When the Fire Falls

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger. Bryan Broome is not able to join us this time, but hopefully next time.

We’ve been talking about Elijah and his contest with the prophets of Baal, and his relationship to King Ahab and Queen Jezebel and their servant Obadiah. When we left off last time, we had just seen the Lord show up Baal in a magnificent way – fire from heaven, very dramatic – in response to a simple prayer where Elijah is simply telling God who he is and what he’s promised, restating the covenant that’s been established already, not vain repetitions the way the servants of Baal prayed, if you can call it prayer, but simply talking to God. Everything is hunky-dory now, right? All the prophets of Baal convert and Israel returns to the Lord?

Actually, the prophets were executed.

Okay, so all the bad prophets have been executed. Everybody else returns to the Lord, right?

They say they do, yeah, absolutely. “We’re on board, yeah.”

So then Elijah begins a really prosperous state-sponsored ministry, right?

Yeah, because the state should do that. Well, actually in Israel the state should have done that.

It sounds good. I mean Jezebel, obviously faced with superior firepower, would realize she had a puny god and would convert, and Ahab, seeing all the people yell, “The Lord is God!” – the people have obviously converted because they’ve all walked down the aisle. They’ve all raised their hand. “The Lord, he is God.” What more do you need? And Elijah ran in the power of the Spirit before Ahab’s chariot all the way back to Jezreel, where the summer palace was.

It sounds really great, and it may have been greater than we sometimes give it credit for, but Elijah is coming down from a mountaintop experience, and if there’s a simple rule in Christianity it’s “after the mountain is the valley.”

After every new creation there’s a new fall.

Yes, until the end. So Elijah arrives in town, Jezebel hears about all this, and she is unimpressed. She sends a message that amounts to, “The gods do so to me and more also if I don’t make you like one of these prophets by tomorrow.” In other words, “You are so dead,” and that’s enough to break the bubble.

Rather than saying, “Well, she’s just sour grapes and she has no leverage and the people are with me,” Elijah concludes, “It’s all lost. It’s all a failure. Nothing worked. This whole covenant arrangement that God set up at Sinai has absolutely failed because, hey, I was there and I did my part, and God seemingly did his. The people are just beyond help, so it’s time to tear up this contract.”

So partially in fear, largely in depression, he runs. He runs all the way through Israel the northern kingdom, all the way through Judah the southern kingdom, where he theoretically would have been safe, drops off his servant there at Beersheba at the bottom of the kingdom, and then goes out into the Arabian wilderness and sets out toward Mount Sinai, toward Mount Horeb. He falls under a juniper tree and asks God to kill him.

So we’ve gone through the heights of elation and spiritual excitement to utter depression and feelings of complete failure. “God is not in this. The gospel just failed. Why am I even in this ministry anyhow? God, just end it. Take me home. I’m done.”

This is the point where a lot of us good Calvinists would sit down and pull out Romans 8:28. “All things work together for good. Remember the sovereignty of God.” Yes, he did need to understand that, but he needed more perspective, and honestly he needed a nap and some food.

Ain’t that the truth!

Sometimes you don’t need to sit down with someone whose life has collapsed and start lecturing them with theology. Sometimes you need to give them a hug, give them something to eat, and put them to bed, and God does this twice for Elijah. The food is supernatural, and on the energy of that food he goes 40 days and 40 nights into the wilderness until he comes to Sinai, the mountain of God. In fact, he comes to the very cave where Moses had once stood and seen the glory of God.

He’d asked to see all of God’s glory and God said, “Yeah, that’s not happening, but I’ll show you my backside. I’ll show you a little bit of my glory. You go in this cave, I’ll put my hand on you and cover you up until I’ve passed, then you can see something and I’ll proclaim the name of the Lord.” The majority of the manifestation was God simply proclaiming his name in some detail. So that’s where Elijah has come.

It’s significant that it’s Sinai because he could have gone to the temple and talked to God. He’s going all the way back deliberately. He’s walking back through Israel’s past to where it started, not all the way back to Ur of the Chaldees, but all the way back to this covenant arrangement, this administration under Moses, and he’s come there to tell God, “It didn’t work. As your covenant lawyer, I’m tearing up the contract. Just forget it.”

