Hope is a Muscle

Kate Bowler: Oh, hello. My name is Kate Bowler, and I’m a professor and an author and host of this podcast you are listening to called Everything Happens. In a world where people say everything happens for a reason, we are the people who say, no, really? Go ahead. Yeah, no I’d love to hear the reason. Explain how bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. No. For sure. Yeah. No, let’s just let this play out. Tell me everything. I’ll wait. I feel thrilled that we get to do this together because we are back with season 13. Can you even believe it? And we have so many incredible guests to introduce you to this season and all of them, and this is a fun little fact, I got to sit down with in real life so you can listen to these conversations or you can watch our conversations.

Today we’re going to be talking about hope and how it calls us into caring. And before we start, I just want to acknowledge straight up that this is a hard season to be talking about hope. And if I asked any one of you, you could make me a really good list about why despair might feel like an easier emotion to conjure. And a completely plausible one. Like what is even happening in our world? What is happening in our country? In our families? Like, look, it takes hard work to be hopeful right now. But my guest today is someone that I really trust to tell me what hope looks like, especially in the face of despair. His name is Nicholas Kristof. Nick Kristof is one of the world’s most admired journalists. He writes for a little-known paper called The New York Times. He’s like the guy who goes everywhere. He’s traveled to over 150 countries. He is passionate about bringing attention to important issues and human rights and social justice and humanitarian crises. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes. Like, no big deal. One with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, for their amazing work in reporting on China’s Tiananmen Square protests and another for his powerful columns on Darfur. He’s like the guy you trust to shine the light on the hardest story. And then he just keeps yelling about it until we pay attention. Together, Nicholas and Sheryl have written bestselling books like ‘Half the Sky’ and ‘Tightrope,’ and his latest memoir, which is so beautiful, it’s called ‘Chasing Hope.’ Okay, so we taped this conversation in front of a live audience. And, you know, and that comes with all of the live-y stuff that happens when you’re live. You will probably hear a very sudden rainstorm that I thought, swear to God, was an air show taking place above us. And I was like, why are all of these jets above Indianapolis? So stay tuned for that. But I really hope this conversation will leave you feeling encouraged and, dare I say, hopeful. I promise. Without further ado. Nicholas Kristof.

Nicholas Kristof: Thank you. 

Kate: Oh my gosh. It’s so ridiculous and good to see you here in this context.

Nick: It’s great to be here in this context.

Kate: It feels too fun because you’re the one that typically has all the questions. And I will have so many pointy ones. You’ve written such a tender book about how to find your purpose in the world, and I wondered if we could start by talking about your dad. Who– just like what a witness to courage, and also such a powerful example of how one person’s life can have so many shifting kinds of identities with something as seemingly durable as like, what country are you from? So I wondered if we could start there and what his life was like before coming to the United States.

Nick: Sure. And when Kate talks about my dad, you know, not being sure what country he was from. If you asked my dad, with his thick accent where he was from, he would tend to say, Romania. Meanwhile, if you asked his sister where she was from, she would say, oh, I’m Armenian. And if you asked his brother, he would say, I’m Polish. And when, his sister would call up, they would speak together in Romanian, when my uncle would call up, they speak together in Polish. He grew up in, an area called Northern Bukovina, in what is now Ukraine was then Romania was Austria-Hungary, where he was born in an Armenian family. Then the family spied on the Nazis during World War two. They got caught. They fled in every which direction. Some family members were killed by the Nazis. Were killed by the communists, by the Soviet communists. And, my dad, ended up in, concentration camp in Yugoslavia. And his life was saved by a French diplomat who kind of broke the rules to save my dad’s life. And this diplomat, was never promoted to ambassador. But because of him, I exist. Then my dad was able to get to France. He wanted to come to the US and, to French journalists helped make an introduction to the US ambassador when he could not get a visa to get him that, American visa. And that was also, you know, not quite maybe appropriate for a journalist to do to help somebody get a visa. But again, I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for that. And so one reason why I give my editors gray hair is it’s because I’m trying to pay it forward. And if I break the rules, it’s because I exist only because these other people broke the rules before me.

