Walls (Part 2)
In this episode
Scripture References
Works
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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 and Bryan Broome. It’s the usual cast of characters back again. It feels like it’s been a while. Maybe it’s only been two weeks, but it feels like a while.
Last week we began our series on the walls of the city. We talked about biblical theology, because this is a little bit of a focused deep dive into walls as a concept, so we talked about what we’re even doing with biblical theology and what’s the point of that. We talked about the nature of walls in the ancient city to the pagan mind, and we talked about the garden of Eden a little bit. So what’s next?
We did talk briefly about the city of Enoch, which was the city that Cain built, having tried to invent his own religion and then murdered his brother in terms of it, which is the way of the City of Man.
Yeah. And we talked about Babel, Babylon. The tower was topless to be in heaven, and how mankind tried to define himself, give himself a name and identity in terms of that, and again there were walls. What the walls were there for, besides defining the community, the Bible doesn’t say because presumably all of humanity was there. I never thought of that till now – maybe to keep out the dinosaurs and dragons and such, or maybe it’s just something very deep in the human subconscious that says we need definition, we need defense, we need to draw a circle and say we are in the inside and everything else is outside.
It’s funny, even organizationally, if you have one big drawer it’s more likely to become a junk drawer than if you have them broken up into little compartments.
It is something about the way God has rigged our minds to work. We want to know what does and doesn’t belong, what is and isn’t mine.
We come then I suppose to Abram, who’s called away from a land full of cities. Archeology, like history, we’re told begins in Sumer. The Fertile Crescent was full of city-states, each built around a ziggurat, a tower to heaven, in imitation of Babel. God calls Abram away from all of that and, although we’re not told in Genesis, the writer of Hebrews says that he was called out to look for a city which hath foundations whose builder and maker is God.
I remember as a small child sitting in chapel at school and hearing that verse read, and the speaker did not explain it and I don’t know what in the world the message or sermon was about, but I just remember hearing that and thinking, “Wait, something’s going on here. Foundations – doesn’t the Bible call Jesus a foundation or something like that?” That’s all I remember. No one ever explained it, and I don’t know how many people have ever had it explained.
I assume the common assumption is that the writer is talking about heaven or the new Jerusalem beyond the resurrection, the literal physical city God will build. There’s some truth in both of those, but that’s not really what’s going on there. Those are things that fall out in the process.
What Abraham was looking for was something he could not find in this world. He wasn’t looking for a pre-made pre-fab city that was over the next rise or around the next hill. What he was looking for was in the future and he knew that.
When I ask my students, “What is the nature of a city?” they will tell me all sorts of things and generally we have good discussions, but the first word that comes to their minds I’ll tell you is not community, because our cities are not places of community anymore, but once upon a time they were and community is inevitably religious and the ancient world knew that.
I’m going to get that some day. As far as I know he’s not a Christian. Maybe he is and I just don’t know it, but he goes out of his way to argue that the ancient city was inevitably a religious institution. It was founded around a central temple founded by magic in terms of the dead ancestor buried there, and that you belonged by belonging to that religion, and if you didn’t belong to that religion you didn’t belong to that city. You were an outsider, an alien, and so on.
Our modern secularized world would like to pretend that that’s not the case, that you don’t need a religion, that a mere common freeway system and supermarkets, if we have those anymore, are enough to pull people together, and as long as everyone is obeying the traffic laws and not robbing the Stop N Shop, that’s good enough to constitute a community. Add in a public school and county officials who interfere with your business, and you pretty well have a community.
Ironically, in some of our cities you can just stop and rob the Stop N Shop. They call it a sanctuary city.
Yes, a sanctuary from what and for what? The ancient world was honest. They knew who their gods were, and when they went to war with another city their gods went to war with the gods of that city. This is what was taken for granted.
Abram abandoned Ur of the Chaldees, a city dedicated to the moon goddess, and went out away from any kind of organized city. He was looking for a city, but it was one he would not find in his lifetime and he knew that.
