David Conrad

David Conrad: [00:00:00] If you have been given by the Lord a mind that can absorb facts and retain them well, and I think I was just given one of those as a gift and then the ability to articulate those things, and I was given that pretty much as a gift. Then you’ve got a commodity that’s in high demand in the evangelical church in America. You can teach. It can exist completely independent of any intimacy with God, and yet it can be very highly valued in the church. So to have, a, what would appear to be a flourishing life as a Christ follower in the context of the American church is one thing. But and by the way, I think one of the greatest things I’ve observed, especially, I’m in my mid sixties now, especially over this last decade, is how much God is not embarrassed by how long it took me to get here. And I’m super grateful for that. So I don’t, I’m really trying to set down shame as it might relate to where I was 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago -kind of thing. I just don’t think that has any [00:01:00] value in understanding things.

Nathan Wagnon: Hey guys, as part of our Stories of Transformation, I am really pumped right now to be able to bring to you David Conrad. David is a recent friend of mine over the last couple of years. It’s interesting, one of the beautiful things about being in the body of Christ is to be able to meet people from around the world and to immediately have an affinity with them and for them. And that’s definitely true with this brother. So, I’m excited to bring his story to you guys today. Dave, we’re just gonna jump right in, man. I would love to just hear what would it have been like to have a bird’s eye view into your relationship with the Lord over the last however long you’ve been a Christian?

David Conrad: As I look back, I think I was trying to prove to everyone, including God, that I deserve to be in his kingdom. And when you and I first got to know each other and you talked about, you know, what most evangelicals think about what God thinks of them. The word [00:02:00] disappointment just super resonated with me, and that had actually come into my mind into some focus before we even met each other, Nathan, that, I remember having nasty thoughts and dreams about things that you just ought to engrave on my headstone. “He’s a disappointment”. And I’m aware that I have been given some wonderful gifts by the Lord. I take no credit for them, but just to speak the truth, I’ve been given a nice intellectual gift and a community that I could flourish in and whatnot, and worked for an American university for 25 years in the middle of my career and I was an environment that really encouraged and flourished in that kind of giftedness, but it did nothing to say that I had value apart from what I could do for you. And as I was in these recent years, really trying to do the hard work of reevaluating my own journey and how does that shape my perspective on things and to really come to a clear understanding that my own journey as a young person, what have you, to try to broker a peaceful environment in [00:03:00] my home growing up, and then to be responsible to manage a series of ceasefires so that the family could still function, I think wove into me this notion that to the extent that I can solve your problems, I have value and created what a dear friend and therapist that I have talked with and worked with in my life, said was a profoundly externally focused identity that I felt good about myself to the extent that I could perceive that you felt good about me, and there was nothing else in that equation. It’s like I didn’t get a vote in that. It was just what I perceived. It’s radical codependence at one level when you get right down to it. 

Nathan Wagnon (Narration): So here David is definitely correctly diagnosing this, it is a radical codependence. Yet what he is highlighting is the fact that so many of us, gain or draw our identity from what we can do. This is a deeply formed and habituated problem in our society because this is actually the way [00:04:00] that our society functions. Your value is directly linked to what you can provide for me. And so we’ve gotta recognize that the way of Jesus and the way that things actually are are being pressed upon by a transactional society that’s actually malforming us away from the way that we’re designed.

David Conrad: I think God was really generous to me in that I was perceiving his grace, perceiving his faithfulness, perceiving a journey in sanctification and growing in him. But when Jeremiah says, let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me.I think I was really long on understanding and really short on knowing. And I think that this last season has been this marvelous sort of awakening of what it is to [00:05:00] know God in a relational sense as opposed to knowing about him in a factual sense, and it hasn’t attenuated the value of the knowledge or the understanding. It hasn’t made that less valuable, but it has put it in a very different context that there’s nothing being proven, there’s no certificate being earned in order to, or however you might finish that sentence kind of thing. So it’s been a radical sort of transition going forward that this notion that originally I start with a overarching feeling that God’s likely disappointed. I gave you all these gifts and this is all you could do with it, kind of thing. It was that kind of perspective. To now, actually believing that . . . like once in a while, I’m a lay elder at our church. Once in a while they rotate me into the preaching rotation. And one of the beautiful repercussions of this last journey was when I walk off the platform after preaching. I’ve learned to spend a moment just absorbing God’s [00:06:00] gratitude for my utility to him instead of criticizing where I know I flubbed some word or screwed something up or what have you. But to actually experience his delight in me as his child, trying to introduce others to a savior who loves them and to stay in that space rather than go all into the assessment critical space is an example of how that’s had a practical implication for me. 

