Prepare for the Life You’re Meant to Live With Chaplain John Fox | A Bit of Optimism

What this episode is about

The discussion centers on the importance of preparing for the life you are meant to live, as exemplified by Chaplain John Fox, who transitioned from a successful career in finance to a meaningful role in community service. He emphasizes that pursuing passions and engaging in preparation can lead to significant life changes when the opportunity to pivot arises, highlighting the notion that current experiences can shape one’s future purpose.

Key takeaways

• Preparation is your best ally; seize serendipity by grooming your passions before they beckon.
• Leaving finance for chaplaincy reveals that meaningful careers often emerge from unexpected life detours.
• Sometimes the life you're living is merely a stopover—be ready for when your true journey begins.
• John Fox’s story teaches: success isn’t defined by your job title, but by your heart's call.
• Instead of fleeing your past, step boldly into your next chapter; preparation transforms careers into callings.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Simon Sinek (Guest) · 41 min speaking
• John Fox (Guest) · 27 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: John Fox, Community Development, Interfaith Community Development, Asylum Seekers
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Hospital Chaplaincy, John Fox, Faith, Community Development
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Faith, Hospital Chaplaincy, Spirituality
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Enneagram, Irving Berlin, Peter Drucker
5. 40:00 – 50:00: Community Development, Community Organizing, James Carse, Asylum Seekers
6. 1:00:00 – 1:07:39: Spirituality

Notable quotes from "Prepare for the Life You’re Meant to Live With Chaplain John Fox | A Bit of Optimism"

• But sometimes the life we're living is preparing us for the life we're meant to live the question is will you be prepared when the opportunity to pivot strikes john fox was he…

  about John Fox · at 0:28

• Back to church and then over the next sort of 20 about 20 years i became slowly and more quickly at times more involved in that and a big part of that was being involved in…

  about Interfaith Community Development · at 6:36

• A month and helped me through some processes of making decisions and thinking about things and that's also when i thought well i thought about going to seminary and i have…

  about Faith · at 13:24

• Jail you are a chaplain in all of these places is one of them sort of your main gig is i mean i work more hours in the hospital okay so i never intended to work in health care…

  about Clinical Pastoral Education · at 17:49

• Listen and whatever you mean by spiritual whatever gives you strength and hope and meaning if there's anything that i can do to listen to that and be with you there you're…

  about Hospital Chaplaincy · at 19:51

• Role as my goal is to make this person feel like they matter and feel seen so this is making me think so i agree with what you said and this is making me think one thing that i…

  about Community Development · at 44:02

• Our christian life our scripture story and you weave these together and set off with the people on a shared journey in a different direction because you've all changed each…

  about Community Organizing · at 45:25

• One's ever said that to me i mean i mean one of the things in this work that you realize is that a lot of people talk about religion and say i'm not religious but that almost…

  about Spirituality · at 1:01:20

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• John Fox — Person · Main guest · 3 mentions · first at 0:38
  He shares his transition from high finance to chaplaincy and how faith, community, and service shaped his vocation. His experiences in hospitals, hospice, homelessness services, and jail chaplaincy anchor the episode’s themes of meaning and preparation for life pivots.
• James Carse — Person · Referenced author/thinker · 1 mention · first at 40:47
  Carse’s finite vs. infinite games framework is used to critique endless financial goalposts and to elevate community/service as “infinite game” pursuits.
  It would never run out and i'm not moving the goalposts james cars the guy who wrote finite and infinite games a theologian okay he was a philosopher and theologian and in the…
• Irving Berlin — Person · Referenced philosopher · 1 mention · first at 31:25
  Berlin is invoked to explain value pluralism (“incommensurable goods”), supporting Fox’s stance that many human questions lack a single correct answer.
  Like what are valuable things to do in the world you know what are valuable ways of being present with and caring for each other different people have different answers it's…
• Peter Drucker — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at 37:12
  Drucker is cited for the idea that effective leadership doesn’t require work to be one’s primary source of meaning, supporting the episode’s critique of identity fused to career.
  To me when i was in this business career and i read this book by that management that guy peter drucker yeah and he said and it was called like the effective ceo or something…

Books & papers

• Clinical Pastoral Education — Book · Training pathway · 1 mention · first at 18:00
  CPE is described as the supervised residency-like training required for chaplaincy certification, shaping Fox’s skills in presence, self-awareness, and reflective practice.

Companies & orgs

• Good Samaritan Hospital — Company · Primary workplace / formation site · 1 mention · first at 18:28
  Good Samaritan Hospital is where Fox did Clinical Pastoral Education and fell in love with hospital chaplaincy serving downtown LA’s vulnerable populations.
  Intense than a medical residency but it's the same kind of model most people do it in a hospital and so i applied to hospitals i learned later you can do it in other ways and i…
• LA County Men's Central Jail — Company · Service context · 1 mention · first at 17:37
  The jail is one of Fox’s chaplaincy settings, illustrating his commitment to marginalized communities and the differences between short-term hospital encounters and longer-term accompaniment.
  At a hospital and a hospital i also do some hospice chaplaincy i have been working for six years all of this is part -time in a homeless shelter and also some in the la county…