Paul, in Romans 4, says the promise to Abraham was that he would be heir of the world. Again, you can read Genesis and you won’t find that expression, but Paul takes it as obvious. We are told the gospel that was preached to Abraham was “In thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed” – all the families, so that’s what he was looking for, a community defined in terms of faith in God’s promise to being the Messiah into the world to save people and to bless the nations.
Paul, in Galatians 3, spends a lot of time arguing that blessing means justification and sanctification, the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost, and that this is the heart and center of all the blessing that God intends for his people and for all nations and thus the world. So that’s the kind of city Abraham was looking for.
Now, when you have people whose hearts are dedicated to Jesus Christ, to the Messiah, they’re going to live a certain way. They’re going to submit to his Lordship in all of their laws and culture and customs and traditions and all of that, and that’s the kind of thing Abram was hoping to see, beginning in this world. He was already building in the suburbs of the new Jerusalem when he won followers along the way and had all those humble servants who hung out with him, and he made friends with the local sheikhs and got them onto his side, apparently religiously as well as militarily.
And yet knew that until Messiah came, until the seed came, this work would not be done, and so he waited. He waited in the land that was his by promise, but where he never inherited anything more than some land he bought for a sepulcher for his family.
We could spend a good deal of time in Hebrews 11 looking at, “These all died in faith, not having received the promise.” The writer goes through everyone from Abel down through Abraham and Jacob and Isaac and says they all were looking for this heavenly city. They were looking for something that comes out of heaven, out of God’s grace, out of God’s sovereign power, but is a presence here and is eternal, thus survives the judgement of the resurrection but has its beginnings here.
It's in this context now we come back to walls, because this city does have walls. We see it in the vision in Revelation 21 and 22. There are walls. The people who are inside belong to the city – strange that – and at the center of the city is the temple, which is no longer a building but it’s the Lamb and God himself.
We’re told in the final warnings that there are those who are outside – dogs and whoremongers and idolators and murderers, whoever loves and cherishes a lie – so there’s an inside and there’s an outside, but the focus is ethical and covenantal now. It’s not genetic. It’s not who your parents were, where you were born, what shape your eyes or nose are, the color of your skin or anything like that. It’s your relationship with Jesus Christ.
Without are those who give themselves to sin, and yet in John’s vision the gates are open and there are angels, messengers calling people still to come in. “And the Spirit and the bride say come, and let him that heareth, come. And whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.” That’s to jump ahead, but historically this unfolds.
So we have Abraham – Promised Land. That’s it. It’s a land. It’s promised. It’s going to be his along with the whole world, but not much happens and for the next 430 years we don’t get much further.
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob set up altars when God appears to them. Bethel seems to have been some kind of sanctuary place, but we’re never told if they built a tent or a house or anything there. Altars and groves are about all we get, and so on until Israel is taken down into Egypt in the days of Joseph and are there for a good long while. They come out and then finally at Sinai God introduces walls.
It’s called the tabernacle, tent, and God is going to manifest his presence inside this tent, and where he’s going to manifest his presence, his glory, that’s shut off by a curtain, a veil, a curtain wall. The room outside of that also has its curtain, and only the High Priest can go into the innermost sanctuary into God’s presence, and only once a year on the Day of Atonement.
The other room the priests minister in daily, tending to the shewbread and the lamps and the incense, splattering blood on veils and placing blood on the horns of the altar within and such. They have ongoing ministry. The Levites can’t go in there. Neither can Israel, generally.
Then we come to the courtyard, and the courtyard has a wall. It’s made of wood and linen cloth and Gentiles can’t come in there. God’s people can come as far as the gate and the altar, which is the first piece of furniture, and there they surrender their sacrifice. They place their hands on its head and confess their sins, they kill it, and then they back off and the priests, maybe with the help of the Levites, depending where we are in history, take care of finishing off the sacrifice. You could eat there. Apparently, tables were provided. You could eat your peace offerings, but you couldn’t go any further. You couldn’t go into the holy place, let alone the Holy of Holies.