Nathan Wagnon (Narration): Okay, now we’re getting to the point in David’s story where you’re starting to see a shift, right? He has this awareness that something is off. He begins to start to identify that wait a minute, I’ve been malformed in some ways, some pretty significant ways that are affecting how I’m living my life and affecting my relationship with the Lord and so what he starts to do is actually moving toward God in relationship about those things. And that’s so critical because now instead of trying to manage his resume or do more things for God now, even in his [00:07:00] giftedness, he’s taking those things to God in relationship. To experience a deep identity affirmation from God instead of the things that he’s doing. That is really important. 

David Conrad: I was standing in the bathroom one morning getting my, I don’t know, brushing my teeth or something like that, getting ready to start the day and you’re standing there in the mirror so glad that no one in your acquaintance is there, kind of thing. But God showed up and said, no, that’s the dude, that’s the guy I made, and I’m not the least bit ashamed to do business with him. To be there in your just profoundly vulnerable self, fortunately private, but your profoundly vulnerable self. You can all create the picture in your head of what that moment is like, In the morning you’re shaving, you’re brushing your teeth, whatever. And in that moment, God showed up and strangely made my bathroom holy [00:08:00] ground. And to be at my least impressive and have God say, no, this is the guy. I know how I made you, I did it with great, forethought and I’m ready to do business with you. I don’t need you to perform. I don’t need you to earn this or impress that or pass this test or whateve. I have things I want to do with you. I, it is not like I feel a release from his continuing work in my life. If anything, the intensity has gone up, but it’s just the, the cart’s no longer before the horse. In a sense. It’s no longer so as to earn, but because I’ve received kind of thing. 

Nathan Wagnon (Narration): This is such a beautiful moment in David’s story that knowing him has made a profound impact on his life. As you guys are hearing, it actually reminds me of a conversation I had with Kurt Thompson one time [00:09:00] when Kurt said, we don’t delight in God. We delight in the fact that God delights in us. And that’s a really critical distinction because I feel like so many people out there know that they should delight in God.  And so they’re like, oh, I should, yeah, I should delight in the Lord, but I don’t. And it creates a lot of tension in people’s interior lives, and I think that one of the keys in transformation is to get beyond that. To recognize that delight of God comes from, its origin is the reality that God delights in us, that he delights in you. And all you have to do to prove this if you have kids, is just go delight in your kids and see what happens. [00:10:00] Like the delight is absolutely there, but it’s only there as we are delighting in them. And so a really important distinction that David is highlighting here. 

David Conrad: If step one in this journey was awakening to a completely different relational dynamic between me and the God who saved me, if that’s step one. Step two is to recognize that I had constructed, and I’m gonna borrow some of Eden’s language here. I had constructed I guess it even predated that, but a false self. And hanging out with some of my friends in the Eden project has really added some interesting texture to this, false self. I had created a version of myself that was optimized to impress others and to impress God. And thus earn friendship, relational positions whatever, professional favor, whatever. But it was all about earning, not about being kind of thing. So there was an axiomatic or kind of [00:11:00] preexisting condition of insufficiency that had to be overcome by an overachieving sort of thing. It was the context I was in, but I think there’s something about how the human brain is made that as we learn language and it allows us to. Understand things with greater clarity and that all of a sudden now it’s easier for us to address things and to make progress in areas because whatever that linguistic side of our brain is, it helps us organize that information in a way that allows us to work with it better. And I think just becoming aware of this whole, what is a false self and what it is, its both, its damage and frankly, what is it? What is its utility in protecting us while we’re still trying to figure out how to navigate life. 

Nathan Wagnon (Narration): Okay. Gotta stop here just for a second, because that was just an awesome commercial for Eden Resources. So we have a ton of resources for you guys. You can check ’em out at theedenproject.com/resources. What David’s talking about is the mission of the Resources Arm of Eden [00:12:00] Project, which is to give them a new paradigm to think about these things, which will allow and give them space for deeper relationship and intimacy with themselves, with others, and ultimately with God.

