[0:00] A little while back, my family did something that I had been desiring, maybe even kind of threatening to do for years. We watched the Lord of the Rings movies, the extended editions, all three back to back in one sitting. More than twelve hours on the couch. And because we're that kind of family, and the rest of my extended family knows how to hang as well, we ate like hobbits the entire way through. Breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper. I'm not going to describe to you the way that I felt by the time that Frodo reached Mount Doom, but I will say the hobbits were on to something, and also that my body has limits. But then I noticed something, and this is the reason why I'm making this video. Somewhere around hour nine, the beacons are lit. Rohan has come to the aid of Gondor. Grond, my favorite character, has made his appearance. A little bit later, Sam is carrying Frodo up the mountain.

[0:48] I'm completely wrecked on the couch, just crying full on tears in the best possible way. And then, you know, you get to the very end of this thing, the credits roll, and I stand up and I walk into my kitchen, and it's my kitchen. Dishes are in the sink. It's the same lighting, you know, the same light bulb up there that's been flickering for the past couple of weeks. There's a Monday morning coming that looks exactly like the last 400 Mondays, more or less. I think a lot of you know that kind of feeling in your stomach. You you've felt it walking out of a theater or closing a great book, or driving home from a retreat where God felt as close as your skin for the past three days. The epic is on the screen, and the ordinary is everywhere else. And if you're honest with me, and I'd like you to be, there's a harder thought running underneath all of that. If God is real and this is the life he gave me, then why

[1:37] does it feel like nothing so often? Why does my life, if I'm a follower of Jesus, just feel like an endless march of Mondays? Some of you have buried that flatness for years, and somewhere along the way, you decided that it means something is wrong with you. There's a moment in The Two Towers on the stairs going up into Mordor in the dark when Sam turns to Frodo and says, I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into. I'm gonna keep asking you that question for this entire video. What sort of tale have we fallen into? Because I think that Tolkien knew something about your dumb, boring life and about mine that we are often not told in the church. So strap in. So I think I'm gonna start with me, because I don't think I have any business pointing at your life until I've been honest about mine. Many times over the past few years, I've just gotten good at feeling almost nothing.

[2:26] Like I don't mean that I've been depressed, although of course I have certainly been depressed. There have been battles with depression that I I don't know that I'll ever recount here on this channel. Nothing terrible happened, but my life stayed more or less the same, right? What changed is that the ordinary stopped registering. I'd pour a glass of water from my kitchen tap clean and cold and basically free, something that a king 300 years ago would have traded a horse for, and I would feel essentially nothing. And I have to tell you, feeling nothing is a skill. Nobody teaches it to you. You just sort of practice it one unremarkable morning at a time until you're an expert. The part that scares me about that is that the same thing in me that stopped seeing the water also stopped seeing, you know, sometimes my wife across the table. It stopped seeing my kids being loud in the next room. It stopped seeing my street in October and the fact that I woke up

[3:18] this morning at all, and the fact that I have both of my arms and both of my legs and they all work. And somewhere in there without me ever deciding to, I stopped seeing God in an ordinary week too. I still believed he was there, I just couldn't feel him there. It's like I didn't lose the water or my arms or my wife or my kids or God. I just lost my eyes to see them. I'm probably not alone here though, right? Like I I think that's probably a wound that a lot of you are carrying, and I want to voice that carefully because it's easy to voice it wrongly. Your life, it's not like it fell apart. It just kind of went flat The wonder drained out of a normal week, and you kept showing up, kept singing, kept saying the words, and underneath all of that, you started reading the flatness as evidence that either God isn't really here or that something in you is broken. It's possible that you've never said that out loud to anyone. Not your spouse, not your pastor, not even to yourself.

[4:08] You're not even being honest with yourself if that's how you really felt. So I'll say it out loud for you, and then I'll spend the rest of this time telling you why I think that it's possible we've read the evidence wrong. So let me give you the first reason right now, because it brought me a lot of relief when I found it. There is actually a real studied reason that the ordinary goes invisible and has nothing to do with your faith. We just talked about it in our last video. Fascinating study. I would recommend you go look it up. Back in the late 1970s, a group of researchers went looking for people who had just won the lottery. Big money, life-changing money. And they compared them to regular old people in the same area who hadn't won anything. And then they asked both groups how happy they were and how much they enjoyed the small everyday pleasures of a regular day. Here's what they found. The winners were no happier than everyone else. And when it came to the ordinary pleasures of a normal day, the winners

