It's good to be back.  So, it's great to be back. Man, you guys are so kind. And Jane and I miss every weekend that we're not here, but we had a great summer sabbatical. You know, the first probably 15 years of the church, we took just a couple of weeks off at a time throughout the year. And so I'm just so grateful for the amazing team at all of our locations that have been able to lead and direct in our absence and preach in this pulpit week after week.  Pastor Tim, Pastor Stefan, Pastor Rick Burmeister and just my whole lead team cabinet. They've just done an amazing job. Hey, on our sabbatical, Jane and I added to our family. And so we wanna introduce to you our new, our new friend.  He's got paws the size of a lion cub. And so he's had us up early and breaking us in. And but we wanted to introduce him to you. That's one of the things that we did. And you know, most of the time throughout the year when I'm not in the pulpit here at Radiant, it's because part of the call that God's put on our lives is to minister to other churches and to help establish and lead a movement of churches. And so a lot of times that's where we are. But most of the last, I don't know, six weeks that we've not been here have just been us taking some time to rest and to refresh and to renew a little bit of vacation time. And we're so grateful for that, but we're excited to be back. And so I want to invite you, if you would open your Bibles to John chapter 15. John chapter 15, as we're kind of bringing this John series, we're coming near to the conclusion of it this summer. But John chapter 15 is probably one of my favorite chapters in the entire Bible, because it has everything to do with abiding in the vine and the vine is Jesus. This is one of the pivotal teachings that Jesus gave us as his disciples. And as we dig down deep into it this morning, you're gonna see that this is not just theory, this is organic life. This is what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And so beginning in verse number one, Jesus says, by the way, this is his final I am statement in the book of John. But Jesus says, I am the true vine. And my father is the vine dresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away in every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you, abide in me and I in you as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit for apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he's thrown away like a branch and withers and the branches are burned or the branches are gathered thrown into the fire and burned. Verse seven, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. By this my father is glorified that you bear much fruit. So prove to be my disciples. As the father loved me so I have loved you, abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love. Verse 11, these things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. So Jesus starts off this teaching in John chapter 15 by making a profound statement. He says, I am the true vine. I am the true vine. My father is the vine dresser and you are the branches but I am the true vine. And then 10 times in this section, he's gonna use the word abide, abide in me. It's a significant word.  It reminds me when I think about the relationship that Jesus is calling us to as disciples of Jesus that were to remain in union with him and to abide in him. It reminds me of the vacuum cleaner that my grandmother had when I was a kid and I would spend summers with her. Part of my responsibility was to vacuum the house.  They had the orange, burnt orange and rust and brown shed carpet. You guys remember that from the 70s? Well, my grandparents held it for a long time but they had this rainbow cleaner. Does anybody remember those rainbow vacuums? It was during the era of Star Wars. So I thought it looked like C3P or R2-D2. It was like this thing.   The only problem with this vacuum was that its cord was too short because in older homes like that, they didn't put electrical outlets like every five feet. It was like 25 feet to the electrical outlet but the problem was the length of the living room was about 30 feet. And so I would plug it in. I'd put the attachments on, flip it up. She had the deodorizer you'd put on the inside of it and so it smelled like, I don't know, a new car or something like that. And I'm vacuuming and everything was going okay but then I would get over to the edge where the phone was, where the piano was and that's where the cable, the cord that was plugged into the wall, that's where it got stretched to its fullest length. And as I was trying to reach, it was this, it was 50% of the time, you could get to the edge of the wall. The other 50% of the time, if you moved it too quick, it would unplug from the wall. And there's nothing more frustrating to a teenage kid when you're vacuuming and you're just wanting to get it done.  And the key was you had to be so cautious when you're pulling the vacuum over there that you didn't make a jerky move, it had to be slow and very thoughtful so that you could get to the edge because otherwise you would unplug from the power source. And it reminds me to some degree about what Jesus is talking about because you and I live in an electrical world. We understand vacuums far better than we understand farms. We understand electrical equipment that are plugged into the walls far better than we understand what a vinter or a vine dresser who's growing vines in order to produce wine. We don't understand that world. We think wine is something you buy at the store in a bottle, but actually before it's ever in a bottle, it's rain in the clouds that falls into the soil of the ground that's captured by the root system and pulled up into the vine and pushed out into the branches. And once it reaches the oxygen and the photosynthesis and the heat of the sun, it begins to put forth its blossom and then its cluster. And then it grows in the cluster and then the vine dresser comes and he collects the fruit. And there's a whole process to it. You and I don't understand it, but we get electrical equipment. And so you know when something is unplugged, maybe it's your phone charger. Has anybody in this room ever gone to bed at night thinking you're charging your phone, wake up in the