Concepts & topics

• Hospital Chaplaincy — Concept · Core topic · 3 mentions · first at 18:21
  Hospital chaplaincy is the main arena where Fox practices spiritual care, emphasizing non-evangelizing presence, listening, and the limits of intervention in brief encounters.
• Faith — Concept · Core topic · 2 mentions · first at 13:33
  Faith motivates Fox’s vocational shift, prayer practices, and understanding of meaning beyond career success. It is also discussed as something many retain even when rejecting institutional religion.
• Community Development — Concept · Core topic · 6 mentions · first at 6:46
  Fox describes doing community development with poor communities and later critiques/contrasts it with community organizing. It shapes his philosophy of presence, mutual story-sharing, and non-fix-it service.
• Spirituality — Concept · Core topic · 2 mentions · first at 20:54
  Spirituality is discussed as widespread even among those who reject “religion,” especially in hospital contexts. Fox frames spirituality as connection to meaning, hope, transcendence, and communal practice.
• Community Organizing — Concept · Referenced framework / debated approach · 4 mentions · first at 44:29
  Community organizing is presented as a contrasting approach focused on structural change and power-building. Fox discusses tensions between organizing and development and rejects the false binary.
• Interfaith Community Development — Concept · Core background theme · 1 mention · first at 6:46
  This describes Fox’s pre-seminary service work that deepened meaning and community connection, helping catalyze his eventual vocational shift.
• Clergy — Concept · Role category (explained/contrasted) · 2 mentions · first at 4:01
  Clergy is used to define chaplaincy as clergy work outside church walls and to discuss ordination/endorsement requirements for certification.
  Either like i was i mean i grew up in the south in the 1970s and so i just grew up in a world in which everyone went to church and i didn't even know any people who weren't…
• Asylum Seekers — Concept · Service population · 2 mentions · first at 6:46
  Fox references working with asylum seekers as part of his interfaith community development involvement, illustrating his long-standing commitment to vulnerable populations.
  Back to church and then over the next sort of 20 about 20 years i became slowly and more quickly at times more involved in that and a big part of that was being involved in…
• Enneagram — Concept · Personality framework · 1 mention · first at 30:10
  Fox uses the Enneagram to explain his chaplaincy strengths/limitations (as a Type Five) and how self-knowledge reduces harmful reactivity in care.
  One thing i realized is more things about my personality that i already knew but i didn't realize and one thing that a lot of people in my context use as a personality system…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 how do you know when to walk away from the wrong path start to prepare like these are your passions do something like if you want to write join a writing group get yourself ready for when that step comes you're not going to be able to make the step because you have no preparation for it so i would say if you have some other passion do it as well like real like seriously so that you're preparing yourself to be able to do it as what you do i love that sometimes the life we're living isn't the life we're supposed to live but sometimes the life we're living is preparing us for the life we're meant to live the question is will you be prepared when the opportunity to pivot strikes john fox was he spent 25 years in high finance climbing the corporate ladder and collecting all the traditional markers of success but beneath lived a quiet ache a pull towards something more meaningful so he started doing what he thought was preparation

0:54 for the next thing even though he didn't know what the next thing was through his church he started doing community service and then the right time came he left finance to become a chaplain he wasn't fleeing his old life he was stepping into a new one and he was prepared as a chaplain he felt called to work with those who need him in a hospital a hospice a homeless shelter and a jail and talking to john reminds me that our lives are so much bigger than the thing we're doing right now this is a bit of optimism

1:34 john thank you so much for coming in this is you are one of those magical human beings who i would describe as the joy of serendipity i was at brunch with a friend sitting at the bar of a restaurant and sitting catty corner to us having brunch was you having your brunch thinking that it was going to be a nice peaceful time but for the fact you're a thrust into conversation with the two of us honestly you were so inspiring and so such a delight to get to meet i wanted to share your story and your philosophies with the world which is why you're here today so thank you for coming in you went from high finance you went from a finance career and you are now a chaplain that is not the normal career path for i would imagine either most finance people or most chaplains first of all what took you to finance let's start there sure i mean it's neither of those is as unusual as you might think uh although

2:31 a lot of my friends also thought you know you're the only person i ever did this and i'm like i'm not at all the stranger thing in a lot of ways is that i did work for 25 years in finance because uh when i graduated from college i decided to go to grad school in english but i had a math background and i didn't want to go straight to grad school because i thought i was going to be in academia for the rest of my life and i wanted to live in new york so i got a job at an investment bank in new york because that's what was in new york was things like that uh and i didn't even know what an investment bank was but they didn't really care about that like i read a couple of books because they're like we'll teach you everything you need to know they didn't really want you to have studied finance beforehand they just wanted you to be like capable of the work in whatever you know ways that they saw that i did that job for a couple years

3:21 i um applied to grad school i uh actually then spent most of the next year in paris between the job and the going to grad school because i also just wanted to do some more stuff before i went back to school so i like the intellectual challenge of the work i do like math even though i'm not doing anything like that anymore and i i it's also just when you have a job where you're being rewarded for showing competence and mastery in something then that's also rewarding in its in its own way i mean it was a little bit of an accident but it's not an accident that i really regret or didn't enjoy did you ever imagine that you would end up you know in the clergy was that ever like as a young boy or even as a young man like one day one day you know that that's where i want to go or did it did you sort of fall into it yeah no it wasn't either like i was i mean i grew up in the south in the 1970s and so i just grew up in a world in which everyone went to church

4:23 uh and i didn't even know any people who weren't like you know protestant christians until i was in high school uh i didn't like even jewish and catholic people i didn't i mean i i knew that there were people around us but i didn't actually personally know anyone because of that's what the world was like at that time church was a very social thing at that time so i didn't i don't recall having a whole lot of religious or theological thoughts but i was in a church and i liked it i thought in my 20s about going to seminary because i was really interested in the bible i was really interested in i mean i just grew up in that environment but i also thought i never wanted to be a pastor on the church staff so i thought what's the point and i i didn't i didn't do it for another like 30 years so 30 years go by uh you have this a successful career in finance i mean you were in it for 25 years you said right could you have stayed in finance like what what

5:16 was what was going on in your in your mind that you thought i'm so curious of that transition so when i was around 30 a whole bunch of things happened to me that caused me to think about what i was doing in life uh my mom got a serious cancer diagnosis uh and uh uh passed away like four years later uh i had a couple of relationships in my 20s that did not that i had more hopes for than was realized this previous picture of my life that i'd had for like a while of you know going getting a phd in english and being a professor had not worked out and i was working in something that i liked for the reasons i mentioned but that didn't see i was like is this the point of life that you just make money so you can like save for retirement and retire and go on vacation and eat in restaurants and so i i guess i had what you could call a midlife crisis although i was like 30. i thought there has to be something else

6:15 and since i had grown up in that church context and i actually was studying like religious literature religious poetry uh in grad school and had kind of hung on to a lot of those questions i thought well i know what that is maybe i'll go back and see what that's like so i didn't go to church a whole lot in my 20s i mean i didn't have some deconstructive crisis i just didn't it just really wasn't a big part of my life and so i went back to church and then over the next sort of 20 about 20 years i became slowly and more quickly at times more involved in that and a big part of that was being involved in like interfaith community development work with poor people in the bay area and with asylum seekers those were the main things and as i did that i thought okay i think when i leave this work i want to go and do that so you were doing both simultaneously but like volunteering right community

7:06 volunteering right but i thought i think that that's what i see as a like this is giving me a lot of sense of meaning uh and i did a lot of things to have more sense of meaning and community usefulness or whatever every year it was easy to say well i'm just going to make money for one more year and then suddenly in like january 2015 there was an internal reorganization in my company that was sort of sparked by some external things no one saw it coming like we we had a lot of mergers and combinations and spin outs and it was a constantly changing environment and i've had to reinvent myself multiple times but this time was it didn't seem as good to me and i felt like this was the sign that i had been waiting for that i so i decided very quickly within like two or three days of this reorganization and seeing what was going to happen okay this is the time but i didn't know what i was going to do because i had been doing this volunteering