[4:58] actually rated them lower. They'd gotten used to the big thing. And getting used to the big thing had cost them all the small things. And so now, whether either of us wanted it or not, we both have Blink-182 in our heads. The point is that this is what human beings do. We adapt. You give us something amazing, and then within months, it just becomes our new normal, our baseline. If you give us something awful, and mercifully, the same machinery kicks in and we find a way to keep going. It works on everything: the new house, the new job, the marriage, the healthy body, the clean water, the mind just sort of files all of this under normal now and then stops sending you the signal The reason that matters for you is if you've been living inside a miracle for 40 years and you feel nothing, I don't want you to think of that as a moral failure. You don't have like a defective walk with God or something.

[5:46] It's a human nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do, but has gone a little haywire on things that matter. And there's one more piece because I also I don't want to overstate it. Later researchers then went back and found that this baseline can move, it's not locked. Adaptation is real, but it's also answerable. We can do something about it. But it's a feature of being human that you can actually affect. We'll get into how in a moment, but I can already sort of hear some of you saying, Tim, that's fine for water. My problem isn't the water. My problem is that I have questions about God I can't answer, and I've been told my whole life that the questions themselves are the problem. Understood. Challenge accepted. Let's take that head on right now with our Bibles open because there is an answer here, and I believe firmly that it's better than the one you were told.

[6:32] So let's look at Psalms. The prayer book of Israel, mind you, the song book Jesus grew up singing, Psalm 13 starts after the intro. Until when, oh Yahweh, will you forget me? Or until when? Or how long? Oh Yahweh, will you forget me forever? Grammatically speaking, there's a few different ways of struggling to put this together. But the point is, how long, oh Lord, will you forget me forever? This person's feeling, and this person is a psalm of David, by the way. That person's feeling was, oh God, you're forgetting about me. How long are you gonna forget about me? Flip forward just a few more pages. Another Psalm of David. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That's the one Jesus quoted from the cross. I'm not going to flip to this one because that would take too long, but it's in the same book Psalm 88, which I have bet money, I would

[7:22] bet money you've never heard this thing preached. Uh, because it never actually turns the corner. There's no, but I will trust in you at the end. The last word of the whole psalm is darkness. There it is. The last word is darkness. But there's something about this, right? God put that in the Bible. He put it in the song book. He wanted his people to have words for the days when he doesn't seem to be around. It's not just the last word, by the way. I mean, like, listen, over me has passed your wrath. Your terrors have destroyed me. They came around me like the waters all the day. They surrounded me all together. You have put far my beloved and friend, my close acquaintance is darkness. So I I just think it's important for you to recognize that that's in your Bible. It's an available thing that you can talk to God about, and he's not hiding from you in that.

[8:09] He wants you to acknowledge that sometimes your life feels like that. But think about Job, even. Job loses everything. And for something like 40 chapters, he argues with God, he protests, he demands an audience, he says things that you or I would probably feel nervous saying out loud, and his friends sit there with their tidy, correct sounding theology, telling him that God is in control, and he must have done something to deserve the treatment he's receiving. And then at the very end in Job 42, I think it's verse 7, God speaks and his anger burns. If you were to go there and read it, you would see what it burns against the friends. He says, You have not spoken of me, what is right, as my servant Job has. The man shouting the hard questions gets called God's servant, who speaks rightly about God. The man with all the clean answers and the neat systematic where everything just fits into God's plan, clearly he's the one doing all this to you.

[9:01] They get rebuked Or you can think of Thomas, right? Way further in into the New Testament, who says, Unless I put my finger in the nail marks, I will not believe. Jesus shows up a week later, doesn't scold him, he holds out his hands and says, put your finger here. The doubt got answered with Jesus' own wounds presented as evidence. So there's there's something I've just come to believe about all this stuff, and I hold it pretty tightly. The honest question, even the scary question, this the question that you think if you don't get a good answer to this, it might you might not might shipwreck my faith, it might have a problem with my faith. The honest questions, even those kinds have always had a home in the life of faith, in the life of a Jesus follower. It was there in the Psalms, it was there in Job, it was there with Jesus and his disciples, even in his presence. You are not broken for asking it. You're in the oldest company there is, which brings me back to Samwise on

[9:52] the stairs in the dark. What sort of tale have we fallen into? My first answer is that we've fallen into a tale with room for the dark in it. A tale where the guy on the stairs gets to say, I don't know how this ends, and it doesn't get him thrown out of the story. Let's go get a hold of this scene before we go too much farther, because we're gonna refer back to this quote often enough that it's worth reading together. Yes, that's so, said Sam, and we shouldn't be here at all if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo, adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think they were things that wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were excited and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folks seem to have been just landed in them, usually.