Kate: Yeah. When you hear him tell the story, do you find yourself identifying as much with his role as, like, a refugee and an exile, or as much as the advocate that, like bent if not slightly broke ways to make a path for him?

Nick: Well, so it’s funny because, you know, when I was a kid, I was very conscious of having a dad who had a very strong accent. I grew up in a small farm town in Oregon where everybody else, you know, knew how to fix carburetors and play baseball. And, you know, we had one disastrous game of baseball where my dad tried to get the runner out by throwing the ball at the runner. And then my dad was I couldn’t understand, he said, it’s so much harder to hit a runner than it is to hit second baseman. You know, he should get credit. And, you know, I was mortified. But, so when I was a kid, I was very self-conscious about having this dad who was very different. It was really, I guess, in college and beyond that, I became incredibly appreciative of the risks that he had taken, how he had managed to rebuild his life over and over and start over in America. He arrived not speaking any English. He arrived in New York and took the train to Oregon. And in New York he bought a Sunday New York Times as his learning material to learn English and, you know, read through the paper over months and months and months with the dictionary. You know, I just came to so admire that as an example. And I think it also, you know, taught me to empathize with people who are struggling, who were left out, who are marginalized, who are refugees or otherwise struggling. And to use what, you know, my little my little platform at the New York Times or as an author to try to shine a light to help people. And if that involves occasionally breaking rules, don’t tell.

Kate: There’s such a funny determination about, like, every story about him seems to have like, a zig and zag in it.

Nick: Yeah.

Kate: Like the story of you’d be like, hey, we’re farmers now. We’re farmers. We have a really good idea for what we should farm. It turns out.

Nick: The Kristoff’s were not the most successful farmers. We, we had this, you know, beautiful farm in the right where the Willamette Valley goes into the Coastal Range. My parents got a book to discover the best animal to raise. And this book recommended sheep because they said they graze more closely than cattle. So we, so then they got a book from the library about what breed of sheep to get. And this, this book written in New Zealand, recommended Corriedale sheep. So we got Corriedale sheep. Well, it turned out that, I mean, everybody in, we entertained all the neighbors because they they pointed out that, look, there are too many coyotes around, you’ll feed all the coyotes, it’ll be a coyote buffet. And, the second that Corriedales, I mean, they have great wool, but they don’t, but basically, you raise sheep in America for meat, not for wool. And, but undeterred, we then got a book about how to defend your sheep from coyotes, and it recommended, this breed of dog called the Kuvasz, to which is a guard dog a Hungarian guard dog. So we scoured the country and we got a Kuvasz and the first thing our expensive Kuvasz did was to kill one of our lambs. And then we engaged in a cover-up. You may recall that Kristi Noem was kind of bragging about killing her dog. No, on the Kristof farm, we do things differently. We engage in cover-ups. And so we protected our dog. And, the dead lamb wasn’t much of a problem. The bigger problem was one that the dog had mauled. And there’s this antiseptic called Blue coat that you put on the wounds. And so we had this blue lamb, and the blue lingered for months. And there was kind of a telltale thing, but I said, just in defense of the dog. She never, touched another lamb, another sheep. She protected them from coyotes for the rest of her life, once killed a coyote in the sheep shed. And ever since then, we’ve had other, Kuvaszes. We now have, Connie and, the, the Kuvaszes. And and they did protect the sheep. They did work out. So I do recommend going to your library and checking out books to read the farms, but it just may take a while to get everything just right.

Kate: I like how in the end of the story, everyone became a vegan. It’s a very benevolent end.

Nick: Well, it, I mean, I sort of inherited because in the last few years Sheryl and I decided to, to support the community to, to plant, grapes and cider apples to make wine and cider. And so we, protected our, vines and apples from all the deer in the area by putting this impregnable deer fence around the, the, the trees and the vines, only to discover that we had fenced some deer inside our incredible deer fence with nothing to eat but vines or apples.

