocate for working with his patients as collaborators mutually engaged in discovery and deep respect resulting ultimately in their empowerment to go forward on their own journey toward wellness.

On "Stress [of Leadership]", we discussed: Triangles Nodal Events Nodal Event Examples: birth, death, marriage, new job Homeostasis (Check out our previous episode on homeostasis Chronic anxiety Convictions / Guiding principles The takeaways from today: [Alex] Don't manage other peoples emotions. Just don't. Listen to this episode and I'll tell you why. [Zac] Seeking advice and changing the homeostasis of a system works best when you keep guiding principle in perspective. [John] As a leader, I'm responsible TO people, not responsible FOR people.

晓华: Hello and welcome to RoundTable’s “the Word of the Week.” This week we are talking about begging and busking. John: That’s right. In English these are two words that are basically interchangeable. They are begging and panhandling. They mean the same thing -- going around, asking people for money. 晓华:Begging 大家都知道,Panhandling从字面上听上去也可以知道是什么意思了,端着一个盘子,也是要乞讨要钱的意思。 John: Besides money of course, they may also ask for food, drink, cigarettes or other small items.Now looking at begging from the western history, for Ancient Greeks distinguished between the ptochos (Greek: πτωχός, which means the"passive poor" or "beggars") and the penes (Greek: ποινής, "active poor"), with the latter being accorded a higher social status. 晓华: Interesting. 从古希腊时期开始,就把被动的穷人,也就是乞讨者,还有主动的穷人,在词汇上加以区分了。 John: As many of our listeners probably already know, if you look here in China with Buddhism and perhaps even in Daoism, begging is actually part of the religion. But also Christianity, Hinduism, Sufi Islam and Jainism also provide a traditional method of begging for monks, nuns, and people living in monasteries. 晓华:不光是在佛教中,在基督教,甚至是印度教中都有和尚,尼姑,或者是修道院的修士行乞来求生这样的教义。 John: No let’s take a quick look at some interesting laws and practices from around the world. Just as a very quick example, in Canada, the province of Ontario introduced its Safe Streets Act in 1999. So actually it is not illegal to beg, but they ban what is called “aggressive”, or “abusive” begging or panhandling. 晓华:看来各个国家都有一些限制乞讨的法律。像加拿大就禁止非常强势的,或者缠着别人要钱的这种行为。 John: And in Finland, begging has been legal since 1987. But in 2003, the Public Order Act completely decriminalized begging 晓华: 芬兰相对来说是对begging比较友好的一个国家。 John: And in Luxembourg finally, begging in Luxembourg is totally legal except when it is indulged in as a group or the beggar is a part of an organized effort, someway like we could see in China. 晓华:卢森堡的律法是禁止有组织的行乞行为。 John: So another type, or way of asking for money is not begging, is not really panhandling. It’s basically performing, and having a hat or a can, asking for tips, you might say. So in English, there are two different words or phrases we called street performance, or perhaps even more commonly, we call it“busking.” 晓华: 下面该说到busking了,也就是街头表演。 John: People who engaged in busking can be called “street performers”, or perhaps even “buskers”. 晓华:顾名思义, busker就是街头表演者,或者是街头艺人, John: So the term “busking” was first noted in the English language around the middle 1860s in the Great Britain. The verb "to busk", from the word "busker", comes from the Spanish root word "buscar", meaning "to seek" – as supposedly buskers are seeking fame and fortune. 晓华:所以busking也不光是表演,在它的词源里有“索求,求取“的意思,自然是要要钱了。 John: So there are other four basic forms of street performance or busking is the "Circle show", which tends to gather a crowd around them. They usually have a distinct beginning and end. So perhaps street theater, magicians, acrobats, jugglers, things like that. 晓华:感觉Circle show有点像中文里的撂地卖艺,在一块固定的地点,吸引一些围成圈子的观众,然后表演一些杂耍,变魔术,木偶戏这样的表演。 John: And then there are "Walk-by acts", where the busker performs a musical, living statue or other act that does not have a distinct beginning or end and the public usually watch for a brief time and then walk on by. 晓华: "Walk-by acts"就是不需要观众停留太长时间的,比如说在街头弹吉他唱歌,还有在街头假装成雕像,都可以归在这里面。 John: And then there is the "Stoplight performers". These people present their act right on the crosswalk when the lights are red. Then, while still red, they walk by the cars to get contributions from drivers and/or passengers. 晓华:"Stoplight performers"就是趁人在等红灯的时候在街角表演的艺术家。I’ve never actually seen any of these. John: It doesn’t usually happen in places like China. Usually in America, or perhaps even in parts of Europe. 晓华: I see. John: And then last but not least is"Café busking", mostly done in restaurants, pubs, bars and cafes. Basically the idea is someone is performing inside one of these venues, but the venue is not paying them. Instead, they are making money only from the tips of the patients. 晓华: "Café busking"跟酒吧驻唱的歌手还不太一样。咖啡厅或者酒吧通常不支付他们任何费用,但是他们可以走来走去,为客人表演,向客人收取费用。 So that raps RoundTable’s “the Word of the Week.”