Along the way he has devised a speech. This is clear because he twice says it in exactly the same words, so he’s been thinking about this, and it goes like this. God says, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

And he said, I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant [point 1], thrown down thine altars [point 2, the way we approach God], and slain thy prophets with the sword [point 3, they’ve rejected the word of God], and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.

“We’re down to one, it’s me, and they are in the process of systematically breaking the covenant through all five points.” Rather than argue or lecture him, God says, “Go stand out on the mountain,” and then some very awesome things happen – awesome in the real meaning of the word, awe-inspiring.

Behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind.

The tempest. The wind is so strong that it’s knocking down rocks and ripping them to pieces. That’s a pretty powerful tornado, hurricane, or whatever it was – a tempest.

And after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake.

The whole mountain shakes, and probably more smashing of rocks and such.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire.

The whole mountain is ablaze. It said the Lord passed by, but the Lord was not in it. What we’re to understand is that there is indeed a visible manifestation of God’s power. God in that sense is passing by.

God is everywhere. Of course, we have to keep remembering that. God is not a localized deity who is more here than there, but his unusual activity can be more here than there. His honoring of promises or curses can be more here than there at a particular time.

Some things stand out against the background of his providence, so he was there in that sense that he was doing something nifty, something awe-inspiring, something tremendous – special effects beyond anything Elijah had ever seen. And yet, as for God’s spiritual power being at work, his communication to the heart, Elijah hearing his voice that wasn’t there in all of these things - and then we’re told after this “a still small voice.”

It was not a thunderous voice, as when God spoke from Sinai the first time, not a voice that could reach two million people as some kind of cosmic sound system, but a still quiet voice that probably only Elijah would have been able to hear, had anyone else been around, very quiet, and yet his reaction is very different.

We’re not told what he did in response to the others. Probably huddled in fear and stared around with wide eyes, like most of us would do. But we’re told –

And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out and stood in the entering in of the cave.

He stands in awe before God. That voice, whatever it said to him at that point, touched his heart, showed him the fear of God, and registered on a spiritual level.

God simply says, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” yet again, and Elijah answers with the same words –

I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts because the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away. And the LORD said unto him, Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus.

And he gives him three chores we’ll talk about in a bit.

God is not interested in hearing his complaints, his rehearsed speech, and Elijah still has not had time to process it, so here’s something else to talk about. When we or our friends fall into great depression, despair, worry, or fear, sometimes you just have to let what you said sit there for a while, and that’s frustrating because you’ve explained it clearly. You’ve pointed out the theological truth. You’ve told them how they need to respond and what they need to do.

It’s crystal clear to you, and they’re sitting there like an Eyeore, “Mmm, I don’t know. I’m not sure.” You want to slap them, but that’s not what God does. He just says, “Okay, you’re still saying the same thing. I’m done here. You’ve got work to do. Here’s the job description. Go do it.” He doesn’t try to reason anymore with Elijah. He lets his Spirit and time do the work in his heart.

We need to look at what is going on here in terms of these special phenomena. First of all, the obvious application is that Elijah had called fire down from heaven and it came. Well, he’s seen fire here and more. When he saw the fire fall and he saw all the people respond, his first thought would be, “Well, that’s it. This is a miracle and it’s convinced everybody and they’ve all believed. They’ve all repented. They said they have.”

But what he saw on Sinai is that God’s not in the fire, or in our language God is not in the special effects. Was it from God? Most certainly. Was it miraculous? Most certainly. Was it a divine message? Most certainly. Did people get excited? Absolutely. Did it change their hearts? Well, in the long run we see no, or at least not much.

Maybe some people were moved, but it would be by the message, not by the mere fact that they saw something extraordinary, and this is what Elijah needs to come to terms with. It is not external phenomena or argument or reasonings or laws or rules or rituals or special effects that changes the human heart.

Man is fallen in sin. He’s dead in trespasses and sin. His heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Every imagination or thought of his heart is only evil continually. Despite the fact that he’s made in the image of God, that image is so corrupted that if you throw the natural man a piece of truth he will corrupt it, pervert it, twist it, rewrite it, redesign it. He will turn God’s greatest revelations into idolatry.