morning and realize there's no charge because it wasn't plugged into the wall? Anybody ever had that happen to you? Yeah, it's not, that's like, now you all day long, you're like, man, my battery is draining. When Jesus talks about abiding in him and that he's the true vine, what he's saying is I'm the power source, I'm the life source. I'm the one that sustains you and strengthens you. Life is found in me. You are branches plugged into me. Remain in me, abide in me because as long as you abide in me, power and life and fruit is gonna produce out of your life, but you can have all the right mechanisms. You can go to church, you can have a Bible, you can call yourself a Christian, but if we're not living in an abiding relationship with Jesus, eventually what happens is we plug our lives into other vines in order to find quick, easy and accessible life, energy and power to sustain us. This is why Jesus makes a statement that I'm the true vine because he's not the only vine, but he's the true vine. He's not the only vine. And think about it for a moment today. What are some of the vines that you and I are tempted on a daily basis? Maybe what are some of the vines that before you came into Jesus, your life was plugged into and you were drawing life from, you were drawing purpose from, you were drawing meaning from, you were drawing an adrenaline rush from. This is kind of how we live our lives, right? I mean, think about some of the other vines. Maybe some of the other vines that you can think of are selfish desire. It's like, I'm plugged into this idea, a world system that says, if you live for yourself, then you'll be happy in the long run. And so you did that and you plugged your life into that belief system, but yet it didn't produce the fruits of righteousness, did it? Or maybe you plugged into the vine of religion, which looks just like Jesus. It says, if you do all these things, check the boxes. If you go through the motions, if you're christened, if you say the right prayers, if you read the right books, if you know the right people, if you look the right way, then you'll find life, but actually it doesn't produce eternal fruits of righteousness out of our life. It actually produces other fruit out of our lives. It produces pride. It produces self-sufficiency. Sometimes it produces arrogance. It also produces brokenness, frustration and disappointment. How many people are out there in the world thinking that they're plugged into Jesus, but they're actually plugged into religion and they're not satisfied with the fruit flowing out of their lives because there's no joy, there's no peace, and there's no righteousness that's found in religion. It's only found in relationship. This is what Jesus means when he says, abide in me. He's saying, this is an ongoing, constant, active relationship between a disciple and his Lord that produces a fruitful life. It's a constant and an active, unified relationship between the disciple and his Lord that is producing a fruitful life. And can I just tell you today that that's what God's intentions and desires for every single one of our lives is. It's fruit. It's fruitfulness. Now, some people would say in the church, there's a lot of fruity people already. I'm not talking about that kind of fruit. I'm talking about the fruit of the spirit. I'm talking about the good works that we're saved for. Listen, the vine of religion says that you get saved for good works or you get saved by your good works. But the true vine, Jesus says, no, once you're plugged into me, you're not saved by the things that you do, but when you're plugged into an active, ongoing, living relationship with me, what flows out of your life is good works. You're not saved by good works, but you are saved for good works. Ephesians chapter two says you are his workmanship. In other words, God built you. He put you together.  You are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus. Four good works. God predetermined those good works. So God has good works for you. He wants fruit to flow out of your lives. But you never see a tree, if you were to go look at a vine, how many of you have ever seen like grape vines on the side of a hill or maybe out in St. Joe or in Napa or someplace like that? When you see these vines and you go out there, you don't see vines on the rails going, I gotta produce some grapes. I mean, trees are not trying. Grape vines are not welches. I gotta produce some welches. But yet how many of us are looking in a mirror at our life and thinking if I'm gonna be a good Christian, if I'm gonna be loved by God, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta get more effort. Now, don't get me wrong. God wants fruitfulness out of our lives, but fruitfulness is not you and I just trying harder. This is the false vine of religion. It's the vine that says, try harder, do better. Hey, I've got good news for you this morning. You can't do it. Let me just, I'm gonna tell this side guys, okay. I got good news for you today. You can't do it. See, they're better, they're fruits popping right over here, let me give you a try. I got good news for you guys. You can't do it. They beat you. I can hear portage all the way over here in Richland. You can't do it. Jesus says, a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it, everybody say it, abides. Let's try it together. Abides, say that word out loud. Abides. Constant ongoing relationship between the branch and the vine, constant ongoing living relationship between the disciple and his or her Lord that produces fruitfulness. The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that you are not enough, but Jesus is. That's the good news of the gospel. You can't do it in your own strength. You can't make yourself better, stronger, faster. You can't do it in and of yourself, but Jesus can.  It is eternal, it is forever, it is saving, it is redeeming, it is restoring, and it is otherworldly. When your life has absolutely no reason for it to look the way that it does because of the righteousness of God bearing through you, that is the fruit that Jesus wants you to bear so that the world sees it in you. Jesus is the true vine, is the life source, and our responsibility is we have to be rightly related to the vine. The father is the vine dresser. Jesus is the vine, and when we get saved, we make Jesus the Lord of our lives. We're plugged into that vine and his life flows in us just like that extension cord on a vacuum.  