Kate: You just made a deer zoo.

Nick: The deer are laughing at us. They’re mocking us.

Kate: I guess that’s what I mean. I really love your family stories because there’s such a hilarious, like, whack a mole quality to like and then we tried this. Having recently discovered information about this, we try. I wonder what you got, your mom is from a Quaker background. Is that right?

Nick: She, there were elements of a Quaker background.

Kate: Quaker adjacent. Yeah, yeah. I wonder what qualities you got from your mom.

Nick: I certainly deeply admired the, you know, the that. We, we went to Quaker meetings, occasionally. And kids in meetings are actually empowered to periodically stand up and say what they, what they think, which is kind of kind of nice. So, it was a tradition that, you know, that I really admired.

Kate: Yes, I do remember my my son recently. We got to, right now we’re at a Presbyterian church, and he was like, mom, why do you keep taking me to this place where they keep saying, we’ll hear from God, but everyone just keeps talking. That’s like. That’s, that’s actually that was a really good argument, so I don’t, I don’t blame you. It’s too many. It’s too many creeds. They just. Yeah. Just in case anyone’s taking notes to pass on. We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. My family always had mottos like really hilariously specific, but generalizing mottos like don’t let the turkeys get you down, or one we just had like, don’t get crumbs on the baby, which I just feel like was more just like a life lesson after we had my youngest sister. But we had to, so we were like, you know, the family motto, and it was like, how is this relevant anymore? But I wonder if your family had a motto, what would your motto be?

Nick: We certainly didn’t have, we didn’t particularly have a motto, at least not in English that I was aware of. My dad had was always was that he was a polyglot and he was always, so he may well have had a, you know, a, motto in Serbian or something but I think that, you know, there was this undercurrent which I certainly absorbed of about hope. I think that he thought that hope had, you know, kept him alive, that better days would, would come and that it’s not something passive, but that hope is a muscle. And then we build it and develop it and thereby are more likely to achieve that outcome, you know, more likely, not necessarily.