8:04 stuff but i wasn't quite i wasn't really ready to not have a job i wasn't i didn't really want to retire and so i spent several months talking to people i talked to a career counselor but i had also started this practice the summer before as part of that religious life of something called praying the hours where you have a prayer practice where you pray at different at specific times of the day so you know some people in some traditions it's like three times a day in like islam it's like five times a day i think the the catholic priest or monastery tradition is like seven times a day i did one that was four times a day and i did use a lot of the structured material you could almost think of that like one person i know called it like priming the pump like you're reading like scripture you're reading devotional material and then there's different practices in the morning often you're doing uh prayer for

9:00 other people like intercessory prayer in the middle of the day uh a process of asking questions trying to if you have something that's going on in your life trying to uh be open to hearing something about that what you should do at the end of the day is often a kind of review of the day where did you feel most connected where did you feel most love where did you feel less connected and less love and just sort of understand that and also kind of forgive yourself uh let go of those things and go into the night and the new day in a you know a new process i want to say this again because i actually it's beautiful so the morning what was the morning uh it's mostly praying for other people so morning is for others lunchtime is for you know discernment is a word we often use uh but if something's going on in your life to create a space for openness to kind of let go of things and create a space to hear something about what you're trying to do

10:03 start for others then discernment and open an openness the afternoon was so that one was less some specific purpose so that was wherever your your heart yeah and then the and the evening was sort of a gratitude finding where there was love finally where there wasn't love sort of taking the day in the summary so you're you're you're still at the bank you're still working you you knew after two or three days this wasn't it you took the sign of the restructure to be like okay i got to figure this out you didn't want to retire and just volunteer you still wanted to do some sort of work but you sort of you started this practice much more uh conscientiously you're you're having your afford time a day prayer sessions and and and then take it from there so and then well so i started that in the summer before and i didn't know why but i had started a lot of practices to say what does it feel like to do that

10:53 a lot of people have this structured prayer practice a lot of traditions have it mine did not yeah so i was like what is it going to be like and i didn't know why and the way i saw it was and the reorganization a lot of things that had happened in my company we had seen coming they had been planned i had been part sometimes of the the planning around an acquisition or something but this time no one saw it coming because no one it wasn't foreseeable what happened it had to do with people changing their roles and in in a way that they didn't even know they were going to do and so the way i saw it was well none of us knew that this was going to happen but the way that i would phrase it is but god knew it was going to happen and so put this prayer practice in my heart because it was like you're going to need it and so i had it so the unexpected unforeseen was the sign because everything else we can prepare for we are aware but if

11:43 something unexpected happens god knew so you should you should and got me prepared got you should you should pay it pay attention to the fact that this is happening is is the sign is the message and how long were you working at the bank while sort of now changing the way you saw the world change the way you saw your life more than a year but i in the summer i after talking to all these people and doing these practices and looking preparing for change figuring out what change was going to look like yeah i was just thinking should i change to another company in this industry should i change to another industry like what kinds of things and i was praying about that and i wasn't hearing anything and then i ran into as i was also investigating these kind of community opportunities the community development it's called community economic development sector in the peace corps in some countries

12:31 in south america or in latin america broadly and so i did it i applied uh it was like a two -month process or so to apply interview and then they gave you a country you don't get to choose your country and i accepted it the next day like there was no question if i was if i got that opportunity i went to paraguay for i was there for about two and a half years uh the peace corps is typically you can extend it if you have good reasons but it's typically two years and three months and during that time i had a lot of opportunity because i was living in a in a rural village in a developing country i had a lot of time and i mean i was working but i had a lot of time and i had a lot of time to think about what came next and i also talked to some people i had what's called a spiritual director at the time that uh i met with like once a month and helped me through some processes of of making decisions uh

13:29 and thinking about things and that's also when i thought well i thought about going to seminary and i have become this i was led into this by my life of faith and practice and so i looked more into that and i i learned that half of people these days who go to seminary don't become religious professionals of any kind like i had not gone in my 20s because i thought well i don't want to be a pastor but half of people nowadays go to a lot of seminaries so that that kind of process of religious formation can inform and guide their business career their career as an artist they don't i mean i'm not even saying they don't become pastors they don't become any kind of religious professional so i thought well i'll do that and that's the place where i'll figure out the next thing that comes next uh in the context of that formation and with people who are also going through that process yeah you said when you were young you went to church because everybody went to church

14:30 and it wasn't really religious i mean obviously it was for some people it was and for some people you know it was very social for you it's very social and you like the people there's common values shared perspective on the world and so there's that community aspect um uh and and i guess some degree of predictability as well so now you join the the seminary um and then you went which state were you in when you went to seminary so i ended up in pasadena because when i was going through that process which the spiritual director helped me with another ignatian process for making decisions then i was like oh i lived in new york when i was in my 20s and i loved it it was the goal of my whole like childhood was to grow up and move to new york but then i was like after 25 years in california i'm just too california like they i thought of these two seminaries even though a lot of people would see

15:22 them as kind of different as both large urban multi -denominational seminaries that uh have underlying their religious formation have a big focus on social justice and so to me they seemed like very similar places although one is the kind of was the headline seminary of the kind of liberal mainland tradition for the 20th century and the other one is an evangelical seminary and i went to the evangelical one and when one graduates seminary do you be is that is do you like a graduate degree or are you ordained like what's the terminology when you graduate seminary well it depends on your tradition you know if in my tradition uh ordination is something that's done by a church or a denomination okay and a church within a denomination uh and seminary is an educational process okay so you got a degree yeah in some traditions seminary like catholics uh i think well so i've known a lot of people working as a chaplain in the last few years in

16:20 different traditions and in some traditions seminary and ordination are more tied together but not in mine okay uh so many people if they're not going to be pastors they never do get ordained okay so and so you are not ordained no i am because to be to go through the process of chaplaincy formation and board certification you have to be ordained or endorsed okay but for most people that's ordination because the whole idea of that process is you think that you're called to be a chaplain which is great but does anyone else think that and so it's to say there's a community of people that knows you that you have lived in mutual discernment with right for a time and they say we also believe this is what you're called to i kind of love that it's a challenge to the what we tell our kids right you can be anything you want to be and in this it says you can be anything you want to be so long as others think that

17:09 that's true too i mean i kind of like the checks and balance that goes along with that that that you think you have value to the world and the world agrees that you have value yeah what is a chaplain for those who are so a chaplain is like a clergy person who works outside of a church and so let's be clear you're not a priest or a pastor you are a chaplain at a hospital and a hospital i also do some hospice chaplaincy i have been working for six years all of this is part -time in a homeless shelter uh and also some in the la county men's central jail okay so hospital hospice homeless and prison you are a jail jail you are a a chaplain in all of these places um is one of them sort of your main gig uh is i mean i work more hours in the hospital okay uh so i never intended to work in health care but there's a process of clinical pastoral education that you have to do as part of certification

