#25: Best of The LTN Podcast

#25: Best of the LTN Podcast

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: You know, often with Love Thy Neighborhood episodes…

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

LACHLAN COFFEY: It’s ‘Where the Blank Meets’ — no, it’s ‘Where the Gospel.’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: ‘Where the Gospel.’

LACHLAN COFFEY: ‘‘Where the Gospel Meets Blank.’

RACHEL SZABO: ‘Meets Blank.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

LACHLAN COFFEY: In second hesitations…

JESSE EUBANKS: There’s always a moment that I regret you coming into the studio.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Most of the time it starts with ‘hello.’ You had me at ‘hello.’ (laughter) You made me question everything at ‘hello.’ What are we meeting today?

RACHEL SZABO: Ourselves.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Where the gospel meets ourselves. (laughter)

JESSE EUBANKS: Maybe just play the music.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay.

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JESSE EUBANKS: This is the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: I’m Lachlan Coffey.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. And today we’re all in the studio to bring back some of your favorite episodes.

LACHLAN COFFEY: A stroll down memory lane.

RACHEL SZABO: That’s right.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, how many are we doing?

RACHEL SZABO: So we’re doing five. We had our listeners vote for their top three, but we’re actually gonna do top five, listener-voted, favorite episodes.

JESSE EUBANKS: Cool.

LACHLAN COFFEY: It’s nice to reminisce, look back.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, and it’s, it’s because it’s our 25th episode too.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Oh my word. 25 of these things?

RACHEL SZABO: It is! That worked out really well.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. No, that wasn’t on purpose?

RACHEL SZABO: No. (laughs) I didn’t even realize that.

JESSE EUBANKS: That’s great.

RACHEL SZABO: But yeah, you’re right. This is quarter of a century episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s the quarter-life episode.

RACHEL SZABO: Alright, you ready to go?

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Uh, okay, so what are we starting with?

RACHEL SZABO: Alright, we’re gonna start with episode five. We’re gonna work backwards. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so this is the fifth-ranked episode.

RACHEL SZABO: Fifth-ranked episode. But first, I want you to guess.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, number five. Can we get a hint?

LACHLAN COFFEY: So the ones that I love are the ones that I am in. 

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, well okay, here’s a hint. This is one that you’re not in. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, Lachlan’s not in.

RACHEL SZABO: This is one that I’m in.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh Rachel…

LACHLAN COFFEY: This is me sleeping.

RACHEL SZABO: I’m the co-host in this one.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, you’re the co-host. Um, mental illness?

RACHEL SZABO: That was a good guess. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: And correct!

RACHEL SZABO: It’s not.

JESSE EUBANKS AND LACHLAN COFFEY: Ahhh.

RACHEL SZABO: No it is not. So number five is actually singleness.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh yeah.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Singleness. I remember being reminded again on that episode that we’re not all called to be married, and so there doesn’t have to be a plan of a single person like ‘What’s your plan to get married?’ You know what I’m saying?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Because your plan, devised by the Lord himself, might be too be single, and that’s fine.

JESSE EUBANKS: I really liked, I loved telling the story about the artist who continuously changed her appearance in order to appeal to different guys. I thought that was really like bizarre and fascinating and disturbing at the same time.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. So that’s the clip I have for you.

JESSE EUBANKS: Ohhh, okay.

RACHEL SZABO: It’s about Sarah Martin.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: And what she did.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: So here’s a clip of that story from episode number 18 – Where the Gospel Meets Singleness.

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CLIP FROM EPISODE 18:

SARAH MARTIN: Maybe I am doing something wrong, so I kinda took it on as an experiment. Um, I joined multiple Christian dating websites and then um, I asked friends of friends through Facebook if they would participate in this project. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Wait, wait. Did she just say project? Wait, what project is she talking about? I don’t — what is happening right now?

RACHEL SZABO: So Sarah’s an artist, and she likes to use her art to kind of explore different problems in the world. And so what Sarah decides to do is she’s gonna get on all of these Christian dating websites and she’s gonna ask all these different single Christian men to give her a list of what they expect in an ideal spouse.

SARAH MARTIN: Anything that comes to mind, like what are some characteristics? What would they look like? What would you guys be doing on the weekends on a day off? Things like that.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, and then Sarah is gonna try and be whatever this person is that they’ve described and then she’s gonna take a picture of herself or a video of herself as this person, send it to the men, and say ‘Is this right?’ 

SARAH MARTIN: I would have three chances to meet their expectations and become that person for them.

JESSE EUBANKS: This is like, this is so bold, like I either feel like this is gonna be like so amazing or just so terrible. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: So like did guys actually like go along with this?

RACHEL SZABO: Well actually, not at first. 

SARAH MARTIN: I got kicked off of one dating site. Um, a pastor who was on the dating site turned me in because he was really upset that I wasn’t there legitimately to date. So anyway, it’s kind of funny to get like a rejection letter from a dating website. (laughs)

JESSE EUBANKS (laughs): That’s like, that’s like the dating police gestapo like came after her.