If you were a Gentile, you can’t go in at all. Gentile meant you had not been circumcised. You did not attend Passover. You were not a political member of Israel. You were not covenanted with God’s people. As a God fearer you would come to the very gate and people would take over for you, and that happened, but otherwise there’s an end there. Beyond that lay the holy land, but it had borders. It didn’t have walls.
So as we look at this border/boundary/wall thing, I suppose what we need to concentrate on is what was important to God. Who did he want to keep out? Who did he want to invite in? And on what terms was any of this possible?
it’s interesting that the nation of Israel, as you mentioned politically, had such a defined in and out in the sign of the covenant in circumcision. It was very clear who was Israelite, who was worshiping God as a member of this covenant, so the walls would have been symbolically unnecessary as far as people are concerned. As you were saying, God decided what mattered, what was in and out, and geography wasn’t on the list.
Although I do find it funny what someone said about a week ago, talking about circumcision and how do you determine that someone is circumcised before they enter the temple? Is it just, “Alright, before you can come in you’ve got to drop your drawers and prove it”? I imagine there was probably some more familiarity among the members of Israel, but even with that tongue-in-cheek observation aside, it doesn’t quite matter anything except that you’re descended from Abraham. Obviously in the new covenant it matters that you’re a descendant of Abraham by means of faith, which even further eradicates the physical location mattering.
You have to think about the community. We don’t check that somebody is baptized before they take the Lord’s Supper in our churches today, but with caveats for how mobile society is today, if there’s a kid who’s grown up in your church there are probably people in that church who remember that kid’s baptism. There’s a communal remembrance, and I wonder how much that played into it.
There were also the blue fringes. Presumably once you were adopted into Israel by circumcision, you would then wear the blue fringe on your robes, which testified that you were a child of heaven. And presumably the local rabbis or Levites or whoever at the time who knew their congregations and knew the law would say, “Wait, why are you wearing that blue stuff? You’re not one of us,” so there would be some outward significance, other than dropping your drawers, as you say.
You were talking about the baptism of children, but in truth you have the same thing with the baptism of adults. What if the pastor says, “If you’re a baptized member of a Christian church in good standing, and believe that Jesus is your Savior, you may come to the Lord’s Supper.”? I’ve been caught in that awkward position of, “Well, I think I was baptized. He’s my husband. He was baptized. He’s not exactly a Christian, but…” and all of those kinds of things that get difficult.
I don’t know what your churches do. Our church does a general announcement, but then we also ask people who are visiting, who we don’t know, to slip out and speak to an elder, and basically we ask that one question. It’s sometimes a little stricter fencing to get people to look you in the eye and say, “Oh yes, I’m a member of such-and-such church. I’ve been baptized and I’m trusting Jesus, the Son of God,” so then, “Welcome to the Lord’s Supper.” That’s as opposed to, “Well, why are you asking?”
Yeah, you get that sometimes, so there are still outward boundaries, but of course the ones that matter most deeply are, as Bryan said, faith in the God of Abraham, being a child of Abraham by faith in Jesus Christ. That’s not to despise outward externals and ordinances that God has given us, but salvation is the wall that surrounds God’s city, we’re told in Isaiah.
Stepping back for a moment and looking at the Promised Land in the days of the judges and early days of the monarchy. Insofar as God’s people did what they were supposed to, which wasn’t often, granted, but if they had, they would have had a free and prosperous society that was not supposed to discriminate against foreigners, immigrants and such. If you wanted to come and live in Israel, you could.
There were only a few restrictions. You had to leave your gods behind. At least if you brought them out in the open you’d be in a lot of trouble. You had to conform to the moral standards that God had set for all his people. There was to be one law for the immigrant as for those who were born in the land. You could open up a business. You could come to synagogue. You could come as far as the temple gate and have the priest sacrifice for you. There were a couple things you couldn’t do. You couldn’t own agricultural land, at least for very long, and you couldn’t hold political office until you became a covenanted member of Israel. But if Israel was what they were supposed to be, you’re going to have a land that is relatively free.