18:10 as a chaplain and most people do it in hospital hospitals have organized programs around it medicare uh pays for it's like a residency that you do it's much less intense than a medical residency but it's the same kind of model most people do it in a hospital and so i applied to hospitals i learned later you can do it in other ways and i probably should have but i worked at good samaritan hospital in downtown la in the west lake area near downtown and i fell in love with that hospital with the staff there and their commitment to serving the downtown community there's a lot of of poor people that go to that hospital there's a lot of homelessness there's a lot of addiction and overdoses there's a lot of kind of diseases of poverty like diabetes that that is not well managed and just a lot of things that so i never expected to work in a hospital and i don't think i would have stayed in a hospital

19:10 if i'd worked at more of a kind of suburban middle -class hospital because i do feel like you know like you know middle -class people need spiritual care too but just not for me like that's not what i think i'm i'm that's not the community i think i'm called to be with and so uh but working in that hospital there's in a hospital i mean hospice it's all like end of life but in a hospital that's a significant like i'd say a quarter to a third of the time and people will often say to me because i go in as a chaplain i don't necessarily use that word but they'll be like oh i'm not religious but they'll talk because i'm like i'm just here to listen and whatever you mean by spiritual whatever gives you strength and hope and meaning uh if there's anything that i can do to listen to that and and and be with you there you're definitely not allowed to evangelize in a hospital and i mean i i don't want to do that anyway but it's you'd be fired and

20:11 people will then at the end of our time sometimes people are talking to me for 15 minutes 20 minutes sometimes an hour then people will say uh oh can you pray for me and i'm like oh but so how do you do that what like uh they said they weren't religious and they're like oh i'm not religious but i definitely believe in god and they because they and they'll say things like religion is doesn't come from god it's something made up by people because so many people have been hurt by churches yeah and most people especially this is la most people grew up in a christian catholic or not catholic context but the vast majority of people and they still adhere to that context but they no longer want to participate in that community and they're like i i have my own relationship with god and i personally don't think that's the that is as as enriching and fulfilling a way to live your relationship with god

21:10 by yourself i do think that for me we need to be with each other in these things we need to do them together and we need to shape each other together in them but i don't give advice you know in these contexts so if that's what a person at this point in their life is is telling me that they want support in then that's what i'm going to do what's so interesting is all the data shows that you know religion is in decline like people are less religious but it's because the question is flawed right are you religious no do you believe in god yes you know and to your point which is people are are defining religion as the organization the church the stuff and i i'm not that's not me i'm i'm not into that and i'm not into that community for what for whatever reason but i still have my i'm spiritual i have my practice i believe in god whatever however people are defining it but to your point which is perhaps part of the challenge in our modern day and this sort

22:06 of increasing rates of loneliness is is and you're saying you're you're putting it and it's your own experience which is a belief in god should be a communal thing it is more enriching as a communal thing and and people see it sounds like even just meeting you in hospital sort of dare i say a chance encounter they're learning the value of faith by sitting with you asking you to pray for them knowing that somebody is thinking about them and willing to pray for them what a beautiful thought that to have the confidence and knowledge that somebody is praying for me we're not even always 100 sure our friends like us let alone to believe that someone is praying for my well -being that sense of care that i matter that somebody is willing to take time for me i it's a small but very powerful thought there's a little insight in there can you share a story a specific story of someone you helped in any one of those places that you work um early

23:06 when you made this transition to become a chaplain that sitting with this person you realized i made the right this is for me this is this is where god wanted me this is where i'm supposed to be yeah that's actually a good way of asking the question one thing i remember early on was a woman who was about 60 years old who had lived in another state her two daughters had graduated from college and were beginning their adult lives and she and her husband moved from this southern state to california to to la to continue their work at i mean they both had sort of secular jobs but they'd been very involved in a spiritual movement and they came here because there was a branch of it here in la and to start the next act of their lives and right after she got here she found out that she had a stage four cancer diagnosis and there was going to be no next act and one thing i learned about in in chaplaincy formation was this thing called counter transference which is basically the idea that

24:19 uh the patient is or the the client or whatever is creating things in you it's kind of the opposite of the idea that the patient is projecting things onto you it's that you your care is being created by things the patient is invoking in you and this has happened to me a number of times but my mom also she was 57 when she was diagnosed and she passed away at 61. it was like there it brought a lot for me now this was like 20 years ago with my mom so i'm not saying that this was an open wound at the at the moment but i realized there was a lot of things in b in being in that experience and i was with her for about 15 minutes when someone came in to like check her blood pressure and as something else and i just waited and then she talked to me for more than an hour and at the end she said wow i didn't even think i needed you when you came in like i i like i guess i had more to get out than i thought and

25:28 it's interesting that a lot of times when women who are around that age or even younger are thinking about the end of their life there's so many of their thoughts are about what will my husband do how will he survive and a lot much more than their fear of their own death another woman i saw that summer was younger and she actually sent her husband out of the room and he was actually really angry but she said he won't let me talk about what i want to talk about he'll say you're giving up if you're talking about the end of your life and i'm not giving up i am not giving up but i need it might happen and i need to talk about that with someone and he won't let me talk about it and it's very often when you ask what is a chaplain doing if people have families in church and whatever there's a lot of things that you will say to a person who's a stranger for a lot of reasons they don't you don't have a relationship with them that where they're trying to get

26:23 things as well you don't have to deal with being around a person after this who knows all these things about you people have even explicitly told me that i i'm glad that i won't see you again after all the things i've told you so many thoughts what was it about her that made you realize you're in the right place doing the right thing you'd made the right choice what so it's what can a stranger do that's what i didn't understand i understood that i was drawn to exploring this path but until i started doing it i was like what and then i realized oh there's no one else she can tell this stuff to yeah there's no one else who will listen to it and there's no one else who will understand it because everyone else in her life is working out their own issues with her and her husband is mainly working out the loss of her for him and that makes it difficult for him to be present for whatever's going

27:18 on with her and because she was a person who took care of other people that's why she said at the end i did i guess i had a lot to get out i didn't even know that because everything she said for the first like 15 minutes was about other people and then she started to talk about herself it's also interesting is there's a connection that the two you had i don't know if this is coincidental or if this is important but she had a whole plan for what her life was going to be until that wasn't the plan like and you said you you were put on your path in part because you thought you were going to be an academic that didn't work out the relationships that you thought you were going to have those didn't work out you lost your mom all of these expectations and plans of what the future what what you imagined the future was going to be for you for whatever reason it none of it worked even the even at work where like all of the planning and