David Conrad: This forward progress following kind of an awakening of understanding God’s love has been to find enough quiet in my life to create a safe place for me to do the inward work to say no, what really is going on in my heart? And I. I think one of the interesting discoveries of my latter years is that I think, and I’ve been a part of this, I think that we have done the Christian Church a great disservice in acting like because salvation is by faith alone through grace alone or by grace alone, through faith alone and all of that, which is absolutely true and fabulous. We make it sound like there’s no effort involved. But in point of fact, there is significant effort involved and for me, I have to [00:13:00] provide quiet times. We use the term solitude and silence, but I have to provide chunks of time for me to let the noise quiet down. One, one of my favorite stories, Nathan, when I was an undergraduate, I was studying engineering in Southern California and the university I was going to had what they call an anechoic chamber and it’s a huge room with giant foam box on the walls. Four feet deep pyramids of foam. And you go in this room and they close this door that’s, five feet thick and what have you. And after you’ve been in there for about five minutes, you can hear the valves of your heart open and close. You can hear the sound of your breathing, it sounds like a torrent, and you hear all kinds of things that you become aware of whats going on in your body that you couldn’t hear until you had been in the quiet and you had to be in the quiet for a while. My first reaction to that is I was astonished that my ears were still capable of hearing things that quiet, that the noise I experience in day-to-day life hadn’t made my ears incapable of it. That [00:14:00] was the first thing, but the second thing was this, wow, all of this stuff is happening down there. And so that little experience I had, I dunno, 40 years ago as an undergraduate, there’s a spiritual parallel to that, that I have to create a space that’s quiet enough so I could find me here. So my journey is more satisfying. My journey of the Lord even saying hard things to me is more satisfying now and there are hard things that he is doing for me. I am a lay elder at my church and dealing with church stuff is just hard and messy and demanding on your soul. And you’ve gotta be able to somehow put the Lord back in because life is sucking it out. And those processes for me. Require, not that I perform better, but usually that I, find a time to sit [00:15:00] alone. Okay –  I certainly wouldn’t project this on anybody else, but one of my sons, we have twin sons that are in their mid thirties, and one of them, turned me on to smoking a pipe of all things. I don’t know, I think it’s probably my homage to CS Lewis or something. I don’t know. Turns out that he liked a tobacco called three nuns, so I went and found that tobacco. They still make it, but it takes me about a half an hour to gather up all my little kit and go and sit on my back porch outside and, pack the pipe and light it and go through and keep it lit, until it’s out at 15 or 20 minutes. It’s about a 30 minute exercise to do that. I deliberately don’t take my phone with me. I don’t take anything to read with me. It’s an intentional 30 minute pause in everything else, so that maybe by minute 27, the noise is quieted down and I can hear my heart. 

Nathan Wagnon (Narration): The practice that David is describing right now in silence and solitude is such a [00:16:00] critical practice that very few people actually make time to listen to God even in prayer. Most prayer practices are people talking to God about some kind of plot line in their life that has tension around it, and they’re asking for resolution and they’re asking God for something. But rarely do we sit down and create space to actually listen to God. And this is a – for where David is in his story- this kind of practice becomes really critical because the Christian life is not about what we say to God primarily, but what he says to us. And unless we learn how to slow down and listen and approach God with confidence, then we’re not gonna be able to hear what he’s saying to us.

David Conrad: We have not made it a practice of, in any way systematically teaching the importance of that. Throughout our journey I [00:17:00] take great delight in helping people understand the arc and the flow of the history of the Old Testament. And I have taught. I don’t know, sometimes 16 weeks, 20 weeks. I’ve taught, surveys, the Old Testament, all this kind of stuff, and been through, bazillions of facts and never once in there does it occur to me to say how important it was that Jesus pulled his people into the wilderness. So as to create a relationship with them and they looked through that lens. And then to use that as an opportunity to teach that. A friend of mine and I were teaching through the Old Testament. He had the best quote, the entire series when he was talking about the Exodus. He said First God saved his people and then he taught them how to be his people. I have a friend here in Huntsville, Alabama named Gordon. He and his wife, have had incredible impact in world missions. He and his wife have traveled all over the world. They’ve never had a multi-year assignment overseas, but they’ve gone for six months. And here and five months there, and four months there. And mainly because [00:18:00] he is a genius at commercial construction. And so he’s built, 15 buildings to build a seminary in Uganda. And he has been in countries that we can’t even name kind of things. He had a fascinating journey. His professional journey was that he taught in the trades. He taught carpentry and commercial construction and steel construction and things like that. And he said something to me the other day that has really stuck in my mind. He said, when I’m teaching at a trade school, I don’t teach so that my students can know I teach so that they can do. And in a few weeks I had the responsibility of introducing the Sermon on the Mount at our church as preaching. And it’s just fascinating to me to look through that lens that Gordon gave me and to think that I. Nobody was sitting on the mount with a, with an iPad taking notes or a voice recorder recording it, or even writing anything down as if those kind of tools were available. No, the purpose of that teaching was to transform the way people lived, not to give them more knowledge so that they could be [00:19:00] puffed up by, or share or anything else he wanted. Jesus was trying to change them into people that felt at home in his kingdom, I think that was the purpose of the Sermon on the Mount. So this notion that I’m trying to grow out of a mode of aggregating facts and into a mode of deepening a connection is what the season is. I’m still figuring out what my version of spiritual disciplines are that match what the Lord’s trying to do in me. The notion that my pace and practice for my season right now might have more to do with sitting on my porch with nothing – because the aggregation of more knowledge isn’t the key, it’s the implementation of living in a relationship. That is what my need is not to learn more facts. 