RACHEL SZABO: Right, that’s like the ultimate rejection. (laughter) Okay, so after that, eventually Sarah did find 20 guys on these dating websites who said they would do it. And then the expectations started coming in. And at first, y’know, the expectations were pretty general, pretty normal. 

SARAH MARTIN: There was this super sweet guy in the military and he just wanted somebody to tell him happy birthday and have a conversation with him, so we did over Skype.

JESSE EUBANKS: Aw, that’s like so sweet.

RACHEL SZABO: I know, right? Like that’s cute.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I kinda like that.

RACHEL SZABO: But then, it gets weird, okay? It’s about to get really weird. Because some of the other men had expectations that were strangely particular.

SARAH MARTIN: ‘I want to come home from work and I want you to be making dinner in a dress and serving me impeccably.’ And I’m like ‘Alright, ‘K.’  But then it would get even like more specific. ‘And I want you to wear this certain kind of polka dot dress.’ So I go out and buy a polka dot dress and I would do the video and then he was like ‘Mmm that was really close. I don’t like that dress. I don’t like your hair. Can you do it again?’

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh.

RACHEL SZABO: This guy even went so far as to say ‘I want your dress to be navy with white polka dots.’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: I, I feel really gross right now. Like I feel like I need to go like take a shower. Like this is like —

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah it’s weird.

JESSE EUBANKS: Ahh, it’s like so disturbing.

RACHEL SZABO: And what’s really weird is this guy wasn’t the only guy who had a very specific image in mind.

SARAH MARTIN: They wanted me to physically like alter myself. Several people were like ‘You’re a pretty girl, but if you lost like 15 to 20 pounds…’  Like that was a normal thing, so I did.

JESSE EUBANKS: Hold on. This is like next level. Like she’s physically altering herself because of their requests.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I mean like Sarah’s totally committed to ‘this is the project, this is what I said I’m gonna do.’ And whatever they want, she’s doing it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, it’s like Sarah’s like their little doll and they can do with her like whatever they want. Like that is super weird.

SARAH MARTIN: Other people wanted me to pose like a Christmas card, a family Christmas card, so I did borrow babies and children of my friends to accommodate. Y’know, one guy was like an off-the-grid type guy that wanted me to be like self-sufficient, and learning to shoot a rifle was interesting. Learning how to sew and doing all this stuff that I didn’t know how to do, or I had to learn how to play the guitar a little bit. That took like a long time.

RACHEL SZABO: So actually it took Sarah two years to complete all of the requests from these 20 men. And some of them were so demanding that actually she didn’t meet the expectation in the three tries that she gave them. 

SARAH MARTIN: I had one guy get really angry with me because I didn’t meet his expectations after the third time, like he sent me an email that said ‘Do you need me to do this video for you and give you notes so you know how to do it right?’ And I was like ‘Wow.’

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LACHLAN COFFEY: I apologize for the male species. (laughter)

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh my gosh. It’s still so hard to listen to.

LACHLAN COFFEY: It’s so hard.

RACHEL SZABO: Uh-huh. So I actually, I sent Sarah an email, y’know, ‘Do you have an update for our listeners?’

LACHLAN COFFEY: No way.

RACHEL SZABO: ‘How’s life going and whatever?’ And she said she’s still happily single, and she said that, y’know, this journey that she’s gone through — she was like that’s actually been a real gift for her and she’s really thankful for it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Mmm. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: That’s cool.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh that’s great.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah.

LACHLAN COFFEY: I’m just kinda spitballing here, but what do you think about a Love Thy Neighborhood dating website? 

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s actually called ‘Love Thy Neighbor.’

LACHLAN COFFEY: Don’t you guys have like a 10% marriage rate or something coming out of the program?

JESSE EUBANKS: We used to. Marriage is in the minority, considerably. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. 

JESSE EUBANKS: It used to be, when we started this, marriage was in the majority within a few years. Now it’s sizably in the minority. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: That’s fascinating.

JESSE EUBANKS: Change of culture, man. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah. 

RACHEL SZABO: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Alright, you ready for another clip?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, yeah. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yes!

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so this is the fourth highest-ranked episode?

RACHEL SZABO: This is number four, yeah. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay. 

RACHEL SZABO: Lachlan, you’re in this one!

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yesss.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, oh, that’s our hint?

RACHEL SZABO: Hint, yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS AND RACHEL SZABO: Lachlan’s in this one.

JESSE EUBANKS: I’m trying to think of which ones he’s been in.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Neighbors! Where the Gospel Meets Neighbors.

RACHEL SZABO: Good guess. That’s not it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, hold on.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Community.

RACHEL SZABO: No.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh, the wealth episode.

LACHLAN COFFEY: No.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. Yeah. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Oh, the wealth episode.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeahhh.

LACHLAN COFFEY: That’s what I was gonna say. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: I love this episode. I really do. I think that uh, I think that —

LACHLAN COFFEY: Because we don’t talk about it. 