Kate: You found a partner in Sheryl that shares your curiosity and courage. And I wondered if we could hear about the role that China had in shaping your young married life, and in particular in your role in reporting the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Nick: So China just shaped us in so many ways. It started and it’s still very much affects my journalism. We arrived in China in the fall of 1988 as the New York Times correspondents there. The first lesson came when we moved into the official New York Times bureau chief apartment, and we knew it was bugged, partly because one of our Chinese friends worked part-time translating conversations in our building. And but we didn’t know quite where the bugs were. And then somebody pointed out this little recess in the wall covered with a screen and said, that’s where the bugs are. So I thought, I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I got a ladder, pried off the screen. There’s all this electronic gadgetry there. Sheryl and I were peeping in. We recognize the Chinese characters. I just been studying Chinese. I’m so proud of myself. I’ve nailed it. Because that, what this big gadget says the Chinese characters on it read electronic sound carrying device. We’d just arrived in Beijing. We figured out the bugs, and then Sheryl and I were very well prepared for this moment because we’d read a lot of spy novels. And so we decided that we were going to use this as our private disinformation channel to Chinese state security. We had nailed it. And then just at that moment, a friend arrived at the front door and we discovered what an electronic sound-carrying device is in Chinese. It’s a doorbell buzzer. And, you know, that was just very useful to arrive in this, you know, place and feel like you understand everything, you’ve got it all figured out because that is the moment you truly need to worry and and that you’re overstepping and everything is always more complicated than it seems. And that’s true in China in 1988. That’s true of America in 2024. It’s true of any, you know, a lesson in humility for any reporter. It’s a lesson in humility for anybody, anywhere, that any time we’re a little too confident, too bold in our assessments, just beware. So that was a useful lesson. I mean, one harder lesson, was, we just last month celebrated  our 35th anniversary. On June 4th, 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square at the end of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement and the crowd of unarmed protesters when the People’s Liberation Army arrived and opened fire on us. And, that was the massacre that ended the democracy movement. And you never forget seeing a modern army turn weapons of war on an unarmed crowd and just massacre people. And I felt it it I think it affected me partly it goes back to the humility, I guess, that I had been kind of condescending. I felt badly because I’d been condescending to a lot of the less educated protesters, the peasants from the countryside, the workers. And I said, you know, I wrote several times that, you know, they say they’re for democracy, but they can’t they can’t really articulate what kind of democracy they want, what institutions they want, what guardrails. And that was all true. But, that night when I was cowering as they were opening fire on us, the, the heroes of the day were these rickshaw drivers, uneducated peasants in the countryside who would drive up toward the soldiers whenever there was a lull in the firing, pick up bodies of kids who’d been killed or injured and put them on the backs of the rickshaws and then peddle them, to the hospitals. And there was a bus driver, on one of the roads leading to Tiananmen Square, and it was a two-lane road, the only one going in. The troops were arriving from that direction to to massacre more protesters. And this bus driver saw the truckloads of soldiers coming, he knew what they were intending. He quickly drove his bus to block across the road to block it, and he turned the engine off and stepped down with the keys in his hand. It was dark. It was the evening of June 3rd, and he, and the officer got out of the lead truck and ordered him to move the bus and the bus driver, the salt of the earth worker. He said no. And the officer pointed his sidearm at the, at the bus driver and said, move the bus. And the bus driver took the keys, and he hurled them into the grassy verge where there was high grass in the dark. Somebody like that bus driver who couldn’t have defined, you know, democracy. He might not have been able to define the institutions that he wanted, but he was willing to die for it. And in this country, as we’ve seen, I mean, I think we in this country don’t always appreciate the democracy and the institutions we’ve inherited. And I think we could learn a lot from the courage and conviction of those Chinese protesters who, maybe because they didn’t enjoy it, knew how valuable it was.

Kate: It’s a wild and terrible thing to see courage up close I imagine. You’ve seen so much of it and so much, your capacity to hear and to report and to simultaneously have like, an absorbative quality, but also to be able to reflect it back. I wonder, did you get did you ever get used to the feeling of taking in that pain, telling the truth and then having to do it again?

Nick: So in some sense, I mean, you seek it out because you were outraged when you see that. When you see it, soldiers massacre unarmed protesters at Tiananmen Square. Or in Darfur when you see, the Janjaweed militia massacre people in a genocide because of the tribe they belong to. When you see in Cambodia, traffickers kidnap young girls and lock them in brothels and auction them off to be raped. You’re furious. And I fight back. Journalists fight back. We fight back with our laptops and our cameras. But to fight back effectively, those are our tools to fight back, we have to get there. And so we have to go and bear witness. And then we hope that we can do that without getting in trouble ourselves, without getting other people in trouble, without getting our interpreter and driver shot. But if we can get there and get that story, then the only reason we do that is there’s hope that then it matters, and that if we convey that, people will spill their coffee when they read my column and then will, you know, write their member of Congress or these days email them and that somehow it will add up. And sometimes it does, and it’s thrilling and sometimes it doesn’t, and it just breaks your heart.

Kate: Yeah. There’s like such a it’s such a strange exchange between like the work of witness and then, and then the economy of like empathy because, I mean, the great philosopher of mass death, Stalin is quoted as saying.

Nick: When death is a tragedy, a million deaths, is that specific? But, but, you know, it’s not I mean, I think there’s this the first time people meet me, they often think I’m going to be this, you know, dour, grim pessimist.

Kate: That is the man we’ve met tonight.