28:11 meticulousness of what the future is going to look like and future planning and in a heartbeat it was all turned upside down that there's that connection as well which is i thought this was my plan until it wasn't i think part of the thing about being a chaplain maybe is that in my role of it i'm not trying to fix anything for anyone and a lot of times what people want to talk about is not fixable and that's why their family sometimes doesn't want to listen to them because they're a lot of times your family and people close to you and not just people close to you but anyone you talk to practically often when you tell them about the hard things in your there in your life they feel helpless and they don't like that and they they want an impulse to fix it somehow even things that are obviously not fixable like death this thought that it's so hard for people to open up about unfixable or unchangeable

29:06 things and and and it's it's very hard for people to hold space for it because it's the listener that feels powerless i don't know what to do i don't know how to help you and i guess there's a guilt associated with it which is you've come to me you're opening up to me you're sharing your darkest or deepest thoughts with me and i don't know what to do and that powerlessness or guilt damages the dynamic where do you why do you not feel powerless one thing i realized during my 15 months of this residency uh with because it's a supervised process where you do 10 hours a week of group process and 30 hours a week of like clinical time and you're with other students and a educator who's certified to do this and one thing i realized is more things about my personality that i already knew but i didn't realize and one thing that a lot of people in my context use as a personality system is called the enneagram and

30:16 i am a five which is not super common for chaplains most chaplains are two which is like a helper and which one is five so five is called an observer or an investigator and one thing so the strength of that for chaplaincy is that you're just a person like me is just really interested in learning things learning things for my own sake and independence but also just listening to people uh and i also to some extent it'll probably sound weird but i kind of don't really believe in the truth now people don't like it because obviously i'm a committed christian so in some strong sense i do believe in in the truth in some very strong sense in a lot of ways but i just very constitutionally in my personality i think almost every important question in human life there's no single correct answer to there's like a for example like what are valuable things to do in the world you know what are um what are valuable ways of being present with and caring for each other different people

31:25 have different answers it's kind of like isaiah berlin talked about the incommensurable goods and so meaning that there's no way we're going to find some system of good and virtue that is uh universal to all people that there are good virtues ways of life ways of being present in the world ways of caring for each other ways of improving our community that are just so different from each other that they can't be put on the same scale so and this is where people often get into conflicts like uh i mean one example that i learned about when i was taking a class on islam and we were reading about you know the western idea during some of the like that certainly afghanistan but i think also other wars after september 11th that we're liberating the women in these societies from the patriarchal structure of the societies and i was reading some of these like islamic feminist authors which is it's not a

32:28 feminist is almost the wrong word because we think of western feminism because what they were basically saying is okay we agree with you that there are elements of our society that are patriarchal and we want to talk among ourselves about how to be liberated from it but we do not want you to do it for us by killing our men and and we don't want the liberation that you want so i think that i mean that example really struck me i don't know a whole lot about that topic i read some of this stuff but what i mean is we sometimes look at other societies and we judge uh ways that they are organized around value yeah there's an ethnocentric uh uh perspective and we're like western individualism and materialism is the best way of of reaching human flourishing right and we can't conceive of a system that doesn't support individualism as leading to human flourishing but i want to i want to pull on that

33:22 string that the because if i look at your story where you knew even when you in finance like that there's you said like you worked you made money you liked it not because you're doing any social good you like the people you work with these this is what you said at the beginning right give or take yeah and at some point you realize this can't be this can't be what life is just like work make money work make money like this there's got to be more to it than this and you were doing this volunteer work which you found more fulfillment and now you've completely committed your life to what i would argue is a life of service and though you served a little and made a lot of money before you make a little bit of money and you serve a lot now and i guess the first question i have is are you more fulfilled now than you were for 25 years in finance yes so i have thought about that uh for in some different ways one way

34:20 that's interesting to me is i met a person uh a few years ago that we didn't know each other at all but we were having very personal conversations uh once a week and we got to know each other well over the course of a couple of years and he said to me in one of the early conversations learning about what i was doing he said wow you really like to help people and i was like wow i i just would not describe it that way like i don't think i'm doing this work because i really want to be a person who helps people and or because i want to help you like i just didn't that's not a description i would apply to myself i did this work because i felt like this is the kind of world that i wanted to live in and this is the kind of community that i wanted to live in and because it made me feel more whole and i didn't even i just didn't think about it as self -sacrificing service and i still don't i don't think service has to be self -sacrificing and that's part of i think

35:26 that's part of the problem that people think they like in order to serve you have to sort of suffer or give something up but and and you only you can answer this which is the bankers you work with the finance people you work with the analysts you work with you know were they happy with were they like this is what life is supposed to be or could you see that there was a that this was this had a time frame that they too would come to some sort of realization that there's got to be more to life than this some people were especially some of the most senior people were got a huge amount of reward from being extremely successful in a very competitive field and being extremely well rewarded for that were they happy so i i mean that's you know i i don't know because those people i knew them in a sense well and spent time with them uh but i wasn't really part of their like social world or whatever and very few of them lived in california they were mostly

36:32 in new york or london but most people i knew if you ask them what makes life meaningful their their work and the reward of their work would be a way of like other things were the most meaningful things in their life very often family was the most meaningful thing but family in the context of a community a lot of the time but also people had hobbies and that were very meaningful to them but you have to pay your rent was the view that a lot of people honestly had and it was a really eye -opening thing to me when i was in this business career and i read this book by that management that guy peter drucker yeah yeah uh and he and he said and it was called like the effective ceo or something and he said there's no personality or formula for being an effective ceo he said i've met people where this is the most important thing in their life i've met people where this is how they pay their money and their hobby is the most important thing in their life

37:34 and they would never say that they get meaning from this job and they're highly effective because they have oriented their organization around meeting their objectives and one of their objectives is to have a lot of money in financial security and they know that's why they're doing it and for me that wasn't enough but it was a it was a significant part of it was not being financially because i didn't grow up in like a really well -off family and i grew up in a family with like a decent amount of anxiety around money like we weren't super poor but and i didn't want to live that i just didn't want that which is part of the reason that i worked in an industry that paid a lot of money was because i didn't want to live with economic anxiety financial goal setting is uh a series of finite games where once you reach one goal you know the person who wants a million who makes a million wants three the person who makes three wants five the person who makes