JESSE EUBANKS: What do you mean?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Like we talk about poor, but we don’t talk —

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like about poverty. Well because yes, often we talk about poverty and we only revere wealth, but we actually don’t explore it Christianly, y’know.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: And so, and there were so many good, there’s so many good stories in this episode.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, actually this is part of the story from the guy you talked to whose name was Stephen. So here’s a clip from episode number 17 — Where the Gospel Meets Wealth. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Roll that beautiful footage.

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CLIP FROM EPISODE 17:

JESSE EUBANKS: So when Stephen was a teenager, my favorite movie of all time came out. Do you know what my favorite movie of all time is?

LACHLAN COFFEY: Is it Simon Birch? I love that movie. I’m obsessed with Simon Birch. You know that line where he’s like ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

JESSE EUBANKS: No, and please stop guessing. Uh, the greatest movie of all time is where Michael J. Fox goes back in time to save his family.

JESSE EUBANKS AND LACHLAN COFFEY (IN UNISON): Back to the Future.

STEPHEN WILLIAMSON: There’s two things that matter in that movie to me. I mean what matters to you is probably the DeLorean and going back in time, but I saw the first scene where there’s speakers and the guitar and the pick. And he just plays like one note and blows up everything. Like awesome. And then what does he do? First he cusses, which is crazy cuz that’s what every ‘80s movie did, and then he jumps on a skateboard.

JESSE EUBANKS: So that guitar and the skateboard had Stephen like hooked. And he decided like that was what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to play guitar, and he wanted to skateboard. Which back in the ‘80s was synonymous with one thing — punk rock.

GUITAR PLAYING

STEPHEN WILLIAMSON: I spent a lot of time with kinda punk rock kids and they didn’t have much money and they lived in the basement of their house. I think everyone — I mean I can’t remember a household that wasn’t broken, like I think through like ‘Was anyone married in any of these kids’ homes?’ That’s how it felt.

JESSE EUBANKS: Not surprisingly, the punk rock environment was really different from the environment that Stephen grew up in.

STEPHEN WILLIAMSON: But back then it was like, that was the scene for the marginalized right? And there’s a lot of poverty, a lot of emotional poverty and physical poverty.

JESSE EUBANKS: So spending his days with like all these punk rock kids and being in and out of all these different punk rock kids’ homes and eventually touring in a punk rock band, like Stephen’s outlook on wealth, it changed. And not because he simply saw poverty firsthand, but because he had real relationships with these punk rock kids.

STEPHEN WILLIAMSON: So it gave great conversations of ‘You’re wealthy, y’know, you’re better than us maybe or you think you’re better than us. And we’re poor.’ It was very easy to talk about.

JESSE EUBANKS: And it was easy to talk about because in punk rock it’s like almost your goal to offend people, right? And so the reality was these punk rockers would be brutally honest. Stephen knew what they thought about him, and he knew what they thought about his money. And just being in that punk rock environment has really shaped much of Stephen’s outlook on wealth and poverty.

STEPHEN WILLIAMSON: Like it’s fine to interact with poverty by going ‘Hey, you’re poor. Here’s a dollar,’ which you don’t really do but that’s the idea. Like ‘Let me give you something. I’m American. Let me fix you.’ But just going — just be around poverty for a while. Just be here.

JESSE EUBANKS: In fact, Stephen is still friends with some of these same guys from his punk rock days. And it’s because he finds something in them that honestly he really struggles to find in the church.

STEPHEN WILLIAMSON: You know it’s nice to have someone who can outright call you out because they don’t care. Um, living in the Christian community, in the Christian world, the church, people are nice. So you don’t form a lot of friendships where people don’t care to offend you. Like we’re always making it our goal not to offend people. We really want to say things that we won’t because we’re not supposed to. I guess I miss the honesty a lot of — y’know, when you’re known to have a lot, even if people don’t want anything now, they may one day, let’s not burn that bridge. And so to have someone that long term doesn’t really care is very refreshing.

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LACHLAN COFFEY: It’s weird to have a topic like that of wealth, and you think — what are you gonna talk about? Just opulence and how great it is. And then you hear — that’s what I appreciate about Love Thy Neighborhood, is you guys, when you all delve into a topic that seems superficial even, like wealth, you end up finding very raw feelings of people being affected by this topic, y’know? 

RACHEL SZABO: Well yeah, because there’s a huge relational component to it that we don’t think about. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, it always ties back some way into community and relationship like you’re saying, Rachel.

RACHEL SZABO: Hmm-mm, yeah.

LACHLAN COFFEY: It’s great. Great episode.

JESSE EUBANKS: Alright, when we come back, we’ll keep on making our way down the list. So stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome back to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

LACHLAN COFFEY: I’m Lachlan Coffey.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. And today we’re going through our listeners’ top five favorite episodes. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Top five, baby!

RACHEL SZABO: Alright, on to number three.

JESSE EUBANKS: Um, any hints for us?

RACHEL SZABO: This is one you’ve already guessed.

JESSE EUBANKS: Um, oh. I’m gonna say — I’m gonna guess mental illness then. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, it is. Yeah. Mental illness. Which I was surprised.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, I’m not. I think it’s a topic that people know that we have to be able to talk about and it’s something that affects all of us, y’know, in various ways, so like yeah. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Do you think it’s also more relevant than ever?