[10:41] Their paths were laid that way, as you put it, but I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on And not all to a good end, mind you, at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home and finding things all right, though not quite the same, like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in. I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into. I wonder, said Frodo, but I don't know, and that's the way of a real tale. Take anyone that you're fond of. You may know or guess what kind of a tale it is, happy ending or sad ending, but the people in it don't know, and you don't want them to. No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did. And that was a worse place and a blacker danger even than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and

[11:31] into grief and beyond it. And the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. This is the nerdiest thing I'm gonna say all day, I think. And why, sir, I never thought of that before. We've got you've got some of the light of that in that star-glass that the Lady gave you. Why to think of it? We're in the same tale still. It's going on. Don't the great tales never end? No, they never end as tales, said Frodo. But the people in them come and go when their parts ended. And our part will end later or sooner. One of my favorite quotes, I think, from the entire corpus of the books and the films do an interesting version of it at the end of the Two Towers film, where he says that folk went on in those stories because they had something worth fighting for. And then Frodo in the movie asks him, they were holding on to something, he says. And then Frodo says, What are we holding on to, Sam? And then Sam turns and says, That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.

[12:21] I just like kind of hold back tears even as I think about that line, because it's just incredible. But the point is, he says, I don't know how this ends. I don't I don't know how the story ends, and it could end badly, and it doesn't get him thrown out of the story In the same way, your flatness in this life, you're feeling like things don't add up and it doesn't make sense, and having rough questions and dark nights of the soul is not a verdict against you. It's the stretch of the road where the light is harder to see, and the tale is not over. So let's pick up right there. Because if the if this first part is asking whether your flatness is a verdict against you, our second march is about something I find a lot more hopeful. What if the flatness can be fixed? And what if God already showed us how he fixes it in public at a party? To get there, I'm going to lean on the help of two dead Englishmen. And if fantasy novels and old essays

[13:09] aren't your thing, you probably have clicked off of this video, but try to stick with me anyway. They're only going to get us to the door. The payoff is in John chapter 2. You can check that on your own in your Bible in about 60 seconds. So the first is G.K. Chesterton, writing in 1908 in a book called Orthodoxy. Chesterton noticed something about children that every parent watching this already knows from experience. Throw a little kid in the air, and then they say, again, and so you do it again, and then they say, again, and you do it until your arms give out, and the kid is still saying it because a small child has more life in them than they know what to do with. Grown ups get tired of a thing, and children don't. Chesterton makes a turn I've never been able to shake. It's just stuck with me all these years. He writes, It is possible that God says every morning, do it again to the sun, and every evening, do it again to the moon. He says, maybe every daisy looks like every other daisy, because God has never

[14:00] got tired of making them. And then the sentence that got me, for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father in heaven is younger than we. So let's sit with what that does to the flatness we've been experiencing, because it flipped mine. I had been reading the sameness of my days as evidence that the magic had drained out of them. The same sunrise, the same drive, the same water out of the same tap. Chesterton looks at the exact same sameness and sees a father who cannot get enough of good things, standing over the world every single morning with the appetite of a four-year-old shouting, Again! The sun coming up on some random day in the middle of your week is a thing he asked for on purpose this morning, because he still loves watching it. So the tiredness in this picture belongs to us. He is still delighted. We're the weary ones dozing off and losing sight of how beautiful even the mundane things are.

[14:49] The repetition of an ordinary day might be proof of a delight in God that I didn't know how to access anymore. The second Englishman, to probably no one's surprise, is Tolkien, and in 1939 he gave a lecture that became an essay called On Fairy-Stories. If you have not read it, if you're a storyteller of any kind, read this thing. It's incredible. He asks what fairy stories, fairy tales, stories of any kind, really, even what we would call fantasy, what they're actually for. And one of his answers is a single word. Recovery, which he defines as a regaining of a clear view. And then he puts it more plainly. Seeing things as we are or were meant to see them. So who stole the clear view? Tolkien now names the thief. He says the things that we see need to be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity from possessiveness. I paused on that word, possessiveness, because