There’s no tyrant who thinks he’s God sitting on your throne. You’re not going to be turned into a slave labor force. The government is not going to be interfering with your business and taxing you into non-existence. This is a place where there is liberty, and even liberty of conscience.
No one forced you to worship Yahweh. You couldn’t worship your idols, but you didn’t have to profess faith in a God you didn’t know and didn’t believe in, but you could be confronted with his reality again and again. People would bear witness to that and various institutions would bear witness to that. So the borders were, in a sense, open.
Now, before I go further and anybody gets worried, is there a one-to-one correlation between Israel and the United States today? No, for lots of reasons, some of them of our own making. For instance, nobody came to Israel to get a free education for their kids, because Israel didn’t have a state-funded educational system. No one came to Israel to get welfare handouts, because Israel didn’t have that kind of welfare system.
There was a gleaning system. You might be allowed, as Ruth was, to go into a field and glean, work really hard and earn some money, and there were no political sanctions against such a thing – in fact, political encouragement, God’s encouragement to let the stranger do that. But you didn’t come, thinking you were going to get free handouts. And if you weren’t skilled, you would be doing backbreaking labor for a while.
No, you couldn’t do that or your idols, or pornography. There were certain things that were not supposed to come with you, that you had to leave behind. You were subject to the laws of the land, like everybody else. And if you were found guilty, you were not generally simply deported. You were probably either forced to pay restitution or, as the case may be, executed depending on the severity of your offense, because there was one law for everybody.
So God had no walls on his country and on this political/economic semi-paradise, had it worked the way it was supposed to, which it didn’t.
The Enlightenment helped us with that, and then the Romantic Age really taught us to follow our hearts, so we’re all better now and we all love everybody, and the government loves us most of all. Big Brother is watching us. We will be assimilated. We’ve been down those roads before.
But at the center of Israel – spiritually at least, and theologically – was the tabernacle. Again, foreigners could come to the gate and could offer sacrifices to the priest, but they did not partake of the feasts, of Passover, until they’d been circumcised, so there’s that boundary. It’s a covenantal boundary. Being covenantal, it’s asking for and demanding spiritual faith and spiritual responses, but it also has an outward manifestation, as sacramental things do.
That was the tabernacle, and then along comes Solomon and builds the temple and it’s bigger and it’s grander and it has stone walls and more courts and it’s still kind of the same thing. During the days of the monarchy, we do begin to get a standing army, a royal guard of sorts, and sometimes it did police borders and chase down bandits, so the idea of going after cartel lords with federal force is not foreign to scripture at all.
We need to go back because I forgot this – the land. The land was originally parceled out in the days of the conquest and it was assigned to particular families. The only way an outsider could come in and ever own land for any length of time was by being adopted into one of the existing families, at which point you became a family member and you could inherit the land.
Aside from that, if you came in you could lease living space. You could even theoretically lease agricultural lands, but never for more than 49 years because in the 50th year, the year of jubilee, all lands reverted to the original owner. So if the jubilee was 10 years off, then you could lease this land for 10 years. Maybe on the other side you could try re-leasing it, but probably the owners, having now gotten fresh land, won’t be too thrilled about that.
Also as far as holding office, once you were a covenant member – you had been circumcised and you attended Passover – you could in theory hold office because you’re an Israelite, but God stuck in some caveats or prohibitions or whatever the word is that means “wait a bit.”
If you were an Egyptian or an Edomite you had to wait three generations. If you were a Moabite you had to wait 10 generations, and some read that as indefinitely, because culture matters. They were not to be overly harsh on Egyptian culture because they had lived in it and they knew what that was like. Edomites were brothers sort of, so three generations. The Moabites were born out of an incestuous relationship way back before the Exodus, and God said, “No, you don’t want those people exercising rule in your city anytime soon, or in your nation.”