But then we also trust this that Jesus says very clearly that the father is the vine dresser and that he has a role in our lives as well. You see, fruit is the goal. It starts off in verse number three by saying he wants you to bear fruit, and then again in verse number three, he wants you to bear more fruit, and then ultimately in verse five, it says that you might bear much fruit. Notice there's a progression. This is a picture of Christian maturity. I want you to bear fruit, and then bear more fruit until you bear lots of fruit. Well, how do we get to the place? How do we go through the process of maturity? While we're staying in relationship with Jesus, avoiding the traps of religion and self do-it-yourself, self-improvement mentalities, how do we stay in Jesus and actually live fruitful lives to where we're abounding in fruitfulness? We're not just bearing a little bit. How does that work? That's where the father steps in. The father's the vine dresser. And Jesus says about the father, it says that he prunes those branches so that they may bear more fruit.  In our human mentalities, here's what we often think.  If I bear fruit, then I'm good. Hey, I'm doing the right things. God's gonna leave me alone. But can I just tell you something today? I wanna change your paradigm related to this. You and I don't want God to leave us alone. I know in our flesh sometimes we're like, I think there's a subtle attitude that we have with God. It's like, okay, God, I'm doing the right things. All right, I'm going to church. Are we good? I'm reading my Bible. Are we good? I prayed the right prayers. Nothing's gonna go wrong, right? Nothing's gonna be difficult. Nothing's gonna be challenging. If I just do the right things, God will leave me alone. Do you know where that mentality originates in the garden of Eden? After Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their eyes were open. They began to see through a different lens. Now God, the father comes down into the garden. Notice God is a gardener from the very beginning. He comes down into the garden and what does he want? Ongoing, active, living relationship with Adam and Eve. But what's their response? Now that they've eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they hide behind a tree. They're hiding from it. Because what they don't want is they don't want God to prune them. And this is the mentality that oftentimes we get into. It's like, hey, if I'm doing the right things, God's gonna leave me alone. But Jesus said, no, when you're doing the right things, when you're growing and in the seasons where you're bearing fruit, I want you to know that the father is going to be involved in your life. And here's how the father is going to be active and involved in even a fruitful life. He's going to prune us. Now if your immediate response to that is, oh, then what you don't really understand is why the father prunes. It's not him coming to cut the vine to destroy it. It's him coming to mature the vine so that it reaches its maximum fruitful potential. And that's God's desire for us. As followers of Jesus, he doesn't just want us saved and going to heaven. He wants our lives to bear fruit. And part of what he does is he says, abide in me, Jesus, abide in me and I'm gonna abide in you. And then realize the father is not a distant, removed, neglectful or even angry father, but he's a good gardener. And he's gonna bring pruning into our lives. If you look at the life of a vine, especially a grapevine, and this is most likely what Jesus is referring to. And part of the reason why Jesus uses this metaphor in John 15 is if you look in Jeremiah and Isaiah and Ezekiel in the Old Testament, Israel as a nation is oftentimes typified as a vine, a vineyard or a vine.  So the father has sent me to be the true vine. And everybody who hears my words and believes and chooses to rely on me and not just religion is gonna be tapped into me and given access to eternal life. But remember, the father is the vine dresser. This is the context of it. It's for Israel, but it's for every single one of us. But if you understand the life of a vine in a vineyard, there's three primary seasons. There's the first season, the primary season, which is the fruit season. This is where, man, if you've ever seen rows and rows and rows of grape vines, like in Napa or in some place that's well known for their grape yield, these purple, beautiful clusters of grape, just pulling down on these branches, on these vines, they're just heavy with the fruit. And it's an awesome season. It's leading up into the harvest time in which the grapes are gonna be picked and they're gonna be smashed and the juice is gonna then be stored and it's gonna go through a fermentation process. And it's the goal. That's the goal, but it's not the only season. See, after the fruit has been collected by the gardener, vine branches go into a season of dormancy, a winter season. A season where the branches that once bore great weighted fruit now go into a season, into a time of dormancy, and oftentimes some of the branches that bore the best fruit now become old, they become thick, and they are no longer going to bear fruit. But it's in this dormancy that that becomes clear. That then leads into the third season, which is the spring season, that the farmer then goes out into the vineyard and he looks at the vines and he can measure it by the bark and the skin on it. The old branches, the old branches that once upon a time were great, bore great fruit, now have to be cut back. And other vines that are new vines need to be trimmed as well. And it is a setup for more fruit to come in the season. And what will happen is a new vine will bear a little bit of fruit, but old vines produce the most fruit when they are care taken. But when vines are left unpruned, eventually what can happen is vines that one time had great yield no longer bear any fruit because they get blocked from the life force. You see the root system goes down deep into the soil and it brings up the water and it turns it into life when it's