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, yeah, because all the reports show that, y’know, younger generations have higher levels of anxiety and social phobias and, y’know, mental health struggles, y’know, yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: Hm-mm. So okay, so yeah, if you remember in this episode, uh, the main storyline was about Deborah and her family and they were missionaries overseas and then Deborah started to get like really manic and she eventually was hospitalized and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Y’know, she got on medication, things got like evened out, she got stable, and things were looking, y’know, generally like they could go back to normal, and then that’s where this clip is gonna pick up. So here’s a clip from episode number seven — Where the Gospel Meets Mental Illness.

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CLIP FROM EPISODE 7:

MARK: The psychiatrist said, y’know, ‘This is totally treatable, you can be high functioning just like you’ve always been.’ And so, his assessment and evaluation was that ‘you guys could go back and go overseas.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So Deborah and her family wait for the organization to give them the go ahead. They are more than ready to go back to their home and their friends and their mission country. And then one day, the organization calls Deborah on the phone.

DEBORAH: I received a call from them and was told that because of my bipolar disorder I was not able to get medical clearance to go back overseas. What was explained to me by the personnel was that they don’t appoint people with bipolar disorder because a person who might be manic on the field might do things to lose their Christian witness. That was devastating.

JESSE EUBANKS: When they had come back to the states, they expected to return to their country. All of their belongings were still there. They had to have friends from that country pack up everything they owned and ship it to them. Deborah and Mark would never go back. 

DEBORAH: I became very numb, lack of motivation. To wash my dishes was overwhelming. I would just cry over the fact that I felt so overwhelmed just to wash my dishes or just to have to go out of my house and meet someone. I became very isolated, very difficult to reach out to people.

MARK: For a while she’s mainly spending time in the room, not really able to do things that she would normally be doing, and so I’m taking the kids to school and starting to make the meals. There was a lot of things that was like in a small, small way living like what it would be if you were a single parent.

DEBORAH: One day, it was just really, really bad and I set the girls down and they had asked to go to the pool and I was gonna take them to the pool, but it was so overwhelming for me that I couldn’t and I was very upset about that and I was crying and shared with them some of what was happening to me, um, about the fact that I had depression. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Most of us would say that Deborah’s experiencing depression because of what happened. Who wouldn’t? Here’s Dr. Briscoe again. 

BRIAN BRISCOE: The other part of bipolar is the down phase. People will say, ‘Well this a situational depression.’ Well most depression is situational. It’s maybe 5% of depressions that come on out of the blue, but 95% of depression is gonna be situational. An analogy I like to use is, if you’ve ever had a really bad headache, you can’t talk yourself out of a headache, you can’t read Scripture to get yourself out of a headache. You’ve got the headache. Depression is like a really, really bad headache that just doesn’t go away for nine months to three years.

JESSE EUBANKS: And just like her mania had religious connotations, her depression did too.

DEBORAH: I found it very difficult to pray. I found it very difficult to read the Word. I felt like God was very distant from me, and I had never really experienced that in my life. I had a lot of shame about that because I felt like you should be farther along than this in your walk with the Lord. I was really trusting God and crying out to God for relief, and there was no relief. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, that’s really hard. And it’s hard for us when we believe that God is real and that he could do anything and we believe that with Christ all things are possible. And there’s like these moments where we really turn to Scripture, and we don’t turn to Scripture just for encouragement. We end up turning to Scripture because we want to find the answer to our pain and we wanna be healed. 

BRIAN BRISCOE: If I had, y’know, a broken leg, y’know, you could read Scripture to me all day if you want. In fact, doing that might actually cause me harm. If you read Scripture to me and walked away, that could cause me harm, it could actually cause harm to my faith… What it boils down to is not understanding. It’s because mental health and mental illness is just so hard to understand, and my experience has been that people don’t really get things like depression or panic attacks or anxiety until they’ve been through it themselves. 

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LACHLAN COFFEY: It reminds me of like David in the Psalms. Y’know, it’s just not all ‘How great, how amazing are you God.’ Sometimes it’s ‘Where are you God? Like I don’t see you. I don’t experience you.’ And here we are in a moment where it would be very easy to talk about mental illness and, like that doctor was saying, like just throw up Scriptures and ‘you can do it guys’ and throw rainbows and unicorns at people, but you’re willing to get into the mess with it and have a real, honest, raw conversation. So…

JESSE EUBANKS: Deborah’s story is obviously, like it was really moving. But the other thing in that episode too is like — Rachel, you actually ended up sharing a lot of your personal story and your personal journey with mental illness and mental health as well. And actually, I’ve heard from a lot of listeners over the last couple years about, y’know, what you shared in that episode and about how touching that was for them. What was that like for you to talk so openly about your own mental health?

RACHEL SZABO: Actually I love talking about it with other people, like if someone’s like in my Community Group or like I’m hanging out with some friends and someone starts talking about like their struggles with mental illness or like this medication they had to take, like I love jumping in there and being like ‘Hey, I take medication too’ and just kinda like creating like —

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, normalize it.  