It’s interesting to draw a parallel with today’s political discourse and the error that is sometimes made that Americans’ civil rights are human rights. We believe in basically universal suffrage and the right to property and all these things, but those rights are protected by our government, and our government simply does not have authority to defend those rights for other people.
Land ownership in Israel is not a human right. It’s granted to specific families for the protection of the land which is going to bring Messiah.
I would dissent slightly, at the very least, from what Emily just said. There are some aspects of what the United States government considers human rights that I think are more universal. For instance, the right to self-defense is definitely one of those.
But we don’t go invading other countries because they don’t recognize their citizens’ right to self-defense.
So you’re talking about how our government should react to people in other countries? That it shouldn’t be a universal policeman enforcing human rights everywhere? I’m trying not to put words in your mouth, but to clarify.
But in the language of the United States, we consider those rights given by God. They’re not given by the United States government, and yet the job of the United States government recognizing those rights does not extend to jurisdiction over other people.
Then I would agree with that, because every nation has been allotted an area over which God has given them authority.
So we still have walls and borders. Sometimes they’re to keep people out. Sometimes they’re to keep people in. You all remember the Berlin wall?
I actually have a piece of it around here someplace from the time I visited Berlin shortly after the wall had fallen.
Yeah, but there was an attempt to keep people in paradise. It was rather embarrassing.
To keep people from escaping from free East Berlin into tyrannical West Berlin.
Now, at the end of the Middle Ages walls began to be not such a big deal because of, largely, cannons, which could bring down walls. Then by the time we get to 1900 we have these things that fly and can drop bombs on you, so walls actually at that point might be detrimental because they keep you from running. So that’s gone, after a fashion, although walls on the southern border of the United States are still an issue.
Even in the ancient world walls could be turned against you if somebody decided to sit outside of them for months on end, as happened in Israel a lot, rather spectacularly in AD 70.
When walls are no longer your friends, when your defenses become your own adversaries.
The nature of covenant faith is to draw borders. I suppose the New Testament classic passage on this, at least one of them, is in Ephesians 2 where we’re told about the middle wall of partition that separated Jew and Gentile in the old covenant and how that is abolished in Christ. “He is our peace, who had made both one and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.” Colossians 2 says something similar.
Christ’s coming into this world was to bless all nations, so the picture we get in Revelation is true. We have come into a community that is spiritual, that is covenantal. It has visible manifestations, but it cannot be reduced into any one of them. So when people try to make America the new Zion, or Scotland or England or Russia or western Europe during the Middle Ages, we go astray, sometimes horribly.
And yet we do acknowledge that nations that submit to Christ, families that submit to Christ, churches that submit to Christ – yes, there are churches that don’t – that these are manifestations of the covenant life that’s in Christ. And it’s legitimate to draw boundaries and say, “We’re a Christian family and we’d love to have you over, and you’re invited to court my daughters if you’re a Christian. And you can come to our church, but if you start teaching things contrary to the gospel we’re probably going to ask you to leave.”
It also unites, and that’s the other thing. The old saying a few generations back was, “Truth divides, love unites,” or “Doctrine divides, love unites.” No, as far as Paul is concerned, and here Ephesians 4 is the classic passage –
When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men…And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.
In other words, God gave Bible teachers to unify the church, because we’re unified by truth. You can be unified by being tossed into a leper colony and eventually you’re all going to get leprosy. That’s probably not the kind of unity you should want, or being tossed into a place where heresy reigns just so we can all be together and enjoy the heresy together, that is not what God has in mind for us. He wants us to believe the truth, because he is truth.
As we talk about walls and we talk about coming to Christ and coming to God through Christ, we’re using images that Jesus used. “The way is straight and narrow. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the door. If any man will enter in by me he will be saved and will get in and find pasture.”