mixed with sunlight and then it begins to oxygenate and it puts forth its blossoms and then it's fruit and it's a beautiful process that happens. But here's why it's important for us to understand the three seasons. It's because you and I as Western-minded, technological, post-modern people, we think in terms of semesters when it comes to growth, knowledge and advancement, we've been trained from the time we go to preschool to think in terms of semesters. But God thinks in terms of seasons, not semesters. What God teaches us, He doesn't teach us in semesters. He teaches us in seasons. And sometimes the seasons that seem to be the hardest seasons in our faith are actually the setup for the most fruitful seasons in the future if we do not grow weary and we abide in Him. In 2008, we had pastored Radiant Church for, well, it started in 1996, so we were about 12 years in. 2007 into 2008, we had just come off the heels of a pretty major building campaign. Our church was growing really quickly. I was a young pastor in the first 12 years of pastoring. I had, I used to preach three Sunday mornings. We had Wednesday night service every Wednesday. And then I also taught a young adult ministry up in Grand Rapids on Thursday nights. And on top of that, Jane and I were raising three kids, three children at that time. And we were also building a house at the same time that we had just built the sanctuary. We just had all kinds of stuff going on. And I thought, I thought, man, this is light.  It's been great. And look at all the fruit that we're producing. Look at all the fruit that's going on. It was a good season. And then in 2008, coming into 2008, hit one of the most difficult seasons of my life. You might think to yourself, pastors don't have difficult seasons, do they? I mean, life's pretty easy.  How can life be hard? Now, I personally went into a season where I had never experienced burnout before. I didn't know it. Nobody shows up with a subpoena and says, hey, you're going into a season of burnout and depression. But all of a sudden I began to experience it. I began to experience anxiety.  Panic attacks. I would cry for no reason. I mean, I had always looked at people who had experienced depression and thought to myself, well, they must just be emotionally kind of, there's some, maybe weakness there or something. I don't know. It's just some people are more melancholy than others. I was just kind of prided myself on the fact that, I just put my head down and kept going and plowed and plowed and plowed. Now, for the first time, my emotions felt like I was sad a lot. The only time that I did not feel depressed was when I would stand up into the pulpit. I would come up these stairs and as soon as my feet touched the platform immediately, the grace and the anointing of God came on me. But as soon as I walked back down, I walked right back down into depression. And it was a dark season. It was a winter season where places of my life that had borne fruit up until this moment, all of a sudden weren't bearing fruit anymore. And I didn't know how to, up until this point, I was just kind of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps type of person. I knew if I just prayed a little bit harder, it wasn't that I had sinned stuff going on. It wasn't like I had walked away from God and I started crying out to God, God, where are you? God, where are you? This doesn't make any sense. How am I supposed to do what you're calling me to do if I can't get myself together? And I started having this anxiety. It's like, maybe I've broken myself and I don't know how to fix myself. But through a series of reaching out to people that I trust that were overseers of my life, going to a counselor and crying out to God, I used to go up into the upper room here in Richland and I used to go up there and cry and pray the book of Psalms.  And I know that in that season, the Father drew near to me and he was saying, Leah, I love you so much. And you have borne fruit in past seasons, but this is a season where I've gotta cut back some of the insecurities, some of the ambition, some of the fears that have been driving you, some of the misconceptions about yourself, even about the church, about your role in it. I'm cutting those things back so that you can bear more fruit in this next season. And the question that the Lord asked me in that season was this, will you abide? Will you stay? Will you stay close? Will you harden your heart towards me or will you lean into me? Will you turn towards another vine? Because it's quick and because it's easy and you can get immediate relief from it? So oftentimes that's what we do. We might turn to alcohol or we might turn to drugs or a person or a relationship or some other thing that gives us an immediate out. And it's because the pain of pruning oftentimes causes us to no longer abide. It's like that cable coming out of the vacuum. It pulls out of the wall and we're looking for something that we can plug it into. But what we don't realize is that God's not trying to destroy us. God's trying to prune us. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 11, it's talking about the season, this winter season of the soul. It says, for at that moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant. Amen to that. But later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. In the moment, pruning hurts. But God's design for pruning is not to destroy but it's actually to strengthen. In the words of the great theologian, the big Lebowski, God's looking for the dude that will abide. He's looking for the son or the daughter that will abide in him. Do not grow weary for in due season, in due season you will reap if you do not faint, if you don't lose hope. You see what happens is the seasons that you and I look at as our greatest failures, if we abide in him actually become the most significant growth seasons in our lives. And this is why Jesus said, abide in me. Because if you abide in me, I'm gonna abide in you, abide in my word, verse 70 says, if my words abide in you and you abide in me, you're gonna bear fruit. See what happens is when we're abiding in his word, even in those winter seasons of our soul, we're like, God, what are you doing? Why does this hurt? God's like, I know it's not pleasant, but I love you. I'm cutting away the bark, I'm cutting away the callus things, I'm cutting away the things that you depended on our previous season because I don't want you depending on anyone or anything besides me. I came out of that season with a stronger knowledge of God's presence, a greater confidence in who I was in him and not just in me.  