RACHEL SZABO: — y’know, a bond, like a safe space, like we can talk about that because the reality is other people do too. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so on these episodes — so number five was singleness, number four was wealth, number three was mental illness. So far, the episodes are kind of personal, like it’s kind of —

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, they’re not the big like justice topics, like, y’know, incarceration or abortion or, y’know, homelessness, sex industry. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so does this trajectory stay true, like does it continue to be more like self-focused?

RACHEL SZABO: Well, let’s find out. So number two on our list. This episode is like paramount to what we do at Love Thy Neighborhood. It’s like this is at the core of who we are.

LACHLAN COFFEY: First episode.

JESSE EUBANKS: Oh. No, no, no. The neighboring episode. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, yeah. Neighboring.

JESSE EUBANKS: I love this topic because it is, it’s like ground zero for the Christian life. Y’know, it’s like loving God, loving our neighbors, and yet a lot of times it’s like ‘How do we do that neighboring thing?’ It’s like so antiquated the idea of young adults who by and large were not raised in a time of neighboring, like they’ve been raised in an era where like their interaction a lot of times is happening digitally. They’re commuters, so they tend to drive everywhere and their life tends to be pretty fragmented. So this idea of like knowing the people that live next door to you, knowing the people that live on your block, like I love in this episode that we get to hear stories of like young adults trying to do this really old-fashioned thing called neighboring. It’s awesome. 

RACHEL SZABO: Hm-mm. Yeah, and that’s actually what our clip is, is it’s one of our Love Thy Neighborhood alumni and her experience with neighboring, so here’s our clip from episode number eight — Where the Gospel Meets Neighboring.

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CLIP FROM EPISODE 8:

JESSE EUBANKS: Daisy Cooper is serving with Love Thy Neighborhood. She’s at the park, and she sees a pregnant lady with a two-year-old son running circles around her. This woman looks exhausted, and Daisy decides to roll the dice and ask this woman if she can help her with her son. And what does this woman say?

DAISY COOPER: ‘Yeah, sure, go ahead.’ And I was shocked.

JESSE EUBANKS: So Daisy throws a ball around with the little boy. And she learns that the woman’s name is Jamecia.

JAMECIA: My first impression of Daisy — I just actually thought she was like somebody in the neighborhood. She was like ‘Do you mind if I play with your son?’ And I’m like ‘Oh, yes, take him off my hands. Like I got this huge belly, I would love to sit down for a second.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Daisy’s teammates eventually come over, and they also start playing with the little boy. So as her teammates are playing with the little boy, Daisy walks over and sits down with Jamecia. And she learns that Jamecia is a single mom, she’s in her third trimester of pregnancy, and she moved here a year ago with her son Kobe.

JAMECIA: I was miserable, stressed out that I would never like get anywhere and stuff at the time. I was pregnant and had Kobe, so I couldn’t work. I was like really struggling, but it was very like stressful and miserable for me. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So they’re really enjoying their conversation with each other, Daisy’s really excited because she’s finally met a neighbor, Jamecia’s excited because she’s got people playing with her kid. And so they exchange phone numbers, and then suddenly a rain shower happens. 

DAISY COOPER: It started raining, so we just like literally ran home. And she’s like struggling. Seven months pregnant, she can’t run.

JESSE EUBANKS: So they part ways and each go home. And Daisy figured she probably wouldn’t see Jamecia again, that this was just some random meeting. 

DAISY COOPER: It was strange that I never saw her my whole summer ‘cuz she lived like two blocks from us. We always went to the park. She said she always went to the park. But no, it’s really weird.

JESSE EUBANKS: But Jamecia was really curious about these people.

JAMECIA: Actually I was hoping to run into them again after she talked to me about how much they were involved into the community ‘cuz they just seemed to be so happy, y’know, and just calm about things.

JESSE EUBANKS: Now remember, when Daisy and Jamecia met at the park, they exchanged phone numbers. And Jamecia is the only neighbor that Daisy has gotten to know. And so Daisy starts texting Jamecia — often — asking her if she wants to come over, asking her if she wants to go to church, asking if she wants to meet up for dinner, wanting to spend time together. And it’s just hard for Jamecia. Jamecia’s a single mom with a baby on the way. And so Daisy starts asking herself, ‘You know, if I were in Jamecia’s shoes, what would I want right now?’ And so she decides to throw Jamecia a baby shower.

DAISY COOPER: She was seven months pregnant when we met her, and she didn’t have things for this baby.

JESSE EUBANKS: So Daisy gets on Facebook and starts asking her friends to donate things and help throw this shower. And her teammates, they start doing the same thing.

DAISY COOPER: And it was really awesome also to see my roommates just come behind that idea because for six people who’ve never had a baby to like throw a baby shower — We’re like ‘Yeah, that’s crazy.’ People donated tons of stuff from baby clothes to a bouncer, food for the party, decorations for the party, they came to our party.

JESSE EUBANKS: And because Jamecia didn’t really have friends to invite to the shower, Daisy just invited some of her own friends. It was a bit strange asking people to come to a stranger’s baby shower. But they did. And some of the strangers that came to that shower — Jamecia is friends with some of them now. Here’s Jamecia remembering the shower.