Nick: The Eeyore of journalists. I mean, the truth is that, you see, you see, I mean, these things that I’ve seen. I just wish I could unsee, that the Darfur genocide maybe in particular because that was civilians. That was kids. But but you also see just the courage that people are capable of. In this country, we’re not tested to the same degree because we don’t have warlords going through our streets. When people are tested, it is amazing what we are capable of. And so I managed to come back sometimes just awed by the the the courage of humans, the decency of humans. I, you know, I, I was, in a, in a village in, in, Pakistan where this, I met this incredible woman. I came to know well, Mukhtar Mai, and Mukhtar had been sentenced by her village council to be gang raped because of something that her younger brother supposedly had done. And, in fact, he probably hadn’t done it. But then the village council carried out the order. They gang raped Mukhtar, and the expectation was that he was then going to kill herself out of shame. Instead, Mukhtar prosecuted her attackers. She sent them to prison, and then she use compensation money for the rape to start the first school in her village, because she believed that education was the best way to chip away at the misogyny and cruelty that had led her to be victimized. And then she enrolled the children of her attackers in her school. And you know, when you were in that village, yes, you see the evil that people are capable of, but you also see just what an amazing species we are and how, when tested, we are also capable of this incredible strength and resilience and courage and just, just plain goodness. And that, I mean, that puts a spring in my step. That is why I am not a journalistic Eeyore.

Kate: I love watching you, like, pick out little details and even just like if you just watch this man walk around, he’s like, oh, thank you so much. And where are you from? It sounds like your mom would have–I mean, it’s just like it gets it’s such a it’s such a it’s such a wonderful and detailed way of, of knowing people, of figuring out what inspires, like what tells the story of their life. I also wondered if it’s given you unique perspective in how much we’re capable of, I guess like co-feeling with other people, because one thing that is I find really common about a lot of the professions that I meet through Everything Happens, is that they have these really porous jobs where they they meet, there’s like this exchange of humanity that goes on. But then also we’re also simultaneously trying to figure out, like, how much do I pour out and then how much can it change in the world? You’ve you’ve experienced both a shocking lack of empathy over wildly important stories like Darfur. Like, I wonder if it makes you. This amount of granular attention makes you feel like everybody is as capable as empathy, of empathy as you are.

Nick: Well, there’s there’s there’s been some, there’s actually been some good brain research on this. And it turns out they put people under these brain scans as they help others or get money. And it turns out that most human beings, actually, the pleasure centers, have their brains light up more when they help somebody than when they get something. But there are some egotists around. Their pleasure centers don’t really light up when they help somebody else. They light up when they when they get, not when they give. So there’s you know, there’s clearly some variance but but I mean, you know, I do think that we are more empathetic than we tend to appreciate, and that one of our failures as journalists is that we aren’t always great at the kind of storytelling that will connect people to foreign tragedies, and that people often want to help, but they don’t quite know how. And they’re, you know, then they get a call from some charity that mentions, you know, children in need or something, and they just don’t know how to help effectively. I think that we can do a better job addressing, that and that when, you know, when people have the opportunity, they do want to help, they do the right thing. We just have to be a better storytellers at it.

Kate: In the effort to make people care about Darfur, you had like structural obstacles you had to constantly chip away at to force people to look clear eyed at what you were screaming.