It wasn't me. I can do nothing. One of the greatest revelations we can get in our relationship is how inadequate we are without him. How an utterly inadequate and insufficient that we are. This isn't like, I am great, I am good enough and people like me. That's not what this is. In Christ alone, I put my trust. On Christ the solid rock, I stand and I choose to abide in him. I'm drawing from his life and the way I draw life is I'm abiding in his presence. I'm abiding in his word. I'm abiding in his love. Look at that in verse number nine. It's one of the most beautiful verses in this whole teaching, this discourse that Jesus gave. He says, as a father has loved me, so I've loved you, abide in my love. God's perfect agape love. That means he loves you. Can I just tell you something? The father loves you when there's no fruit coming out of your life. As much as he loves you when the branches are weighed down with the clusters of grapes that you can't even contain. God loves you. He says, abide in my love.  No, God is in every season. He's in the fruit seasons of your life. He's like, yeah! Lest we think this is my fruit. God, didn't I do good? God's like, no, actually that's my fruit. Through you. Oh yeah, good reminder. And it makes it a lot easier when you go into a winter dormancy season where you're just like, I don't, I feel crusty. I feel like my bark is thick. Anybody ever felt like your bark is getting thick? Let the hearer understand and feeling a little thick these days. And it's like, I don't feel like there's a lot of fruit coming out of me. Jesus, I got a bad attitude. Things that used to thrill me don't thrill me anymore. I'm reading the word out of discipline and out of obedience. But I just, I feel dry. What did I do wrong? And the father's like, no, it's all right. Because now I'm stepping into a season where I, your father, am coming. I'm gonna begin to prune some things.  Now they're stealing life from you. Things that you, that were, you know, things that were interesting to you in the last season have kind of grown, they're not bearing fruit anymore. So I'm gonna change that. Things that you used to depend on in yourself, belief systems, paradigms that you used to have. I'm trimming all that back. Why, why, Father? Why am I going through this? That's oftentimes what we ask, God, why, why, why? And God's like, you'll see in the next season. You'll see in the next season. You'll see when the grapes are bigger and the clusters are closer together and the branches are bowed heavier, you're gonna see the fruit. And can I just tell you, it leads right to what Jesus says at the very end. Verse 11, these things I've spoken to you. Why are you telling us this, God? That my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. I love that.  One of the fruit of the Spirit is joy. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, all the nine fruit of the Holy Spirit. But joy, Jesus says it's not just your joy. He says my joy in you will produce your joy to the fullest. God's goal for every season of our life is to not bring us into a place of regret or of depression or discouragement. It's to bring us into a season of joy that our joy may be full. Now, I don't know what season you're in. I don't know what season you're coming out of. I don't know what season you're going into. But here's what I know is Jesus invites us to abide in him no matter what. When it seems hard, it's time to lean in. When you're on top of the mountain top and it's just like, man, I feel the presence of the Lord all the time. I'm opening up my Bible and it's like I'm getting theological revelation of the ages. It's like I'm witnessing to people and I'm leading my neighbor's dog to the Lord. It's like I can heal the sick from across the county. I mean, it's, or in seasons where it just feels like God is taking the vine dresser's blades to places of your life and is trimming back. In every season, abide, abide in Jesus. Ongoing, living, active relationship with him. Jesus, what are you doing? Father, what are you doing in me? What are you saying to me? What areas of my life are you wanting to prune back, trim? What areas of my life can you see that are crusty, that are hardened, that are not producing life, that are stealing life from other places where you want fruit to be born? God, what are you doing in me? Do you know you can ask the Father what he's doing and he's faithful and just to lead and guide us and we can know beyond a shadow of a doubt that when it's all said and when it's all done, it's gonna be joy and speakable, full of glory.  But in every season, the goal is not the grapes. The goal is abiding in him. It's abiding in Jesus. Would you stand with me wherever you're at today? All of our locations. Father, thank you today that we can trust you with our lives. As we abide in Jesus, as we abide in the true vine, the faithful vine, we can be confident that the purposes and the plans, the destiny, the fruit that we want to see born out of our lives in due season, it's gonna be there because we're attached to you. And Father, we trust you with our lives. Trust you with our families. We trust you with our health, with our emotions, with our heart, with our dreams, with our plans, with our identity, with our purposes, with our sin, with our struggles, and with our weaknesses. Father, you're trustworthy. And every season, we know that you have our good in mind. You are for us. You are for us. And we're not gonna unplug from you.  