JAMECIA: It was amazing. They brought lots of gifts. I can say that, so I went home with a lot of stuff that I was not expecting. (laughs) After that I just felt happy and joyful, y’know, just excited like ‘Yay I have friends now.’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: That baby shower ended up being a turning point for Daisy and Jamecia. After the baby shower and after seeing that Daisy was committed to be a part of her life, Jamecia accepted her invitation to go to church. And she started going to church every week. And then to Daisy’s community group, which is a small, more intimate gathering of people from her church. A few months later, Jamecia’s baby was born. Daisy and her teammates would often babysit for Jamecia so she could go to community group, so she could look for a job, and even so she could attend a baptism class at church. And on the Sunday of her baptism during her testimony, there is one person she specifically mentions by name. Here’s a clip of someone reading Jamecia’s testimony at her baptism service.

CLIP FROM BAPTISM: ‘I got pregnant again, and that’s when I broke and I cried out to God. I prayed and I asked God for help. But more than that, I needed redemption. He then placed Daisy Cooper into my life. Daisy became my friend and introduced me to Sojourn, where God really started revealing himself to me and molding my heart. He gave me clarity on what his Word meant when he says ‘I am your stronghold.’ My faith began to grow more and more because I believe as it says in 2 Corinthians 3 that my story is written not with pen and ink but with the spirit of the living God.’ Amen. (applause)

DAISY COOPER: So when I heard my name, I froze. It was just like everything in me stopped moving, and I just like started crying. Just broke down crying. I just didn’t expect to be in her story, her testimony by name. It was real that I was a part of someone’s story.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. I love, I love that story.

RACHEL SZABO: Hm-mm. So good.

JESSE EUBANKS: Like it really is, like it’s an incredible story ‘cuz it started with something so small. It’s just like Daisy’s in the park and then she’s just like ‘Oh, there’s this kid and this mom looks tired and I’ll help out.’ And it’s like those little tiny acts, y’know, lead to —

LACHLAN COFFEY: Transformation.

JESSE EUBANKS: — Daisy’s life just completely being changed by God.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, you can’t underestimate the power of relationships, like real relationships and really being present. 

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s a story about perseverance, y’know, and it’s like Daisy just kept showing up and kept trying to move forward and kept pursuing loving her neighbors, and in the end like she did not end up best friends with 20 neighbors, but she ended up best friends with one woman who really needed her and she really needed Jamecia. And so it’s a story of perseverance too. 

Alright, uh, so when we come back, we’re gonna do the top favorite episode, as voted on by listeners. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yep, number one.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Cliffhanger.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yep, so stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome back to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

LACHLAN COFFEY: I’m Lachlan Coffey.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. And now it is time for our listeners’ number one favorite episode. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Wooo. Number one!

RACHEL SZABO: Drumroll.

JESSE EUBANKS: Number one. I’ve gotta say — there are some, there are some episodes not on this list that I was positive were gonna be on this list. 

RACHEL SZABO: Really?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

LACHLAN COFFEY: I thought the first episode would be on. Maybe it is.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well I thought that LGBTQ would definitely be somewhere on this list. I thought social justice would be somewhere on this list.

LACHLAN COFFEY: So you thought like hot-button issues.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well yeah, because those are the ones that get the highest number of listens. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: They get more clicks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, yeah. But maybe they’re just click bait. But number — what do you think number one is?

LACHLAN COFFEY: You know, I don’t know. Is it the first episode?

JESSE EUBANKS: I, I think it’s racial reconciliation.

RACHEL SZABO: So, number one is racial reconciliation.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

LACHLAN COFFEY: That’s the first episode right? Yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: By a landslide.

JESSE EUBANKS: By a landslide? 

RACHEL SZABO: By a landslide. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Really?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, it’s like everyone’s favorite.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well it’s an incredible story.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah. It’s funny too to go back and listen to it because it sounds so bad. (laughter)

LACHLAN COFFEY: We were just little kids.

RACHEL SZABO: You can like totally tell it’s like ‘Oh, we recorded this in the basement of the building.’

LACHLAN COFFEY: All of the audiophiles will enjoy this clip.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so maybe this is a chance for us to like confess — so like all of season one of the podcast, we didn’t have a recording studio. Uh, I had to go into a friend of ours — their ministry was, they had just bought a brand-new building and it was totally empty, no construction done on it, and they said that we could use the basement. And so we went to this like huge building, it’s like 60,000 square feet. And we went down into the basement and then went into a closet and it was me sitting by myself in a little closet, and in fact I even interviewed Mike Cosper inside this little tiny closet. And it wasn’t like — it was a clothes closet and there were no lights in it. Like it was literally the two of us sitting inside this little closet.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Slowly push through the coats…

RACHEL SZABO: You get to Narnia. (laughter)

LACHLAN COFFEY: Lamppost. (laughter)

RACHEL SZABO: Mr. Tumnus?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, but the first season of this podcast was like, I’m like we were like so punk rock.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, it’s so funny.