XH: Hello and welcome to Round Table’s Word of the Week. This week, let’s talk about “OK,” okay? John: Okay. “Okay” is an amazingly mysterious word and it’s also an amazingly flexible word. It can be used as an adjective. It can be used as an adverb, an interjection, a verb, a noun, and a discourse marker. For example, it can be used to show doubt or even be used to seek confirmation. XH: 真的是一个用处非常多的词，它可以用作形容词、副词、感叹词、动词、名词，还可以用作征询意见的语气词。 John: As an adjective and as an adverb, it usually means adequate, acceptable, or perhaps even mediocre, in contrast to good. As an interjection, it denotes compliance or agreement, like just saying “yes.” As a verb and a noun, it shows assent or, again, agreement. XH: 我感觉好像又来到了中学英语英语课堂一样。Let’s talk about it. OK作为副词的时候就是还好 ，还可以，甚至是还凑凑合合的意思，作为感叹词是表示同意。 John: It’s interesting because as a verb and a noun, I don’t think many of our listeners will have heard it used this way so here’s a few examples. For example, “The boss okayed the purchase.” That’s using it as a verb. And, “The boss gave his okay to the purchase.” That’s using “okay” as a noun. XH: OK作为动词使用的不是太多，但也有用到的时候，比如说“老板同意了这笔采购”，我们可以说 “The boss okayed the purchase.” John: Looking at the history, as I mentioned before, it’s a word shrouded in mystery. There actually really is, among etymologists, the people who the history of language or the development of language, there isn’t actually any agreement on where the word “okay” comes from. Some people have speculated that it came into use in Boston in 1838 during an abbreviation fad and “OK” meant “all correct” and correct was spelled with a “k.” It’s also been hypothesized that it comes from a Choctaw origin which, when we look at Bibles from the Choctaw after they converted to Christianity, at the end of many sentences there was the word “okeh,” meaning in Choctaw, “it is so. XH: OK. 关于OK的起源，我们知道的实在不多，因为即使语言学家也无法达成统一的意见。有人说OK是all correct的缩写，还有人说OK起源于北美原住民的语言。 John: To be honest, there are so many different other interesting theories. Maybe, it comes from the Scottish “och aye.” Maybe it comes from another North American, Native American Indian tribe, the Lakota, from "Hokaheh.” It could be a loan word from a Greek pharse, Ola Kala, meaning “all good.” It also could be a loan from the Burmese word “hou' ke,” meaning yes.As we can see, as I said before, “Ok” we just have no idea where it actually comes from, except now we know how to use it, I guess. XH: 还有其它的起源传说，有说是起源于苏格兰的，有说是起源于另外一支北美部落的，有说起源于一个希腊外来词，还有人把它追溯到了缅甸语。So I guess, although we use the word so much in daily life, we really just have to agree that we don’t know where it comes from. John: We have no idea what “ok” actually is, where it comes from, but all we know is how to use it and we use it all the time. XH: And we use it in different languages. Okay! John: OK! XH: That’s all we have for Round Table’s Word of the Week.