Kind of like the bronze serpent.

Yeah. “Here is an image of Christ,” and they end up offering incense to it, or the rich man in hell. How much more evidence do you need that God is real, exists, and hates sin than being in hell?

“But really he needs to come into my classroom and speak to me right now in order for me to believe in him.”

There’s the old story of the professor who stands before the class and says, “I have this glass here and I’m going to drop it. If any of you really believe in God, pray that it won’t break. Any takers? Any takers? Any takers? Ha! See? You don’t believe your God can intervene.”

In that story, one young man does stand up in the back and says, “I believe that. I’m going to ask God right now to make it not break.” It’s a short fall. It’s going to break.

Well, in this case, so the story goes at least, the professor drops the glass, it catches on his robe, and tumbles hopelessly to the floor without breaking, and the whole class starts singing Amazing Grace.

“I’ll take Things That Didn’t Actually Happen for $1,000, Alex.”

And even if it did, so what? That doesn’t mean the professor was convinced. He blew it off, and the class would, too. The class would afterward say, “Wasn’t that a neat thing that happened? Wow. How wonderful, a little blip in the universe that I got to see.” It would not change anything. God does have a sense of humor and sometimes he does do things like that just to show up our ignorance.

There’s another story that ends a little differently. It’s set in the west. A preacher is preaching and some guy in the crowd begins heckling and says, “Well, where’s your God? Bring your God down and I’ll take him on right now,” and the preacher says, “You know what? When I drove into town there was this little kid in the way in front of my wagon, and he started lifting his fist and saying, ‘Mister, want to fight? Mister, want to fight? Come down and fight me.’ You know what? I didn’t fight him. I drove on.”

God is not obligated to prove anything, and here’s the thing. If God were to merely limit himself to externals, even God couldn’t prove anything, because he’s done everything. The rich man in hell is surrounded by proof. What else can you do but send someone to hell? And yet their heart is not changed.

We’re told elsewhere there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Weeping we get. That’s pain, suffering. Gnashing of teeth is anger. They are still angry at God for daring to presume to do this to them. They have not humbled themselves before God. They do not recognize God for who he is, but there’s someone/something out there that’s done this to them they probably have a sense of. But even in their heart of hearts there’s awareness of God or they couldn’t be sinners. They have buried it so far down, suppressed it so far that even that’s not proof. Now, is it sufficient evidence? Absolutely it’s sufficient evidence.

To use yet another example, a man is insisting constantly that there is no sun. “Prove to me there’s this sun thing.” You say, “Well, look up,” and he looks up and says, “I see no sun.” Then he turns and looks at you, and you see that he stabbed out his own eyes.

Okay, well now. The proof is sufficient. The sun is right there in front of him, but he will not see because he has made himself unable to see by his own choices.

This is the doctrine of total depravity and it’s the thing that most apologetic systems and most evangelistic systems stumble over. Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism want to give us this hope that there is something in man somewhere, some little spark of recognition that will allow him on his own without divine overriding to see the truth, approve it, and lay hold on it. It may not be enough to transform his character. God can come and do that, but to actually see the kingdom of God is something that the natural man can do.

Here's another passage in this connection, and I think it’s something that people stumble over. I stumbled over it for a long time or just didn’t get what was going on –

Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night and says –

Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou doest except God be with him.

And Jesus response has always seemed out of the blue –

Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

I think the general assumption is that he saw to the heart of the matter and just went there without any kind of lead-in. I think there was a lead-in. I think the lead-in was the words “We know.” “We know you’re from God.”

“No, you don’t.”

These other people, the ‘we,’ those are the other Pharisees. That’s the Sanhedrin. “We know that you’re from God.” No, they didn’t. To the very end they denied that he was from God. They’re the ones who called for Jesus’ blood in three years.

Nicodemus was naïve. He thought that because there was a general consent to a proposition that that meant there was a real acceptance of divine truth, that they in some fashion at least from afar could see the kingdom of God, could see the reality being manifested, and Jesus jumps right in with, “You don’t know that. Until you’re born again you can’t even see the kingdom of God. It’s not that you see it and reject it. It’s invisible to you because of your own sins.”