[15:38] it's exactly I think what happened to me. The minute that I decide a thing is mine and that I've got it figured out, I stop noticing it. My wife, my kids, my street, my tap full of my water. Familiarity sees says I've seen this thing before. Possessiveness says, This is mine, and both of them close your eyes and your ability to notice how wonderful they are. It's, I think, the function behind how we take good things, beautiful things, even incredible things, for granted. And Tolkien's prescription is one line. We need, in any case, to clean our windows. That's that is what a fairy story does. It takes the water and makes a river run with wine. And here's Chesterton again from the same chapter on exactly why. They make rivers run with wine, only to make us remember for one wild moment that they run with water. The story exaggerates the world so that you come back and finally see the world.

[16:26] And so now let's think about Sam again on those stairs. Same scenario where we started. He's holding a little glass of light in his hand, or Frodo is, and that light is from the oldest story he knows. And he's taking his own small, terrified, ordinary hobbit life, which has taken a much more drastic turn than he ever anticipated, and he's sitting it inside of a tale that's far bigger than himself. His own life and its meaning gets handed back to him, cleaned up, so that he can see it for what it really is. That's what I'm trying to do for myself, and it's the move I'm asking you to make as well. Now, if this is starting to sound like I'm just sort of telling you to buck up and you know cheer up and notice the flowers or something, hang on. I'm promising you I won't do that. The story that I'm about to read isn't about you noticing anything. It's about God grabbing hold of the plainest thing in the house and holding it up in front of a whole village.

[17:16] So let's get to it. John chapter 2. There's a wedding in Cana, there's a little small town in Galilee, and then the wine runs out. So at a wedding in that world, that's a family's shame in front of everyone they know. Jesus is a guest at this wedding. You've almost certainly heard the story before. But in verse 6, John gives us a detail a lot of people just skip right over. There were, moreover, there, of stone water jars, six, according to the purication of the purification of the Jews, standing, having space. for metrete, two or three What on earth is going on there? Six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Stone. Lithinai. Super simple. Those jars held wash water. The water you rinsed your hands and your cups with before you ate. The most ordinary water in the house, the kind that comes out of my tap.

[18:03] And they were made of stone for a reason. Under their rules, clay could pick up ritual uncleanness, and stone could not. So these were the dull, heavy, hardworking jars nobody at that wedding looked at twice. The closest thing again, that house had to a kitchen tap. Jesus tells the servants to fill them with water. And I want you to do the math yourself right now, in your own Bible. Okay, six jars, 20 to 30 gallons each, that's somewhere between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and eighty gallons of wine for a party that was already winding down. It is an absurd, overflowing, almost embarrassing amount. Somebody tastes it and says to the groom, You have kept the good wine until now. This did, here we are in verse 11. Essentially, this, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.

[18:51] The first one. You would have, of course, expected the first public miracle to be loud, a healing, a storm shutdown. Instead, John hands us wash water in stone jars turned into glory. And John's word for it is a sign, and a sign always points past itself to something else. So, what was it pointing at? Chesterton wrote his line about rivers and wine as a description of fairy tales. John wrote the same thing down as history. Something I missed for years about this, by the way. The wine was the miracle for one afternoon, but the sign was pointing at the water. The water was always the miracle. The wine was there for one afternoon so that you would see the water for the rest of your life. Jesus did for that village exactly what Tolkien said the old stories do. He cleaned the windows, and he did it with the plainest stuff in the whole house. So, Sam, on the stairs, what sort of tale have we fallen into?

[19:40] My second answer, and it sits right on top of the first. We've fallen into a tale with room for the dark in it, and a tale where ordinary things like water were the wonder the whole time. Where the thing you look at least is the thing God picked to show his glory through. In case it's not clear, you haven't been living a life with no miracle in it. You've been drinking the miracle with your eyes shut, not noticing how beautiful it was. Now let's pause there for just a second because something strange happened. I want to make sure you notice it. I read you a line that sounds like a fairy tale. Rivers run with wine, so we'll remember they run with water. That's the sort of a sentence you would expect in a story with dragons in it. And then we opened John's gospel and found it sitting there as plain as history. A wedding, six stone jars, a servant who knew where the wine came from. The magic and the fact turned out to be the same sentence. So let's ask this again, and I'm gonna leave it hanging. What sort of tale have we fallen into?