JESSE EUBANKS: It was just like duct tape and any microphone we could get our hand on, but it’s to the power of story that, y’know —

RACHEL SZABO: Oh it’s an incredible story.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah the power, like the story was so incredible that, y’know, as long as the audio sounded decent, that we had a chance, y’know, to tell a good story.

RACHEL SZABO: So yeah, so uh, the clip I’m gonna play for you for that is actually with your interview with Mike Cosper and his controversial sermon that he preached that was sort of like the catalyst for a lot of stuff that happened in this church. So here we go. Last clip, from episode number one — Where the Gospel Meets Racial Reconciliation. 

—————————————–

CLIP FROM EPISODE 1:

JESSE EUBANKS: It was fall of 2014. Sojourn was preaching through the book of Ephesians, and they came to Ephesians chapter 2, which says, “For Christ himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility.”

MIKE COSPER: As soon as we knew we were doing an Ephesians series, we knew we’d come to this passage. And we had to figure out, okay what are we gonna do with it? How do we want to approach it? Y’know, that Ephesians 2 passage is famous for being a passage for these kinds of conversations around race because it’s, y’know, Christ tore down the wall of hostility.

JESSE EUBANKS: As a writer and blogger, Cosper had been sharing his thoughts on the recent happenings in Ferguson, Missouri — the shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer and the riots that followed. 

MIKE COSPER: I had been writing on race a good bit, and so the pastors asked me, “Hey, would you take this passage? Take this week?” Knowing that it was a tough subject and that I at least had a certain fluency in how to talk about the questions or how to speak specifically to white people about these things.

JESSE EUBANKS: But having fluency doesn’t make the words easy to say. Or to hear. Here’s a clip from that sermon.

COSPER SERMON CLIP:  Nick Kristof in the New York Times wrote a fascinating editorial called “Are We All a Little Bit Racist?” And he includes African Americans in this. And what he shows is that studies show this broad tendency to make prejudicial judgments about people with black skin. And what he points to, and this is so crucial for us to hear it, is that most of this bias is implicit. It’s not conscious. And here’s the thing, racism isn’t just politically incorrect. It’s sin. And sin is dynamic and deceptive. Racism deceives us and we think we’ve conquered it, but it persists in our hearts and it persists in our culture.

MIKE COSPER: My goal was to get white members of our congregation to acknowledge there’s still a problem here. It didn’t end with the end of slavery. It didn’t end with the Civil Rights Movement. 

JESSE EUBANKS: But hold on, hold on. But there is equal opportunity for blacks in America. 

KEVIN JONES: There is not equal opportunity for blacks in America.

JESSE EUBANKS: Hold on, hold on. In fact, because of Affirmative Action and things like that, it now establishes legally that people of color cannot be discriminated against, that being black can actually work to your advantage in some cases.

KEVIN JONES: Yeah, so that’s to the advantage of a few. It’s not a systemic advantage at all. For example, the 9th Street Divide in Louisville. So one way you go downtown, everything is all hunky-dorey, nice buildings, nice restaurants, everything is clean, kept neat. Boom, you cross 9th Street, 10th on down? Family Dollars on every other corner, liquor stores on every other corner. And that is simply the 9th Street Divide. You tell me — what’s the predominant race that lives beyond 9th Street?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, it’s mostly African American.

KEVIN JONES: Yeah. And this is just in the city of Louisville. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Here’s Cosper again.

COSPER SERMON CLIP: We quote pastors and theologians and treat ‘em like they’re heroes, and people in our pews and people in our neighborhoods think to themselves, “That guy might’ve owned one of my ancestors.” That’s privilege. It’s never having to hear quotes from people who subjugated your relatives. And the refusal to acknowledge its existence is itself a way of wounding a whole community. 

MIKE COSPER: And so you have this incredibly dark history and legacy, and it shadows a lot of what we do and it shadows a lot of the reality of how it is. And yeah, it’s way more fun to preach platitudes and sing some happy songs on a Sunday morning than to go ‘Hey, this is a big deal, and people are still hurting over this and being hurt by this now.’

JESSE EUBANKS: It was a bold step toward racial reconciliation. And Sojourn has four services on Sunday. So Cosper, he had to say this message four times. But what Cosper and the other pastors didn’t realize was the aftermath and trajectory their church would now take because of this Sunday.

MIKE COSPER: One of the things that happened afterwards was there was a significant amount of pushback. I got a lot of pushback for my comments.

JESSE EUBANKS: He got face to face comments and many emails. The first comment he received was…

MIKE COSPER: By 11 a.m. that day. Somebody went to the first service that day, went home, and sent me a dozen links, just lots of these very hardcore, right wing kind of things, saying racism doesn’t exist in America today.

JESSE EUBANKS: And this guy wasn’t the only one who had an opinion. There were many white people who were very upset.

MIKE COSPER: I remember after one service there were these gals, sort of confronted me, white gals, born and raised in the suburbs, and just vitriolic, just angry over the content of the message. Y’know and essentially arguing, ‘Hey, you didn’t preach the text. You brought too much politics or too much philosophy or this, that, and the other, we need to talk about Jesus.’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: And not just white people. Even the handful of black people in the church were upset too.