Nick: Well so the biggest challenge in the case of Darfur is simply to get the story. And, you know that, I mean, the Sudanese government was not big on giving visas to reporters who would go report on its genocide. And so sometimes that meant then sneaking in, hiring a vehicle in neighboring Chad and just hiring a car and just driving illegally into Sudan. Sometimes you we found other creative ways. My my most successful moment was when Kofi Annan was secretary general of the U.N., he was making a two hour trip to Darfur for kind of basically a photo op, and he agreed to take me along, on the plane. And as we were coming down for the two hour visit, I said, by the way, I went back and I saw him and I said, just, I just want you to know that I may miss the plane out, and I don’t want people to be worried if I miss the plane out. It’s okay. You can go. And he said, just be careful. And so, sure enough, two hours later, I was in the back of the crowd at the airport, saw the U.N. plane take off, and I felt so exultant because I’ve been trying so hard to get into the heart of the genocide. And now, finally, I’m there and able to report it. And Sudanese authorities don’t know why I’m there. They can’t follow me. They can’t tail me so, but then I realized that there were checkpoints all over manned by these people committing genocide, and I wasn’t quite sure how I would ever get through the checkpoints until I saw these U.N. people with their English language U.N. passes. They would just show their passes and be waved through. And I realized these soldiers of the checkpoints, they probably can’t read Arabic, let alone English. So I pulled out my United Airlines Mileageplus card. And got to the first checkpoint. It is amazing the respect that people, even in committing genocide have for United Airlines. And, I mean, one of the diciest, one of the most difficult, wrenching questions, was about how to write about things without getting people in trouble. There was, Sudan really had a policy of, of mass rape. It was a policy of rape, and it was a way of breaking down societies, discrediting village elders and tribal leaders. And but you had to have people talk about it and tell their stories. But if they did, they could get in terrible trouble. And how, you know, how do you get informed consent from somebody when they don’t know, she doesn’t know what the New York Times is, what the internet is. I remember one woman I was saying, you know, why? Why do you say you, it’s okay to tell your story. And she said, she’d been gang raped by eight, eight Janjaweed, eight of these people, and brutally beaten. And she said this is the only way I have to fight back and tell my story. So I sort of understood that, and protected her. And I was able to go back two years later to that same spot, and and she was okay. But I just the responsibility you feel for other people’s lives is just such a burden.

Kate: Witness does this really strange thing to both parties, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Nick: I mean, they’re not passive. They’re, you know, they’re agents you have. And you have to treat them that way.

Kate: Yeah.

Nick: Somehow having the giving them the respect that they are in this impossible situation, but they are making choices. And, they’re not these two-dimensional, you know, victims. They are fully complicated people. And, and you try to help them and figure out, you know, how you do that without breaking journalistic rules. And the most troubling ethical dilemma that Sheryl and I ever faced was in, China when there was a young man who was arrested because he had helped us cover the Tiananmen democracy movement, and then he escaped from prison, and he came to Beijing and asked us for help fleeing China. What do you do? You know, the pretty basic rule of being a foreign correspondent, that you don’t help an escaped felon flee the country. On the other hand, he’s a 19 year old guy who’d already been in prison because he’d helped New York Times readers. If we didn’t help him, at some point, he was going to get caught. Who knows what would have happened to him then? And it was I mean, it was also complicated a little bit because I’d never heard of anybody escaping from a Chinese prison before. And I just, you know, I wondered, how real is this? Could this be an entrapment effort? Could this be a setup to imprison us and get us, you know, close a New York Times bureau? And and I agonized over this. And Sheryl, I must say, had a truer moral compass than I did, and she said we just have to help him. And we did. And he was able to get with our help to Hong Kong. And then we flew to Hong Kong and, we able to get him to the US. He’s now an American. It’s probably nothing I’ve done that was so unprofessional. But two things that I’ve done that I’m prouder of.

Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. Father, Greg Boyle, who is like everybody’s favorite Jesuit. You kind of have to have one. And he’s like, not a bad choice, likes to say that unhope is lethal. And I wondered your, like, fundamental Tiggery-ness, where you have bounced the likes of which… Like on your spare time, when you should be resting, you’re like hiking or doing other horrible things. I wondered if, as we go into this next year as people are already pre-fatigued by feeling a lack of urgency, a frustration, a despair, our things that that what we our small efforts don’t matter. And but now seems like a lovely time to absorb a little bit of Nickness in this.