As I look through the short history of my life and the trends that have come along in the Christian community, I’ve seen evangelists and apologists trying to change people’s hearts by evidences of creation. If we prove that evolution isn’t true then people will believe. Or showing them American’s Christian history. How that’s supposed to do anything, I don’t know, but there was an entire movement a while back that was dedicated to that. If people could just see that America was founded as a Christian country, then that will change everything.

America has to be so central to your very identity and existence for that to even remotely compute, which then it doesn’t.

In fact, this movement got up enough money to make a little video, which was hosted by the man I was working for at the time, and two of his sons were in it. In the whole video, only two people made explicit reference to Jesus Christ. They were my two students. The man’s wife gave her testimony, and the testimony was, “America’s Christian history led me to faith in God.”

It was a good video that any Mormon could have made and probably done better, and somehow they thought that was going to fix things.

Mormons have really good funding for that sort of thing, too.

They do. They’re good at that.

Then you can look at the whole pro-life thing. If we just prove the baby is biologically alive, then everyone will stop this. Well, no, they won’t because that’s never been the issue. The issue is the baby is inconvenient.

How about if you use scary pictures? People who have gut reactions to strong emotional stimuli, that will put them off for a little while until we get used to it.

And it educates people on what abortion actually is, which is often covered up.

Yeah, but in the end we simply get desensitized all over again and we don’t care, because you can prove the baby is alive and biologically human, and still people will say, “But sociologically it’s not human. Society has not yet granted it the right to exist. Its existence is not as important as the happiness of the mother, so this does not change anything here. You’re still putting your religious interpretations on it.”

Retrospectively we could always say, “Oh yeah, we knew that all the time.” Once you get past the fact where it’s no longer an effective argument you can freely admit, “Yeah, you were right. You’ve been telling us that and we know that, but it doesn’t matter. It never did really,” because they become more epistemologically self-aware. They realize what the real issue is.

You can do that. That kind of evidential apologetics can drive you to the point where you say, “Yeah, that’s really good. The baby is human. I still want it dead,” and then where do you go?

“Yeah, evolution doesn’t make any sense, so probably it was alien intervention.”

“Jesus really rose from the dead? Well, that’s weird. There are UFOs and Big Foot and Atlantis and all kinds of weird things.”

“What difference do they make for my life?”

“They don’t. They don’t convict me of sin. They don’t teach me the fear of God.”

The other thing we should throw in is commandments and rules. “Do this and live,” and every generation comes up with a set of rules. They tend – in the West and probably in the East as well – to be somewhat Gnostic. “Don’t touch. Don’t taste. Don’t handle.” Eventually we say, “If you will submit to these rules, you will grow in faith, or faith will come to you.” No, that won’t do it.

Christian parents with regard to their covenant children are really bad with this. Once upon a time as an elder I had to – how do I say this gently? – I had to announce to the leaders of households that a certain young woman was expecting and she wasn’t married, and she was repentant so it was a good thing and everybody embraced her and that was all wonderful.

But I talked to the father afterwards, or he talked to me and he said, “You know, you send them to church and to Sunday School and to catechism class and you homeschool and Christian school, and then this happens,” and my first thought was, “Well, I can now explain to you exactly why this happened. You were trusting externals. You were trusting the rules and procedures. Those don’t change the heart.”

Interestingly enough, several years later in a very different context the same man said, “You know, one day I gathered my kids around me. They were all still fairly young, pre-high school, and I said, ‘Okay kids, just checking on you. What does it mean to be a Christian? How are you a Christian?’”

“Well, you go to catechism class, you memorize the catechism, and you…”

“No! No! What a….”

We can be guilty of that, and Reformed Christians can be amongst the worst at that, but also our evangelical friends who are constantly trying to get the child to say the magic words and ask Jesus into their hearts can do the same thing. Emotional appeal, cultural conditioning – none of this is going to bring a child to Christ.

It takes the work of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit works through the gospel, so you have to explain the gospel, but you know what that means? It means you have to know what in the world the gospel is, and that’s hard.