38:30 10 wants 20 the person who 20 makes 50 that's how it goes it's a series of moving goal posts yes that's why i had to get kicked out and and and and what i know from my work is that's not an infinite game that's a series of moving goal posts which always feels like it's never enough it always feels like um you're never fulfilled you're never satisfied and for those who uh rationalize that you know gotta pay the rent like holy cow how much is your rent but more importantly what happens when you have to leave work at some point if your whole identity and reason for being is the goal setting the paying the rent whatever however you want to say it i love the game dot dot dot but when that is removed then what and i've seen so many people and usually the more senior the more successful the more i see this obviously which is they're either very bored because they're good at it like it was exciting at the beginning but they have fear of change they

39:35 don't know what they're going to do next or their whole identity is wrapped into this thing and when they have to leave literally identity crisis is the thing i know this one ceo who big ceo big company blah blah blah and he he left and he was talking to a friend this big fancy party that he would go to every year and he wasn't invited and he says to his friend you know uh did you get your invitation and the guy goes yeah of course he goes i didn't get mine i i wonder if i got lost it never occurred to him that they were never ever inviting him to the party they were inviting the ceo of this company to the party and the quote unquote his invitation went to his replacement you know the next guy it no it didn't occur to him that he's not invited and the and i and to see him go through this crazy identity crisis because he'd so intertwined his in his entire reason for being with this job that he had so people who truly like family community hobbies

40:32 anything other than this something that truly is infinite i could do this forever and it would never run out and i'm not moving the goalposts james cars the guy who wrote finite and infinite games a theologian okay uh um he was a philosopher and theologian and in the mid -1980s defined these two types of games finite games and infinite games finite games baseball football known players fixed rules agreed upon objectives you know infinite games known and unknown players changeable rules and the objective is to perpetuate the game i got to meet him before he died and i asked him very simply to like how did you how'd you come up with that i mean that's a truth you know that happens every hundred years that somebody comes up with a truth rather than just a theory i just noticed there's a picture of me and him right there and he said when his kids would play ping pong there was which is a finite game there's a winner there's a loser there was

41:26 always fighting at some point and there's always accusations of cheating at some point when they would draw or play with lego kids would come and go go for hours it was always quiet people would join they would leave they would come back again because there was no goal or end and he realized that we were so obsessed with finite games we're so obsessed with zero sum we're so obsessed with winners and losers you know that we've completely forgotten the joy of play and i would argue that hobbies family community service or play which is there's no end state and there are finite goals within obviously obviously but the satisfaction comes from the the i mean you go in you come out you talk to some people you miss other people but there's a there's an intense joy that comes from helping stay in the game being in the game you know you the term community keeps coming up as we talk and and the feeling seen and i and i go back to what what you said before which

42:37 i found the thing that i've i'm taking away from this conversation with you which i find overwhelmingly powerful which is that somebody sees me not likes me not knows me right but somebody sees me and wants to pray for me because these aren't your friends these aren't your family because we usually think you have to fall in love with someone or have a deep lifelong relationship before i matter enough that somebody would care about me and pray for me but that somebody just sees me for who i am as a human being and is willing to take time out of their very busy day to pray for me i find overwhelmingly powerful and turns on its head the notion of what it means to feel seen which is deeply understood which is not really what it is mm -hmm yeah i mean so i do people feel seen when they sit with you and though you can't solve their problems and and and and and this is what i'm learning which is your ability to let

43:46 go and accept that i can't fix i can't change and the reason you have no frustration and the reason you have no guilt is because you it seems from from the time we're talking it seems that what you have defined your role as my goal is to make this person feel like they matter and feel seen so this is making me think so i agree with what you said and this is making me think one thing that i struggled with i was working in community development in the peace corps and i i have been working in community development although not necessarily using that name before uh in with poor people in the bay area and like i said also asylum seekers but that was a little bit different and i learned later and i took a couple classes on community organizing and that there's kind of a war in between community organizing people and community development people community organizing people say to people who are working in community development what's the difference so one is you're you

44:50 go into a community and you uh listen to people to learn what's going on and you walk alongside them in participation and that's organizing or development okay and so the idea is and also kind of christian community development idea is that you go and be present with people and you you live in their community and you learn their stories and they learn your story because you're actually there you're not just there as an outsider or as a helper or fixer and then you in the kind of christian version you take those two stories and the third story of like our our our christian life our scripture story and you weave these together and set off with the people on a shared journey in a different direction because you've all changed each other and community organizing is trying to address structural problems and organize people so that they can address problems that can't be addressed in that way and what they say can be this

45:52 is a kind of cartoon but they can say community development people are just putting an endless series of band -aids on wounds that will be inflicted over and over again and community development people can say to community organizing people you're just another form of colonizing conquest where you come in and save people and fix their problems that's so disempowering like and the a big part of the international community like international community development called in that name in like the mid -20th century was you go to into people's communities and you're like you either say one of two stories you all lack of resources you lack knowledge money technology whatever it is we have them we'll give them to you well that's certainly not how europe developed that's not how the us developed where some aliens came and gave them all the things they were lacking and it's so disempowering to people to be

46:45 like you just lack and we're going to give it to you the other story is you're helpless victims of systems of injustice and we will work together with you to to remove the injustice well that's also extremely disempowering to people and i think for me i accept you're not necessarily going to change systematic injustice by being present with people but i just can't do that other thing i just i just want to be with people even if it's not as effective and my professor of community organizing in seminary said that's a false choice like you don't have to accept these false choices and like we don't have to decide we only organize one like organizing or development is not a binary system you have to pick one yeah that we need to do both and we need people who do both or or neither uh well this was a class on community organizing so it wasn't about people who don't do anything what have you learned about yourself since you became a chaplain i guess i would

47:47 say some are just the way i think about helping people with their spiritual and faith questions but that's kind of almost that's not secondary well it it is because it's made me think about the way i understand those questions in my own life and meaning but i also think one thing that i learned in the the residency was that my my observer investigator type one of the strengths of that is that it it makes you genuinely interested in people it makes people feel like you listen to them and you're not judgmental and uh often does make people feel that because of that you are able to be present and support them and help them even without trying but the downside of that personality type is that i'm not very in touch with my feelings and i realize that more and more going through that process and being with people who are in a different situation it caused me to look back in my life and realize i don't know what i feel about something when it's happening it's often hours

48:48 or even the next day and like i would leave a movie for instance and people would be what did you think about such and such or what do you think about that movie and just to be social i would often just make something up or like i go to an art museum and someone would say what was your favorite part of it i would have no idea i mean one time i went to the african -american museum in expo park with a friend who i've known for decades and then afterwards we were having dinner with her partner a few hours later and i talked about how it had been a really powerful experience because of these things my friend got really mad and said you didn't tell me that and i was like because i didn't know it until just now like i didn't know what i was feeling when i was there and so the problem is i have the same feelings as other people and they influence how i care for people but i don't know what they are and so one thing that helped me and one