Nick: So there’s people, I think young people in particular, you know, they look around, they say, you know, I’ll never be able to afford a house. Democracy is under threat. Climate change may ruin our planet. And, you know, those are all real. And the challenges around us are very real. But we’ve always faced immense challenges in this country and abroad. And I think that our mind, our brains sometimes aren’t don’t fully acknowledge how much progress there has also been, what we’ve overcome. I, you know, Sheryl, is a Chinese-American. Our marriage, a, interracial marriage, was not allowed in every state, when I was a young kid. When you ask in polls whether global poverty is what has happened with global poverty over the last 20 years, 90% of Americans say it has stayed the same or gotten worse. In fact, we are lucky that we have lived in the most thrilling time in the history of humanity when there’s been an explosion in human well-being. When I was born, one fifth of all kids worldwide died by the age of five. Now, when I graduated from college, 11%. And now we’re down to just over 3%. Every day another 300,000 people move out of extreme poverty. Every day. When we were kids, a majority of humans had always been illiterate. Now we’re pushing 90% adult literacy. That’s transformative, especially because that increment is is largely women. And when women are literate, they can earn money, they can hold jobs, they have influence in their household, they can raise their kids more effectively. It has this revolutionary impact. And so, yes, those challenges around us are all real, but we are equipped with toolboxes to help address these. And, you know, people sometimes I think feel overwhelmed because they figure they can’t solve problems. Well, when my dad was sponsored by a family in Portland, Oregon in 1952, that didn’t solve the global refugee problem, didn’t make a dent in the global refugee problem. It was pretty transformative for the Kristof’s. Any one of us has the capacity to make a difference, and it can be in our community, you know, tutoring a kid, or supporting a shelter that can be half a world away. There’s the girls education is a cause, I believe there’s a group called camp said that that educates girls. And, I mean, you know, that any of us can afford to do that at some level in ways that don’t solve the global problem, but are completely transformative for some people somewhere. That’s the power we have. It’s a superpower.

Kate: Yes, Nick, being around you is really annoying because.

Nick: So much for hope.

Kate: I can tell. I can already think of like a couple more small steps that I can feel empowered to be a part of. And it also makes me want to change like some of my, like, knee jerk fatalism into into some into some mild to moderate… We’re not going to say optimism, but forward-thinking. And I just think we all feel really lucky that you were here with us tonight having this gorgeous conversation. Can we just thank you.

Kate: Friends, I know this is the season where we need as much hope as we can get. We need more reasons to feel like we can have courage, more chances to try again, and to believe that we are loved by God and each other into a kind of wholeness. So, my dears, may you have all the courage you need and all the honesty you crave. May you have all the audacity of a Kristoff that believes you can make a difference, and all of the earnestness of someone who leads with love, no matter the cost. And may there be more and more hope for a world in which everything happens. A big thank you to our friends in Franklin, Indiana who made this live conversation possible. Tiffany at Wild Geese Bookshop, guys, you have to go see her adorable bookstore. And thank you to the Art Craft Theater for being wonderful hosts and Sarah Groves for your gorgeous musical talent that led us through the night. We’re continuing to do live events like this one around the country, so make sure you’re on my email list so you can be the first to know when tickets become available for an event near you. Sign up at katebowler.com/newsletter. And my team loves nothing more than hearing from all of you. And I’m not kidding. We read every email and snail mail and DM and voice mail that you send us, and we actively think about ways we can continue to resource you gorgeous listeners. We’d love to hear your gentle wisdom for what keeps you hopeful right now. Leave a note on social media, I’m @katecbowler, or leave our team a voicemail—call us at (919) 322-8731. And if you would do me a quick favor: podcast land loves when people review and subscribe. It’s this thing that boosts the show’s visibility and gets it in front of new listeners. So if you’re a fan in any way, if you wouldn’t mind taking a minute to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it would help so much.

Kate: And a big thank you to my team and our partners for everything they do and everything they’ve put into this season, which I’m so excited about. And that’s a song for you. And also to Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School that supports all of our projects. This podcast is my favorite group project. These are the people I love. Jessica Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer and Katherine Smith. Who would I be without you? Nothing. Pretty sure nothing. Next week, I’m sitting down with a dear friend. Richard Hayes is a world-renowned scholar on all things Jesus, and he’s also someone I have walked through the trenches with as we faced our diagnoses at the same time. This is a conversation that’s very precious to me, and I can’t wait for you to meet him. I’ll talk to you next week, my dears. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.