I don’t know how many times from Sunday School I have finished a message by saying, “Parents, go home and ask your kids to explain the gospel to you.” No one has ever come back and said, “I did it and they could,” but neither has anyone come back saying, “I did and wow, they were so off.”

We’ve done it in our classrooms at school and we’ve gotten a high percentage – 60, 70, maybe 80% who can, and these are kids who grew up in the churches, and a large percentage of kids can’t. Sometimes this is even after we’ve just gotten done explaining it.

I did that this year. I spent a long time explaining it in detail, and they got some of the details but they missed the overall message, and some of them didn’t even get the details. They were just so mentally and spiritually checked out it did not register – the packed soil here of Jesus’ parable.

The temptation is, “Well, there’s got to be a way around it.” Yeah, it’s God’s.

That doesn’t mean there’s anything more to do than keep on preaching the actual gospel.

Keep on preaching, keep on praying, and waiting. It may be next week or next month or next year. It may be next decade. It may be on his death bed that your child comes to faith. That’s in God’s hands.

I can tell you in my own life, there’s no way I did not hear the gospel until sixth grade, but it definitely did not click until sixth grade. You just never know when the Lord is going to do something that’s really obvious and definitive. All along he’s doing something that might not be obvious and definitive.

Now that you mention that, in my own life I remember as a small child wandering around our large back field area with my little friend from down the street and singing, “For God so loved the world,” and reciting John 3:16 over and over again. She never came to Christ, and at that point I don’t think I was a Christian. Maybe I was. I knew what the Word said and I know they were true words, but I had never been confronted to repent of my sins and put my trust in Jesus, and I don’t know that that was anyone’s fault particularly, except my own.

That’s what Elijah has to learn, that the externals are not going to change the heart. They’re not going to produce revival. Yes, God may at the same time beneath the surface be working in people’s hearts through the preached message which the miracles have punctuated. There are times when we do see in the New Testament, for instance the resurrection of Lazarus, where some believe but many don’t. It’s obviously not the miracle, nor is it anything in them. It’s just that God uses Jesus’ words and Jesus’ actions, his self-revelation, to change their hearts.

I think it’s significant that the call to believe from the apostles is, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” It’s not, “Believe that God actually raised Lazarus.” It’s not, “Believe that God caused this miracle.” It’s believe him, not believe that.

These three phenomena – wind, earthquake, fire – were the same phenomena that attended God’s descent on Mount Sinai, that and the loud voice, as opposed to now the still small voice. There is such a direct connection here between Moses and Elijah.

Moses initiated the covenant as the mediator of the old covenant. Now Elijah has come to tear it up and say it didn’t work, but he sees the same phenomena. First, when the mountain was shaking and on fire and there was the tempest, the people fled. But after 40 days or so they got used to it. They got conditioned to it, and they built a golden calf and had an orgy around the bottom of the mountain while the mountain was aflame and shaking and black and God was up there. That should be scary.

Elijah is seeing the same phenomena and understanding now, maybe for the first time, what he should have read in the text. Sure, God put in a miraculous appearance, very impressive, and it changed no one’s heart, so why would you think it would now? Things haven’t changed. Messiah is in the future.

God is gracious and he’s not done, and that’s where we’re going with this, but in the meantime these things do not change hearts – special effects, dropping ice cream sandwiches from the roof of the church, fire and smoke machines, a pastor riding his Yamaha up onto stage to preach from it.

My very first pastor called them apes and peacocks. All the entertainment in the world, all the shock value, all the miracles – they’re not going to change human hearts. And when we think they are, we’re walking down a Pelagian road that is effectively paganism. We’re back to, “We can do something to grab the power of God, and it is within our ability to do so. We just have to convince people to do it.”

The entire public school system is based on this. If we change the environment, we can create a new world order, and a lot of what we’re seeing in our culture around us is exactly the same thing. Now we’ve moved from not only educating, but biologically conditioning people. If we can just get the environment under control on all levels, then we’ll have this wonderful perfect society.

God throughout the whole Old Testament is saying, “No, you won’t. I created an ideal society, at least in theory. It had all the rules, all the rites, all the rituals, all the outward revelation. I was in their midst, and it did not work, so what do you think you’re going to do that’s going to step that up?”