These are real things. Christianity in some respects is exceedingly narrow because it absolutely insists you have to come to God through Jesus Christ, but at the same time it opens its arms to the world saying, “But you can all come. This is an open invitation to everybody, to every people, every nation, every individual.”
It doesn’t matter what your sins have been. You can find forgiveness, you can find cleansing, you can find new life, but you can’t bring your sins and hang onto them. You can’t hug them to your chest as you come through the gates of the new Jerusalem. The unity of the church, true love, stands in terms of truth and holiness. There are many wonderful things that Francis Schaeffer wrote along these lines.
That’s such a beautiful thing, that we all come through Jesus. My group of friends in college tend to shorthand how we all know each other by saying, “Well, we all hung out at the same house. It was called Rivendell and that’s how we got to know each other,” but really there was something more about Rivendell. It wasn’t until years later that one of my friends and I sat down and thought, “What was it?”
It was this one friend. It’s not like there was a really defined in and out, because hospitality is a thing and all this, but the friendship was strong if you were friends with this one person, and this person didn’t even live at that house. He was just kind of the contact.
We have that in Jesus, where every single one of us in the kingdom of God knows Jesus. You know the six degrees of separation thing? In Jesus it’s a real small world.
Next time we come to Nehemiah and we’ll find out the significance of him rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem after the captivity, and how people standing on the walls of the city are suddenly automatically in the house of God and why that’s important, how it brings us closer to Zion and to the coming of Christ.
I have a great one. I’m recommending a TV show. It’s one that I did not see growing up, but one that my wife grew up with and that we are currently watching through together, me for the first time, obviously. It is the television adaptation of Brian Jacques Redwall.
He voices the villain. It’s perfect. I realized it in like episode 3. I don’t know how I missed it in the first two. I was like, “That’s Tim Curry!” and it’s really good. Season 1 is obviously the first book, Redwall, and then it’s Mattimeo, then the third one is Martin the Warrior. We’re five episodes from the end of that one now, I think. It’s all really good.
It’s kind of funny because at least in the States it aired on PBS. A lot of death happens in the Redwall books. Characters die constantly.
It’s nature, and nature is full of sin and death. But it’s really funny to watch it on the show because you’ll see the sword in this part of the frame, and it will go out of frame and you’ll hear a thing go, “Eh!” and then it cuts and he’s on the ground dead. There’s no blood. It’s really funny.
I was talking with our friend Sam Negus about Redwall and how you start the series and it’s like, “Oh, they have an abbey. They’re monks. They’re like Christian mice,” and then as the books go on and on it’s like, “Oh, they’re praying to the seasons. And how are they eating fish?” There are so many unanswered questions about this religion. It’s very disturbing.
Especially in the earlier books I like it because it’s clear that Jacques wrote it and was like, “This is going to be a medieval-style world, where essentially God is so imminent that everything is holy in some sense.” There’s never any explicit miracle that happens necessarily, except the main character hears the founding mouse. They have visions. In Martin the Warrior there’s a random lady they meet in the forest who can prophesy in verse.
Sidebar: She also gives them oatmeal scones, and I made oatmeal scones today as a result of watching that episode yesterday.
It’s such an interesting world to observe, whether you’re reading it or watching the series, to inhabit, in a sense. Because of that it’s this weirdly grounded, for talking animals, world that nonetheless has things that aren’t just physical, and it does it all without explicit – there’s no Brandon Sanderson magic system where he pops out and goes, “By the way, you can do this, and this will happen because of a magic system powered by the shard of a dead divinity” or something, which is a whole other sidebar, but that’s how he explains his magic systems.
Then of course animals die and characters die constantly. You’re like, “Oh, wow, I was so distracted by the cute animals’ abbey that I forgot that people die in this show.”
I have a question because I have never read the Redwall series, although my girls did. Do human beings have a place in this universe?