Nathan Wagnon (Narration): So the way that David is talking about his relationship with the Lord is really common among those who have taken a very deliberate slowing inward journey. To discover [00:20:00] really what is the spiritual life? Who is God? Who am I? What is this all about? And one of the main things that happens in that journey is a paradigm shift from I need to know more and do more to basically, Hey, how? While the knowledge and the activity is important, the knowledge and the activity is not an end to itself, but a means to deeper intimacy and relationship with God. And so you shift from knowing and doing primarily to using the knowing and doing it in order to cultivate intimacy with the Lord. So it shifts from doing things for God to actual God himself. And that is a really critical shift.

David Conrad: There’s the stuff that I’m really walking away from with intentionality, that God is not sitting there scoring my performance today and deciding whether or not a relational investment in me is worth the return of investment. He’s not in that space and, but I think in [00:21:00] my head there’s this middle ground where he says, what Jesus did on the cross covered your sins. It’s almost like the last part of that sentence is, so I’m willing to forgive you, that’s not the same thing as what Jesus did was so comprehensive that I actually delight in being with you. And so one of the things that Dan, again, my spiritual director and I have talked about a good bit is that scene, I think it’s near the end of the book of John where Jesus is on the beach, the guys are discouraged. We’re post-resurrection and they’re out fishing ’cause they got no idea what else to do kind of thing. They can’t catch any fish. They come in – Jesus asks how’s your fish? I didn’t catch anything. Go back out and try the other side. They still haven’t figured it out it’s Jesus, of course, I love this story. They catch all the fish and then Peter realizes, it’s Jesus and he jumps in the water. This notion of having the joyful experience of sitting on the beach, sharing a meal with Jesus. And he’s got nothing better to [00:22:00] do than that is a really profound thought, and it’s very different than that middle space where his substitutionary atonement is sufficient. You almost go into mathematical language when you talk about that, but to recognize that understanding that is not valueless, but it’s in order that we might sit on a beach with our butt in the sand and laugh together and I dunno, grill fish together or whatever, in that particular context.But, so I think that what this journey has been is to push past the scoring God, and I’m still working past the, I think I’ll put up with you, God. Yeah. And occasionally experience the. Isn’t it great to sit on a beach together? God.

Nathan Wagnon (Narration): What we’re starting to hear from David now is the [00:23:00] transformation of his God image. Through his inward journey, he has learned to identify areas of his image of God that are wounded, and also identify areas of his false self where he’s defending against insecure relational patterns, and he’s beginning to experience his true self, vulnerable, exposed, real, drenched in joy, able to sit by Jesus next to a fire on a beach.

David Conrad: It’s been interesting. My wife Jane and I have really been on an interesting journey when the Lord awakens you to things like this. You immediately wanna shake everyone around you and say no don’t you realize! But no you realize, the Lord has his own path and pace and sequence and everything else for others. But it is transformative, but it’s learning [00:24:00] something new and it takes a while before it is the way we think. When I was a young engineer, I had a boss named Gerard. Gerard was a profoundly gifted mathematician, and I’ve never been a great mathematician, but he was a profoundly gifted one, and we were working on some stuff inside how a big radar works – together- and to watch him apply some really complex mathematics to how to problem solve in the context of what we’re trying to design in this radar was just amazing to watch. And I got to learn later that Gerard’s parents were both professors of mathematics and that he just grew up in an environment where it was very natural for him to assimilate these tools to the point where doing sophisticated what we call digital single processing was as complex to him as a screwdriver is to me, and I think I’m still very much on the journey of this awareness of God and his, as you said, his benevolence, his love towards me. I’m still awakening to that, but it’s something that I have to remind myself of, it’s still a new thing I’m learning.