[20:29] Now I'm gonna show you something. This is a bottle of bourbon vanilla bean paste. I bought it at the grocery store and I paid about five bucks for it. Five bucks for a little brown bottle that I keep next to the flour. Later in this video, I'm gonna tell you what this bottle actually cost and who actually paid it. The real price is a lot higher than five bucks, and you'd never guess who paid the difference. But before we get there, I need to talk to one person watching this. You know who you are. You have questions about God that you have never said out loud. Not to your spouse, not to your pastor, not to the friend who seems to have it all figured out. You've been carrying them by yourself, and sometimes you've wondered whether having them at all means something is broken in you, in your heart somehow. So I'm gonna say this plainly with that bottle you can imagine in my hand. You're not crazy. You're not alone. Most of the people I know who love God the most have a drawer full of questions just like yours I built a short quiz for exactly this

[21:21] situation. It's called Which Lie About God is Secretly Ruining Your Life Because for a lot of us, there's one specific lie that's running the show, and just naming it changes everything. It takes about two minutes. There's no pressure for anything other than just figuring out where you need the most help. It's the first link in the description, or you can go to theoverlap.life/quiz. And I've got a lot of free resources attached to it too, if that's of any use to you. So let's get back to the vanilla. So you've got a fairy tale that turned out to be true. We've got here a five dollar bottle with a secret price. Now let me show you how you can actually get your eyes back. And I'm gonna start right here with this bottle. So first we agreed the flatness in your life is not a verdict against you, and your questions have a home. Next, we said that the water and ordinary things just like it were always the miracle, and Jesus proved it at a wedding.

[22:09] And now I want to ask one more practical question. What do you actually do with all of that on some random day in the middle of your week? And then the harder one, what do you do on the day when you can't feel any of it? There's a practice for this, and it's simple enough that I'm a little embarrassed by it. I call it a wonder audit. You take one ordinary thing, like a glass of water or a jar of vanilla extract, and you trace it back to what it actually is and what it actually cost. That's it. Where did this thing come from? We've talked about this a little bit on the past few videos, but it's so simple. Let's do it twice with those two things so you can see the shape. Start with a glass of water. Mine is a big black metal bottle. I owe it an apology. I have stood at my sink with this thing and filled it up and felt nothing. But if I trace it, that water sat in a reservoir somewhere outside my town. It went through a a plant where somebody on a night shift checked it so that my kids wouldn't get sick.

[22:58] It ran under my street outside through pipes I have never once thought about, and it came out of a metal handle jutting out of the wall at the temperature I wanted in the time it takes me to turn my wrist and with about that much effort. Most people who have ever lived on the surface of this planet carried their water. I get mine by leaning over and turning a handle. And I have functionally infinite water. More than I could ever actually drink in a day is available to me right now if I just go and turn on the faucet. So if that's the audit for water, I can already feel my window getting a little cleaner to borrow from Tolkien. Now, but what about the vanilla? Vanilla, even this vanilla, simple as it is, look at it. It's just a little jar, five bucks. Vanilla is the second most expensive spice on earth, right behind saffron. And here's why.

[23:48] The vanilla orchid opens for less than a day. If nothing pollinates it inside that window, it closes, and you get no vanilla bean. For a long time, nobody outside its native home could get the plant to produce at all. Then in 1841, on a French island called Réunion, a boy figured it out. His name was Edmond Albius. He was around 12 years old, and he was enslaved. He worked out a way to pollinate the flower by hand in that one day window with a little sliver of wood in his thumb. That trick, a child's trick, is still how commercial vanilla is grown everywhere in the world today. Then it takes about five kilograms of green pods to end up with one kilogram of cured vanilla. So every drop in that jar is a flower somebody opened by hand on the one day it was open.

[24:36] And Edmond Albius died poor in 1880 with almost nothing and almost no credit. So what did it cost? And who paid it? There's a boy's genius in my pantry and a boy's suffering. And I've been splashing it onto you know into pancake batter for years without even thinking about it. The word vanilla, in spite of this incredible story, is a word we use in our culture to describe something boring and mundane. I'm not trying to guilt you and I'm not trying to give you a history lecture. The point is that the plainest thing the most boring thing in your pantry on your shelf is packed with story and labor and gift the moment you actually look at it. That's true of water. It's true of vanilla it's true of the chair I'm sitting on it's true of the person in the next room. So there's a biblical passage that we can marry into this that turns this from being mindful of where something came from into worship of Jesus himself.