Even in the difficult seasons, we're not gonna hide behind trees, cover ourselves up with the leaves of our own making. Lord, we want your hand upon us. We trust you. We entrust the branches of our lives into the hands of our Heavenly Father, the Gardener, because you know exactly what's needed so that we stand in the fullness of joy. I wanna invite our prayer team to make their way up along the front this morning. And here's how we're gonna dismiss today. How many of you today, it doesn't matter what it is, but you just find yourself in a season, maybe now as I'm talking about it, you're just like, ah, that's what's going on. I feel like I'm in a dry, I'm in a winter season in my relationship with God. Anybody feel like that? But I just feel like, man, this just kind of felt like a dormant season. How many of you would say, I feel like I'm in a pruning season right now? How many feel like it's a fruitful season right now? How many are like, it's almost football season. And so here's what I know is that whatever season you know yourself to be in, maybe honestly, you just don't know what season you're in. But for those of you who do, there's things that you feel like the Father has identified that he's dealing with in your life. There's power when we recognize it and we submit to it and we ask for prayer over that. There's also incredible power and unity that's released in our lives. When we recognize that I'm not where I have been before, like David talks about, I remember going into the sanctuary with the throngs and leading the way in worship, but now here I am, I'm in exile, I'm running.  It was a winter season for David. And there's no shame in that. God just says, even in that season, are you able to invite me into it? This morning there may be a thing that God is doing, a season, we use that term seasons, but it's very appropriate because that's how God works in our lives. We don't know the length of time, we don't know how far that goes, we just know that there's, that's the focus. But we can either pull away or we can draw near. And this morning I know that some of us may have some things that are going on situations that we need to yield and we need to surrender that we've been holding back from. Or even some trees that we've been hiding back from because he's calling us to abide. And this morning, whatever that is, I wanna invite you, we're gonna pray and we're gonna dismiss. But after we do that, after I pray, it may be appropriate for you to come forward and ask for prayer from our prayer team. You might think, well, I can pray on my own. Sometimes the season we're in requires two or three to come into agreement over that thing. Sometimes there's power and confession. It's what James five says and we just confess. It's like, right now I know I've gotta yield this. The father wants to prune this, he wants to trim this. Or I'm submitting to the Lord in the season that I'm in. We need to just tell somebody to pray and to consecrate that. Sometimes that's the most direct route from one season into the next.  Father today, thank you, we submit to you, Lord. Our great shepherd who promised the lead and guide us and altered Jesus, you indeed are the true vine and we will not look to another vine. The places where our life has detached from you and attached to others, Lord, supernaturally, would you plug us back in? And we make the decision today, we will abide in you.   Lord, let your life flow and your fruit grow through our lives today. In Jesus' name, amen, amen. Listen, we're gonna dismiss. Please come forward if you would like to receive prayer today.


balance. And I'm not saying I have the perfect recipe. I'm still, I continue to tinker. You know how I like to tinker with training. And how you doing Seth? What do you need? Yeah, I feel like I'm turning the corner. I didn't wake up last night. Didn't have to blow my nose. I know. I think I slept nine hours. When did we go to bed? Nine. Yeah, about five. Six, seven, eight hours. That'll hurt your back. And when you, you don't want to put it on one shoulder. You want to put it on both shoulders. Always an adventure getting the family out the door for school, but they are off on their way. And yes, a letter arrived yesterday from the New York Roadrunners. I think this is kind of cool. So I became an official member. Shout out to New York of the New York Roadrunners, even though I live in Colorado, because you do get some pretty good discounts on race registration fees if you become a member and some extra perks along the way. So I got my letter and I got my official number ready to rock and roll. So that's kind of cool. But in addition, they have a map of Central Park. So last year I was a little in the dark as far as the group run in New York City. It turned out amazing. But now this map is absolutely awesome. It gives a mileage of all the different loops. You can do, hopefully you can see that a little bit, of all the loops you can do in Central Park. So that'll come in handy in November. Okay, we're getting ready to rock and roll. Just waiting for true love to get back. Oh man, onward and upward. This clip is for everyone on the treadmill right now. Here's a little outdoor boost for you. Whoa, we got some ice. Don't fall on the treadmill and I won't fall on the ice. Here we go. Nice and easy. Back from the seven miles, basically a little under nine minutes a mile. Nice and easy today. Absorbing the training that I put into my body yesterday. Yesterday in case you didn't see the vlog was 23 miles. My long run for the week at 640 a mile. Definitely the longest run of this training block. So today, and I will say today, I ran this morning and I will be running this afternoon as well. We'll come back to that in a minute. But I thought that this topic, which came up last night in the live stream. In case you missed the live stream, we had a good time here in the studio talking about the US Olympic Marathon Team Trials. And one of the topics that came up and one of the athletes is Jake Riley, who a little bit of a dark horse out of Boulder, Colorado runs for the Boulder Track Club. And his coach is Lee Troup, an Australian and Olympian. And I don't even know which Olympics he qualified for. I will research and put it right here. All right, Lee Troup. There you go. Shout out to the Aussies. So there was an article written after Riley, Jake Riley, Jacob, Jake Riley qualified for the Tokyo Olympics. A lot of buzz around him because again, not a lot of people had him finishing in the top three. He was though the top American at the Chicago Marathon last fall. So it was really, as he put it, a dream come true for him to make the Olympics