This is a much more mundane example, but thinking about communication in the classroom as a teacher. If you say something loudly for everyone to hear once, if you say it loudly a second time it will not register. You’ve just given away all of your communicative power.

What does work is if you say it loudly once and then someone says, “Hey, I don’t get this. Can you come explain it to me?” and then you go explain it to them quietly one-on-one. That’s what works. It seems like that’s kind of what the Lord is doing here with Elijah.

Yeah, the loud voice by itself didn’t communicate, but intimate communion does, when God initiates.

Next time we’ll talk about the job that God gives Elijah. This is the point where we’d say, “Okay, got the message. Now we can go have the revival?” and God’s word to Elijah is going to be, “No, quite the opposite.”

Although God has stressed here his sovereignty and his ability to overwhelm outwardly, and even to communicate to the hearts with incredible spiritual power, that doesn’t mean he’s going to give us what we want.

When I was younger it was common to have campaigns to reach every soul by the end of the century, or to win America back in two years, or those kinds of things. Then every now and then you’d go by some church building and it would say, “Revival begins here next Tuesday.”

Really? You think you can compel God’s plan?

“Well, God wants to save everybody!”

That’s not exactly correct, but even if it were, he’s going to do it in the way that glorifies him most and builds up his people most and sanctifies them most. To put it very bluntly, go talk to the Christians in China. Talk to those who escaped from the former Soviet Union. See if everything was nice and sweet and dandy for them during the years of persecution. The “it cannot happen here” mentality is extremely dangerous and shallow.

So although God very clearly asserts his sovereignty here and his ability to do what he wants, that doesn’t guarantee that what he wants is what’s going to make us really happy and comfortable. That will be our conversation next time.

Great. I look forward to that. Shall we wrap up with some recommendations?

Yup. You got one?

Sure. I will recommend the movie Tortured for Christ. It seems relevant to this conversation. It’s the story of Richard Wurmbrand. Of course, in Romanian I’m sure that’s pronounced very differently. He, of course, wrote the book Tortured for Christ, his story of what he endured under Russian oppression in Romania in 1967.

This movie is sort of a docu-drama that was made more recently to sort of summarize the book, and it’s very well-done. It’s just over an hour. I watched it with my 7th graders in World History this week and I think it was pretty eye-opening to see. It’s one thing to know, “Oh, Communism is opposed to Christianity,” and then to see the brutality portrayed.

It was intense. It was not too intense for most of my 7th graders, but they’re showing you what life was like in the torture chambers and in the state hospitals where they sent their prisoners to die, so it’s intense, not fun, but very good and worth watching.

Okay. I’m going to recommend something I’ve probably recommended before, but it’s worth at least a second and probably third recommendation. My mentor, C.W. Powell, in the later years of his life after many years of teaching wrote a little book, a collection of essays, called Nail in a Sure Place.

As far as I know it’s available on Amazon. It’s not very expensive. It’s quite short. You can read it in an afternoon easily. It’s a great devotional book for teachers. It’s designed for those who teach, parables for those who teach, something like that.

The thing that’s great about it and the thing that he learned coming out of a broad evangelical background into a Reformed background was exactly what we’ve been talking about. The temptation not only within the church but particularly within the Christian schools, since that’s what he’s talking about, is to try to make the kid holy by externals, by lecturing, by rules, by getting the bad stuff out of the environment.

At one point he comments, “You know, we reject the public school system with its philosophy of environmentalism and Messianic pretensions, and we went and established our Christian schools, but unfortunately we kind of took the philosophy right with us, baptized in the name of Jesus.”

There’s a lot there about not trying to reach into the soul of a child oneself and trying to manipulate, but giving room and letting God work. He says it very simply and in a very homely and quaint kind of fashion, but it is rich material. That’s Nail in a Sure Place by C.W. Powell and it should be on Amazon still.

That’s a great book. I can second that recommendation.

Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. Hope you’ve enjoyed this and maybe learned something. Recommend us to a friend. If you’re enjoying us, maybe your friends will, too.

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Thanks so much and we’ll see you next week.