MIKE COSPER: There were African Americans who were angry that we were talking about this. They came to church, and essentially they said, “We deal with this all day long, all day every day. I came to church to hear about Jesus and be encouraged. I don’t want to sit through that.” I have another friend who is a police officer who came and was actually encouraging about the whole conversation and shared some interesting stories from inside the police department. He said that as he was walking in, y’know, one of his friends who’s also a police officer was walking out and said, “You don’t wanna go in there today. You don’t wanna listen to this.” I mean I went home, couldn’t sleep that night. I was just rattled by it. And then the next day I think I finally got to sleep at around one in the morning and then I think I slept until 1 or 2 in the afternoon the next day. Just, just exhausted from the whole experience because of the sense of resistance in the room, the very obvious sense that you are saying things that people don’t want to hear. This sermon made me more aware that even amongst my friends, even amongst people who I’ve lived life with and lived in community with for a long time, the problem runs deeper than we know.

JESSE EUBANKS: In the midst of all the backlash, Cosper says there were a few encouraging responses.

MIKE COSPER: There were three women in particular, African American women who attended that day, who just went out of their way to say thank you and just to share their own experience in the church and, y’know, and this tension for them, for all three of them. They were saying, “Look I was hovering on the edge of this community trying to understand do I have a place here or not? Because here’s this aspect of my life and it hurts, and I want to be in a church where people share that pain and where I’m welcome to feel that pain and talk about it.”

—————————————–

LACHLAN COFFEY: So here’s my question to you all. That was episode number one. 

RACHEL SZABO: Hm-mm.

LACHLAN COFFEY: So why did you all want to start with that episode as your first one? Can you go back into your catacombs, the incubation of this whole thing?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so originally it wasn’t gonna be the first episode. We actually produced episode number two — Where the Gospel Meets the Sex Industry — we actually completely finished that one. And then it was gonna be the second episode, but as Rachel and I talked, we were like, ‘Man, that really feels like the first thing that we need to come out with.’ And part of it is because of what I said earlier, which is it’s not that we all have to agree, but we have to learn how to talk about these things. And in particular on the issue of race, like Christians just don’t know how to talk about it. So what happens usually is that we break off into our little friend groups and then we all just echo each other and reinforce our ideas, y’know, that we already think. So we leave the conversation thinking the exact same thing as when we went in, and that’s not always helpful. I think the idea of being able to share a real story of a real church that truly stepped into it, counted the cost of what does it look like to truly be people, y’know, agents of reconciliation.

RACHEL SZABO: Well and didn’t do everything perfectly either. 

JESSE EUBANKS: No, right, yeah. There were a lot of mistakes along the way, so it was like a very genuine story, y’know, of like people who really wanted to do the right thing and really kinda screwed it up as they went but they just kept moving forward and God, y’know, God in his grace, kept meeting them. So we definitely — we’re gonna have to revisit that story because —

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I want to.

JESSE EUBANKS: — so much has happened —

RACHEL SZABO: They, I mean there’s been leaps and bounds since that episode came out within Sojourn that, yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: The listeners can look forward to it, right?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yes. Yeah, we’d like to definitely.

RACHEL SZABO: I hope so.

JESSE EUBANKS: We’re hoping to revisit that in the next year or two. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: That’d be cool.

RACHEL SZABO: Hm-mm. Hm-mm. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah.

RACHEL SZABO: Well, there we have it — top five episodes, per our listeners.

JESSE EUBANKS: We should have said this too. Obviously we didn’t include any episodes from season three, so people couldn’t vote on episodes from season three.

RACHEL SZABO: Oh right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JESSE EUBANKS: They could only vote on episodes from seasons one and two.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Yeah, there’s rules. There’s rules, people.

RACHEL SZABO: I mean, we’ll have to do it again and include season three.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so it looks like we’ve gotta make it to episode 50 and then we can do another Best Of.

RACHEL SZABO: We’ll do another one. Yeah. 

LACHLAN COFFEY: Retro.

RACHEL SZABO: Half a century.

JESSE EUBANKS: Half — no. (laughter) Not a century. That’s not a — that’s not a thing. 

RACHEL SZABO: Half a century episode. (laughs)

JESSE EUBANKS: No. (laughs)

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JESSE EUBANKS: Hey, special thanks to our listeners who voted on their favorite episodes. We appreciate you guys listening and for supporting this podcast. We would not be doing this without you guys, so thank you. 

RACHEL SZABO: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Co-hosts was Lachlan Coffey…

LACHLAN COFFEY: And editor, technical director, and producer — and breeder of guinea pigs — Rachel Szabo. (laughter) 

JESSE EUBANKS (laughing): You’ve gotta say it. You’ve gotta finish the sentence or we can’t use it.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Okay, Rachel Szabo. (laughing) I didn’t get that one either. I didn’t get that one either.

RACHEL SZABO: Aw, thanks Lachlan.

JESSE EUBANKS: Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.

LACHLAN COFFEY: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’