just kind of unexpected. So here we go. Here's an article which talks about absorbing our training that we put into our bodies. And it just, it runs through a very specific marathon workout. And I thought you would enjoy hearing what Jake Riley was doing, leading up to his second place finish at the Olympic trials. So here we go. And I know we're talking a lot about the Olympic trials, but it was a big event. And I think we're going to be breaking down this race for a long time. Like it's going to be talked about for a long time for a lot of different reasons, whether it was the course or the shoes or the athletes or the weather conditions that just are the depth of the, the, uh, yeah, the depth of runners on the men and women's side. So here we go. Uh, this is an article from sweat elite. It says, the other key workout which troop uses in an, is an 18 mile progression. Uh, and troop again is the coach. This should be run eight and then four weeks prior to a race with a three hour run, six weeks out. Troop aims to simulate race conditions as much as possible. Uh, the workout is completed on a three mile loop. Uh, drink, a drink table is put out to practice taking on fuel. Practice makes perfect. So three miles. So this is the workout. Three miles easy to warm up, change shoes. All right. And then miles three to six, five. And this is for Jake Riley, who's very, uh, very fast. Uh, so miles three to six, 555 to six minutes a mile, miles six to nine, 530 to 535 a mile, miles nine to 12, 515 a mile. And then miles 12 to 18, five minutes to 505 per mile. So marathon pace for him with a five second per mile concession for the 1600 meter elevation. Um, yes. Okay. So the fact, so he's doing this training at, uh, elevation in Boulder, Colorado. So Jake ran this workout significantly faster in the lead up to the trials than when he was preparing for Chicago. Troop says he executed the session really well and looked comfortable. Happy with preparation. Troop said the key things leading into Atlanta were to rest and absorb the training. Okay. There you go. Keep his attention away from media and focus on the things that he actually has control over. I love that. And it just got me thinking that on this channel, two of the most popular vlogs that I've published in the last two years are all about easy running. And the last one was about six months ago. So I like to bring this topic up every now and then where I believe the title of the blog was, I'll put it right here was why I, why I run easy in order to race fast. I believe that was the name of the blog and I'll link to it upper right hand corner to go into more detail if you'd like on this topic because we need to absorb the training that we're putting into our bodies. Now I'm an Arthur Lideard, uh, student and I do believe in raise it. So Arthur Lideard is a coach from the fifties, sixties, seventies who is from New Zealand and he's a big, he was a big pro. He's no longer alive now, but he was a big proponent of raising our heart rates as, as really as much as possible for as long as possible, long, uh, steady runs. That's why I love those two hour plus runs. Uh, but at the same time, we have to keep in mind that, and this is part of the reason why I don't train by heart rate is that we're not just, uh, stimulating our heart rate when we run. We're also putting pounding into our muscular system and into our, our skeletal system and our joints and our, our tendons and ligaments and everything is connected. So I don't like to hone in just on heart rate as much as I would be, I would love to be training in this marathon training block 175 miles a week. And I will just say last night, there was a lot of questions about Jim Walmsley and his training leading up to the Olympic trials. And I don't want to just point out Jim's training, but, um, the reason I am is because he, uh, was sharing before the trials his volume and I guarantee there were some other runners out there running very, very high volume. So for those that don't know Jim was running, he's an ultra runner, okay, who is training at 170, uh, miles a week. That's a lot. Okay. I'm training at 110 miles a week right now and that's considered to be high volume. So he was training at 175 and it came up in last night's live stream here in the studio about his training, what happened in Atlanta. He ran well, but I don't think he ran as well as he would have liked. And the question becomes, uh, do I think that, uh, that type of training, and it's not just Jim, it's a lot of other marathon training systems around the world or training programs. Do you allow your body to absorb the training, the hard training, um, when you're running at that high of volume? And, uh, there's a lot, I would argue that it does not, if you are training above, I'm going to say like above that 145, 140, I've seen some very successful marathon racers train at 140 miles a week, which is a lot. And here it is in kilometers for everyone in the kilometer world. Uh, but anything over that, it just starts flirting with, um, being very tired a lot. And Jim even said before the trials, like he was thinking about even going higher than 175 miles a week, but his legs were, uh, his body was saying like, no, that's enough. Like I, I don't, I feel too tired if I go over 175. And so if I could have it my way, yes, I would love to be training at more because I love running. Remember I asked the question of the day in 2019, like if I, and this would never, you know, this isn't a real scenario, but if I had to choose for the rest of my life between training or racing, I would choose training because I just love, I love training. I love running, but at the end of the day, we have to respect the rest, uh, the rest so that we can adapt. And most importantly, so our muscles can recover because as you know, when you, you know, when you're weightlifting, when you're doing, uh, sprinting in interval sessions, we're breaking, we're literally creating little tears in our muscles. When you race hard and you're sore, uh, the next day or probably, uh, 36 hours later, delayed onset muscle soreness, there's literally little teeny, tiny tears in our muscles and that's that sore feeling that you get. And so then our body has to rebuild our, sorry, our