[25:26] And it's my favorite part. James 1 verse 17 says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above coming down from the Father of lights. Every single one if there's anything good and there's anything perfect it has come to you from the Father. That's it. That's the equation. And then in Psalm 104 which is a whole song about creation it credits God with wine to gladden the heart oil to make the face shine and bread to strengthen it. Again wine, oil, bread, kitchen stuff. The audit doesn't stop with Edmond Albius. It runs all the way back up the chain and ends at a person a capital P person. You trace the gift until you find the giver and then just like the last time the solution is to say thank you. That's a wonder audit. Any of you can start it tonight with whatever's on your counter but I promised you honesty as well and this is where I'm going to keep that promise.

[26:15] Some days you're going to run this audit and you're still gonna feel absolutely nothing. You're gonna trace the water back. You're gonna think about the boy and the flower, and your heart is still gonna just stay flat as a table. I know because that happens to me more than I'd care to admit. And I don't want you to hear that as failure because we already established it in the first point. You adapt. Feelings run out. That's a human nervous system thing. It's not a verdict against you. So wonder needs a backup that doesn't depend on the feeling being there. And again, the Bible gives us one, and it's older even than the Psalms. You think it's the name of a character from a Christmas carol. First Samuel chapter 7. Israel's just been rescued from the Philistines, and Samuel does something really incredible. He takes a stone, plain old rock, just like the jars with water, by the way, a Eben, as you might say, a stone, and then he gives it a name. Samuel took a stone and set it up and called its name Eben Ezer. You might say Ebenezer, for he said, till now, or as far as here,

[27:08] the Lord has helped us. You can see Ebenezer that you think of as Ebenezer Scrooge is literally two words smashed together. Eben ha-Ezer. And they mean exactly what it says. Eben, stone, ha-Ezer, of help or rescue. This is a really loaded word with a ton of history behind it. That's the whole meaning. A stone of help. You've probably sung it without knowing it. Come Thou Fount has the line, here I raise my Ebenezer, right? And that's the hymn writer quoting Samuel. Millions of people sing that every week and have no idea what in the world an Ebenezer is, or that they're singing about a rock. The thing is that the reason why we do this thing with a rock or with something like this is that a feeling goes away, but a stone stays. Samuel didn't build a monument to how Israel felt that day. He built something that would still be standing on a bad day years later, so that a person walking past it, feeling nothing, could read what they could

[27:59] not currently feel. Till now, the Lord has helped us. Up to here, God brought us. It's something that holds the memory for you. It's a memory doing the job even after emotion gives up, or when it gives out. So we should stack stones. I mean that almost literally I keep dated physical markers of the times God helped me in a journal on paper where I can go read them. And I'm gonna actually give you one of mine. One of my very favorite places in the entire history of the world is this place right here, the Maroon Bells out here in Colorado. We got up at 4:30 in the morning to go see it. Like this is at sunrise, and you can see the tops of the mountains look like they're just on fire. So I walked into that place on a brisk morning, having gotten up at 4:30 to go see these mountains at sunrise. And out of nowhere, I remembered a stretch of my life when my family was on food stamps.

[28:47] When we didn't even have enough money to do like the beans and rice and ramen diet without government assistance. I didn't enjoy the beautiful coffees I enjoy now. I had an old, probably moldy tub of Folgers that survived like two moves that I drank essentially out of desperation. We were weeks away from having our water shut off. And I stood there in that place, and I looked a lot, I looked around at my wife and my kids who were there with me, and I thought back to our house in Fort Collins and the work I get to do. And something in me said, Till now the Lord has helped us. And so before we left that place, I bent down and I grabbed a rock from that spot right there where I took the photo. And I grabbed out a notebook. This one right here that I hold against my wall right there. And I pulled out a pen and I wrote I wrote this down.

[29:35] And here I am looking at a graph paper game of battleship that I played with my son that I barely won. By guessing, I won. So that when that was the last one that I got, uh, I was able to say, I won. And my son, who actually loves dad jokes, did not groan and threaten to disown me over it. My point is, I open that book, I see this rock, I read the stone. It says he was there. It's dated. I wrote it myself on a day I could see clearly for the me who can't, other times So when you put those two practices next to each other, I think they're actually one practice stretched across time. The wonder audit is how you see today. The Ebenezer is how you keep what you saw. Today's wonder when you're able to see becomes tomorrow's stone of remembrance of how far God's brought you. The glass of water you finally noticed, the slave boy behind the vanilla, the evening in the humid air, the morning in front of the most beautiful mountains