49:34 of my closest friends in that process who i'm still friends with she's a hospital chaplain she's very different from me uh she and she said it's all head when we're talking about these things with you because this is a group formation process it can be brutal it can be extremely brutal part of it because people are like taking you apart and telling you what they see and you have to write these narratives of pay of like patient contact and then people like why'd you do that and i noticed they said that and you didn't pay any attention to it but then you brought up this other topic things like that that you're like uh and she said it's all head and i want to know what where's your heart in this where's your like what what are you feeling about this and she said because i can't trust someone unless i know their heart and i was like oh that's so interesting for me because one of the frustrations we are good friends but one of the frustrations with her was

50:31 that she couldn't explain why for things and so for me and i was like see i can't trust people you can feel anything and i can't trust people until i know why why is that an okay thing to feel why is that the right thing to feel you wanted more head and she wanted more heart she's she's bleeding heart it's on her sleeve at all moments inability to explain you can understand but maybe you don't feel in the moment right or the problem is the biggest problem is that i do feel but i don't recognize it and it's influencing what i do and so one of the things that i tried to do i'm never going to fix this problem in the sense that i don't believe you can fundamentally change your personality yeah uh and but i do think you can live healthily or less healthily into the personality that you have that's what you can do and one of the things i learned is to pay more attention to my body because when i feel my chest tightening when i feel things like that happen when

51:25 i feel my breathing changing then i'm like something is happening and it's gonna affect the way i am with this person and i better slow down and make some attempt to understand what's happening oh this is so magical you know i i'm been accused of the same as you living too much in my head and and i remember a friend of mine asked me how do you feel i said well i'm tired and i'm a little frustrated and you know and she goes those no i asked you how you feel not if you got enough sleep you know like how do you feel feel fine that's not a feeling fine is not a feeling and i realized how inarticulate i was to explain a feeling and so then she asked me things tell me how you feel below the neck and i was like what like i'm supposed to tell you a word that captures whatever you know and she said no i want you to explain your physiology you know and i was like and you use these terms that i've never used before like

52:27 i can feel my breath shortening i can feel my heart pounding i can and like what am i supposed to do with those things how do i process those things and i think for someone who's learning to understand their feelings not to try and label the feeling per se that comes a little more that comes that takes a little more skill and comes a little later but to recognize one's physiology in the moment and just say i don't know what this is i don't label it but i better pay attention this is a thing uh is such a good lesson you did say however that you have people that you work with clients patients uh that there are some that you just walk away and cry that's immediate oh yeah yeah i mean it it is but i mean there's times when we encounter such a fundamental human tragedy that we just feel overwhelmed you know by like the person who's in their 20s who said i feel like my life is over almost before it began the person

53:34 can't see where they can go is your job to help them see that it's not over well it's definitely not in the hospital because one of the things that people have to realize trying to help people in the hospital is you have to be very careful about intervening because you're going to leave that person yeah you can't go into a room and intervene in someone's life and walk out of their life forever if you are in a hospice situation or to some extent in the jail and certainly in the homeless shelter you are committing to be there with them on their journey and then once you get to know them you can risk pushing them but you cannot do that in a hospital and that's the great danger like this woman that i was just talking about one day she came back and she just seen someone who had had a baby and had was giving it up and so after the baby was born and they took it to the nursery or whatever the nurse said you need to see this baby and she's like i don't

54:27 want to see it i'm giving it up i don't want to see it and the nurse was like you have to you will regret this for the rest of your life if you don't see it and this friend of mine who's the chaplain was there and she was telling me she didn't say that because i mean by this time we've been doing this for like a year and she was like not going to do something like that but it tore her up to the idea that a person would not want to see that baby when she was telling me the story and there was a huge amount of emotion in the story about what this woman was doing and what she thought about it but she also had to kind of try to help the nurse to not force things on this patient to let go and that and i don't blame the nurse but this is what you mean about truth like there's no right or wrong here though we all think that's true you know though though many people have already formed in their head there is a

55:13 right and a wrong that's true the reality is if we're really really really honest with ourselves is there's no truth here in that one yes that i think is me thinking that i that's what i thought so i finally said to my friend because it was very intense for her and this was our job to process with each other so that's why i was listening to the story but i was like what's why is this so important to you like what's going on and she looked at me and she said because i'm a mom yeah and i knew her like story of those things and i was like oh see this is where the one of the ways in which we're so different from each other yeah you know because i just don't get that immediate emotional and the right and wrong in the same way comes from our own our own story yeah she was also certain that this woman this young woman would would regret for the rest of her life i was not certain of that but i also wasn't there yeah so so fascinating i i

56:08 just have a couple more questions i could talk to you forever can you tell me another story of a person you've been with helped served listened to that um really captures the the joy of the service the joy of this life that you've chosen well i i mean one but i already told is the story of that woman that in my first few months in the hospital where i did feel like because of the combination of circumstances of our overlap and stories but you but you work with people where there's no overlap and i mean more often there's less there's no overlap but you still get yeah satisfaction and belief that this is the right calling yeah i mean one thing i'll say is because i'm in so many contexts where people had abuse and uh like family violent family trauma so i know that i know like uh child abuse from personal experience and it wasn't as severe as what a lot of people and you know i mean i mean but just once i said to a friend of

57:11 mine when i was talking about other people sharing their stories with me because they're often very difficult stories to share and i was like well i mean i i it took me a long time to acknowledge and say that i was abused as a child but you know at least i wasn't like sexually abused which is the story that people were sharing with me and she said that's the nicest thing you ever said about that person and i was like wow like and you know like those stories that we tell about these are our own stories i'm not really talking about other people in the situation in my family i'm talking about what i remember and experienced and was shaped by and this was a long time ago and so i've had a lot of time and training and and some amount of therapy and stuff it's not again an open wound right now but i do think i'm in a position to listen to people's stories almost everyone i know has experienced trauma like i said family also being really really hurt by a

58:14 church and i think understanding what people are talking about there is really kind of essential to having people believe that you're really hearing them now could a person who didn't experience is are there any people who don't have any trauma in their life i don't know you know uh so probably not i i mean i don't know so but like dealing with that in your own way so what i would say is people have shared with me these i mean it's a little bit difficult for me to tell the detailed story because the people that have shared these stories with me are people that it was longer in most cases and uh you know so the the details how do you listen to the stories without filtering it through your own because we said before one of the advantages you have is you can listen to someone's story without wanting to fix them or feel the guilt or feel powerless you know all of these things that make us bad listeners which is we are involved in the story with