I think originally, if you read the first book in isolation, there’s kind of a hint that what the animals are living in are kind of the vestiges of a human civilization, but that’s really not consistent. There’s also a horse and dogs in the first book, and they never ever appear again.
So the sense of scale is very different in the first book compared to the rest, because I don’t think he was really planning on following up with an entire series.
The villainous rat, Cluny the Scourge, even in the episode of the TV show, is riding a chariot being pulled by a horse, and they’re roughly human-to-horse ratio size-wise, so either rats and mice and all the other animals grew or the horses have shrunk. Who knows?
I’m going to recommend scrambled eggs. Gretchen didn’t like the first time I made scrambled eggs, because I made them the way I had them all growing up, which was you have a hot pan, you pour the eggs in, you move them around and break them up until they’re bone dry, and that’s scrambled eggs. Then I read this article on how James Bond likes his scrambled eggs, which is super slow and it takes forever because you start with a cold pan. That’s how Gretchen likes her eggs.
The ending is unsatisfactory, as the ending of most series are, but as you come near the end there’s a point where the protagonist explains how to make scrambled eggs properly. Apparently, whoever wrote it had been watching James Bond, because this is almost exactly the same thing. You cannot go too slow. You bring up the heat slowly. You don’t heat it too fast. That’s not exactly how I do it, but burning them is right out.
I grew up with them being somewhat moist, but I found out my family does not like them that way at all, so I have learned to not dry them out to the point of being leather, but to go slow and make sure all the water is gone. There’s a phrase in our family that brings up immediate retching. The phrase is, “Egg juice.”
Yeah, because when I was growing up I didn’t like them that way either. I always scrambled them hard. I’m actually a convert now to eggs over-medium and sometimes over-easy, which I used to not like for whatever reason. But when you have a scramble of potatoes and mushrooms, which I also used to not like, and bell peppers and garlic and meat, then an over-easy egg on top of that – it brings it together. It’s so nice.
Eggs on toast make a lot more sense once you’ve converted to the slow scramble.
It’s so good with duck eggs. We do some kind of hearty toast, butter, goat cheese, jam, and an over-easy or over-medium egg on top. Oh, it’s so good!
Mmm, mmmm. I have to go fix dinner in a minute and that’s not on the list, but maybe tomorrow.
I’m going to recommend recommendations, because we still aren’t getting very many. We got a few more, and our thanks to Gwen again for sending us more recommendations. I was just able to glance over her list briefly, but thank you, Gwen, for dropping a few more things on us.
It is really funny because we obviously can see the stats of how many people are listening to our show. You know the thing where 10% of the students do 90% of the work? I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but we have a lot of listeners who have not sent us recommendations yet – just saying.
Don’t be afraid to recommend. I was talking to one young man who said, “Recommend what? You mean like you recommend books or…you do food a lot.”
“Yes, food, music…” and we got off on that. A walk by the beach. Giving your children middle names or not, or giving them two middle names. There’s all kinds of things…
Yeah. My impression is that, of the people who do listen, a lot of people actually like this section particularly, because it’s just Christians talking about ordinary fun stuff, which they may or may not get into. They may not like our books, but probably along the way they think, “That’s not a very good book. What I would recommend is…”
Yes, ok! The thing that you would recommend? Send it to us. You don’t want to make eggs that way? How do you make them? Tell us. It would be great. And coming up really, really soon, probably in the next three or four weeks, we’re going to have to do that episode, so please send us your recommendations.
Thank you guys so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our transcriptionist, who donates her time to make transcripts of the show available. If you’d like to get those in your email inbox, look us up on Substack. That’s where to get those. Also look for us on your second-favorite podcast catcher and let us know if we’re not there.
A big thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, Dear Listener, you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion, or patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
As always, send those recommendations and any other comments, questions, insults, bouquets, or brickbats to [email protected]. That’s what my mom would always say – comments, questions, insults, bouquets, or brickbats. If you want to send us bouquets, you can do that. I’m sure there’s a way.