[30:26] you've ever seen. You write those down, and they become the evidence that you hand to a future version of yourself who's gone flat again. C.S. Lewis, in a little book from 1964 called Letters to Malcolm, has a phrase for these ordinary pleasures that I've never been able to improve upon. He calls them patches of Godlight. So picture a dark stretch of woods, and a shaft of sun breaks through the trees and lands on the path. That's a glass of cold water. That's a five dollar bottle of vanilla with a child's genius in every drop. Little patches of God's own light falling into the woods of an otherwise ordinary life. The audit is how you learn to see them. The stones are how you remember where they fell, so that on the darkest part of the path you can say the light was here. I marked the spot. I remember. So here's Sam again, on the stairs, one more time. What sort of tale have we fallen into?

[31:13] We've fallen into a tale with room for the darkness in it. A tale where ordinary things like water are the wonder the whole time. And a tale you can remember on the day that you can't feel it, where simple stones of remembrance hold the line when your heart won't. The feeling comes and goes, but the tale doesn't. And even the stones remember what happened. So what can we do with all of that? Let's keep it small. Small is the whole point, really. Tonight or first thing tomorrow morning, walk to your sink and pour a glass of water. Then before you drink it, stop. Run the 10 second wonder audit we talked about Think about how delicious this water would taste to a rural king in the you know 500s AD. Think about how grateful you would be for this glass of water if you had just overcome a stomach bug and you were able to drink water again for the first time in a couple days.

[32:02] Look at the light coming through it in the window. Feel the cold in your hand. Think about the fact that it came out of a wall clean, on demand, in a world where most people who have ever lived would have walked miles for it. Ten seconds, then drink it, and I hope it's the first thing that you've really seen in a long time with clear windows. Second, I mean, look, sometime this week, open your cupboard and pick out something ordinary. I used vanilla, but pick out something on your own. Turn it over and read where it came from. Spend five minutes Googling, figuring out who grew it, or who mixed it, or how it traveled from a field on the other side of the world to a shelf above your stove. There's a real person behind almost everything that you own. And then once you've met one of them, that that cupboard is full of people. And this is another one. I mean, get an index card or open a journal. Write today's date at the top. Under it, write the line Samuel said when he raised that stone. Till now the Lord has helped us.

[32:51] Or as far as here, God carried us. That card is your first Ebenezer, your first stone of help. And the glass of water you finally saw can maybe be entry number one because it counts. It was help. It was there the whole time. It was a good gift. It was a perfect gift that came down from the Father. Then put that card somewhere that a bad day is going to find it. Taped inside the medicine cabinet. In the drawer by the bed. Because the day is coming when you can't feel any of this. And on that day, the card does the remembering for you. You just read it. So what sort of tale have we fallen into? Here's the whole answer, as plainly as I know how to say it. We've fallen into a tale with room for the dark in it. Real dark, the kind that does not just get explained away, where a psalmist can say that it's his constant companion We've fallen into a tale where ordinary things like water and vanilla were the real wonder the whole time, where the enchantment we went chasing after in movies and mountains and good books, as beautiful

[33:40] as those things are, was already sitting in a glass on the counter waiting for us to notice it. And we've fallen into a tale that we can remember on the day we can't feel it because the stones remember for us. I started this whole thing walking out of a 12 hour movie marathon into a kitchen that felt small and gray and beneath the beauty of what I'd been beholding. What I couldn't see that night was that that kitchen was essentially the Shire. It was the ordinary thing the whole epic was fighting to protect. I just hadn't really looked yet, but now I have and I think that you can too. So this video put a finger on something for you. If you're realizing that there's a version of God in your head that made the ordinary things feel gray instead of beautiful and incredible gifts. Again I built a short quiz exactly for that. It is called Which Lie About God is Secretly Ruining Your Life and it is at theoverlap.life/quiz. It takes a few minutes.

[34:28] It'll tell you which one you've been carrying and accidentally believing in a way that makes God seem less generous than he is. The link is right below. And if you want more of this there's other videos in this gratitude series waiting for you or you could even go and get a copy of the prayer journal and ask God to help you to see more clearly in your own prayers how God is at work making his will known and making his will happen on earth as it is in heaven. I mean go pour the water first and then come back and do it. And hopefully we all remember just how powerful and how beautiful things as simple as water and vanilla and rocks can be. I'll see you in the next one. Further up and further in.