59:16 the person we care about or love like we are we are a character in that story which makes being uh the ability to simply hold space you know i'll give a silly example you know my girlfriend is telling me how she feels about the relationship and i'm getting angry because she's saying things that are triggering me and making me feel guilty or making me feel like i'm a bad boyfriend she's just telling me how she feels about the relationship it's all i have to do is hold space for her but i cannot disconnect myself from the fact that i'm involved in her experience and she's not accusing me of anything but i'm feeling guilty right so that makes me it makes it very difficult for me to be a good listener in that situation i wish we all could learn to do what you do to have somebody in our life who maybe we do know who can again just make us feel seen let go of the guilt let go of the the need to intervene do you know who prays for you

1:00:18 yeah that's an interesting thing i mean people do pray for me i have sometimes asked people to pray for me but i grew up in a context where we didn't do so much of that and so i don't really ask people to pray for me that often why not uh because it's just not it's one of those things like we like we grow up in a certain context around practices and we can change them like mother theresa once said i don't pray for results i pray for faithfulness and i feel like that is faithfulness is a result anyway so it's like maybe a distinction that doesn't exist but a lot of people pray for good outcomes and it's just never been my practice so i don't have to ask people but but people have prayed for me recently some people have said i'm going to pray for you for this like i was applying for a job and i wanted to get it and they said i'm going to pray for you to get that job and i'm like oh good because i can't pray to get the job

1:01:09 but you can pray for me because it's an outcome last couple questions um what would you say to someone who says religion is outdated i mean no one's ever said that to me i uh i mean i mean one of the things in this work that you realize is that a lot of people talk about religion and say i'm not religious but that almost nobody doesn't have some kind of spirituality that is connected with something uh like immaterial transcendent storytelling uh people can't survive without some connection to something larger than themselves even if they think that they're living for themselves that's what i would say so maybe the terminology is outdated but the fundamentals are alive and well yeah and also i mean even though you know traditional religion is shrinking in the united states i'm not sure that religion that that kind of faith is shrinking in the united states and certainly even the traditional religions like christianity

1:02:09 is still growing in the world yeah uh and i don't just mean numbers i mean percentage -wise in the south in the global south as someone who changed their life in your 30s how do you know when to walk away from the wrong path well the easiest thing is when i left grad school because i'm like this isn't going to work that i just can't do it leaving the uh business world 25 years later was more like preparing myself like this i have said this to friends who are talking about having other passions and things and just continuing to work for a while more for more money uh start to prepare like these are your passions do something like if you want to write join a writing group that like do it get yourself ready for when that step comes because if you don't you're not going to be able to make it you're not going to be able to make the step because you have no preparation for it so i would say if you have some other passion do it as

1:03:04 well like real like seriously so that you're preparing yourself to be able to do it as what you do and that's interesting because you when the change happened at the at work that was unexpected you made the decision to leave two or three days later but you didn't actually leave until a year later you spent a year preparing for leaving well i also spent 10 years doing community work and developing my own relationship with my church and things like that yeah i love that that to use to use our experiences even though unhappy ones is and to understand preparation before you make a leap like put the parachute on before you jump pack the parachute yourself learn how to pack a parachute do you have any life hacks little tricks that you've that help you in your work in your life one thing i've realized recently but i don't know if this is something that people can do is i also have days where i wake up and i don't really have a lot of

1:04:04 will to live and the way that i uh survive that is that well it's not really a life hack it's just i tell myself this will end and it does but that's not true for everybody some people have like severe long -term depression and it won't end but i think sometimes people give in to shorter term things and you can't necessarily work your way out of those things so much as as have the hope of knowing that it just can't last forever i guess the main thing but i'm just a person who likes to learn and so i feel like you can learn anything if you work on it every single day john thank you so much i literally could talk to you for hours yeah the same i i i've learned i this this idea uh and i think that you can genuinely see someone who you don't know just because you have interest in them and curiosity and you want them to feel feel feel heard and be seen and the power of i i said as i i've said it already multiple times you know to give someone the peace of

1:05:16 mind or confidence that somebody is thinking about me and i i realize how simple it is to do for people and we don't have to do it for strangers we can do for our friends you know we're we're all so busy and so distracted and you know the whole conversation is social media and addiction and like going down rabbit holes and blah blah blah and it's all true and then just every now and then you know like i've done this i'm guilty of this where i don't call a friend because i'm like ah i need to talk to them i always talk to them for an hour i don't have an hour okay i'll do it tomorrow i don't have an hour i'll do it tomorrow months go by yeah and i've realized that what what this this very small notion of someone is saying a prayer for me not devoting their life to me but somebody saying a prayer for me is as simple as like when i'm getting in the car and i think about this person and i can pull

1:06:02 out my phone and text them and just say i just want you to know i'm thinking about you which is somewhat equivalent to i said a prayer for you you know or and something i've also done which is i'm i i'm i'm literally in the car i'm arriving where i'm going in five minutes you know i can see it and i'll and i have five minutes i've got nothing i'm listening to a song and i think of a friend i haven't talked in a while i literally dialed the phone and i say hey i i'm i'm in the car i'm literally going to pull up to where i'm need to be in five minutes but i just wanted to call and say hi i've been talking forever and just hear your hear your voice for four minutes before i have to park and have a four minute conversation and it's it's the best and i'm realizing the value of these very small gestures that have outsized impact you know in your work it's i'll say a prayer for you i will pray for you and and for

1:06:57 the rest of us you know to to do that just to let somebody know that they exist and that they matter it's like the greatest gift we can give someone yeah thanks so much yeah i'm so grateful thank you so grateful a bit of optimism is a production of the optimism company lovingly produced by our team lindsey garbenius phoebe bradford and devin johnson subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts and if you want even more cool stuff visit simonsynic.com thanks for listening take care of yourself take care of each other

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Prepare for the Life You’re Meant to Live With Chaplain John Fox | A Bit of Optimism"?

Simon Sinek (Guest), John Fox (Guest).

What is "Prepare for the Life You’re Meant to Live With Chaplain John Fox | A Bit of Optimism" about?

The discussion centers on the importance of preparing for the life you are meant to live, as exemplified by Chaplain John Fox, who transitioned from a successful career in finance to a meaningful role in community service. He emphasizes that pursuing passions and engaging in preparation can lead to significant life changes when the opportunity to pivot arises, highlighting the notion that…

What is mentioned in this Simon Sinek episode?

16 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including John Fox, Hospital Chaplaincy, Faith, Community Development, Spirituality, Clinical Pastoral Education. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Prepare for the Life You’re Meant to Live With Chaplain John Fox | A Bit of Optimism"?

The episode runs 1 h 8 min; the transcript is about 12,784 words in 70 timestamped sections.

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