muscles have to rebuild and, uh, heal those little tears and that comes through rest. All right. So there you go. Absorbing our training as runners, it's critical. If you want to dive more into it once again, upper right hand corner for some more vlogs, but I just wanted to bring up this topic. I think it's fascinating with everything we witnessed in Atlanta last weekend and today I went seven miles this morning. I'll go seven miles this evening. And this is okay. Question of the day. Do you feel like you are able to build into your days? Okay. I'm back. Just got a little distracted there. Michael was walking by the studio anyway. So question of the day. Do you feel like your training program allows for enough opportunities for your body, your muscles, your everything going on when you put your, uh, body through stress and the load of training, uh, to absorb the training. So, uh, to adapt to the stresses that you're putting yourself through that is a question of the day. And frankly, everyone, I'm in the same boat. Like I'm trying to maintain high volume and still recover well enough. And like today I decided to split up the running into seven and seven. So seven miles this morning, seven miles this evening, uh, just to create two easy runs, all right? Easy pace, but still I'm still going to run 14 miles for the day because I'm still striving for that higher volume as I prepare for a long race. It's a balance. It's a balance. And I'm not saying I have the perfect recipe. I'm still, I continue to tinker. You know how I like to tinker with training and, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm doing that right now, uh, even with my absorbing days, my easy days, my recovery days. So there you go. All right. Vlogs not done. I know I'm leaving some thoughts on the table, but I love it. It's just good to get this discussion going. I look forward to reading your comments down below. All right. I think, I think I'm going inside. I think I'm going inside almost dinner time. Here we go. Super psych, super psych. Oh man, change of plans. I got a text message from my high school buddy, Blake, and he basically was in town visiting Denver and he said, Hey Seth, you want to hang out? And so we were just hanging out that this is the end of the vlog and Blake, uh, Blake and I went to high school together and we ran cross country together and Blake is the one who made the antler knife. Okay. That I opened all the running shoe boxes with and I haven't seen Blake in a long, long time. So it was amazing to hang out with Blake and, uh, we, okay, I'm going to make a vlog someday all about Blake and about our connection and about all the craziness we experienced growing up together. Um, so including just one real quick side story is he purchased or we went in together like, I think we split it or made, I don't know what it was, but we basically bought a video camera. I think it was Sony. I think it was Sony. I don't know for sure. Back in the nineties when we were in like sixth grade or seventh grade, we bought a video camera together and that was the beginning of my filming life and how like, so my dad taught me photography. Okay. So the old picture camera, but Blake taught me about video cameras and like the art of making videos and like, and just introduced me to this whole new world of video production. So it's like, Blake and I go way back anyway, just got done hanging out with Blake. So that is the end of the vlog. Um, this is totally off topic from what we talked about today, but anyway, shout out to Blake and the knife, the antler knife. All right. Oh, it was so fun to catch up after not seeing each other in a long, long time. Um, what vlog am I going to toss it back to? I don't know. Bottom line, we're going to toss it back to a vlog right here. I love you all. Thanks for being here. Thanks for watching. You all are the best and I'll come up with something for right there. All right, everyone. See beauty, work hard and love each other. We will see you all tomorrow.


Good morning. It's Wednesday. It's 11 o'clock. It's time for What Now America? I'm Tim Apachele, your host. Today's title is Make USSR Great Again Invade Ukraine. You know, it was November 9th, 1989. The title is that, Tim. Invade Ukraine. You heard it here on Think Tech. I'm sorry. You know, Jay, that's kind of where we're at in this story. So that's why, you know, we're going to talk about Vladimir Putin and his motivations. And, you know, in 1989, Jay, as you well know, in Winston, the Berlin Wall fell. And then a couple of years later, on December 25th, 1991, the hammer and sickle flag of the USSR came down off the Kremlin flag post. And ever since then, you know, Russia allegedly was going to reform into a democratic nation and join the free society in the free economic world. Boris Yeltsin, with the combination of Valentin Yushmar, decided that a young man by the name of Vladimir Putin would be a great replacement. And back then, Vladimir Putin, believe this or not, was perceived as democratic, liberal, and well in favor of market reforms. What happened in between 1999, when he was appointed prime minister, and today is left to one's imagination. But here we are. And here we are now with Vladimir Putin, who has ordered 100 plus thousand troops on three points of the border of Ukraine, poised what it seems to be an invasion. And that's where we're at. We have the potential of Ukraine being invaded by Russia. And Joe Biden, President Biden has attempted to discuss this matter with Vladimir Putin at Putin's request. And the question goes to you, Jay, is what is Vladimir Putin up to? What is his agenda? I'm taking Ukraine in a word. And it seems obvious. It's like Xi Jinping wants to have Taiwan for many geopolitical reasons. Is this a matter of national sovereignty issues to make Russia great again and have satellite states? Maybe. Maybe he wants to return to the good old days in the USSR. I mean, that seems, if you connect the dots, that's where you go. He did that in the south, the south of Russia, and he's doing it here in the west of Russia. So it's just a matter of getting there. What I find interesting is these conversations between Putin and Biden. And Biden makes these, what do we call it, veiled threats of sanctions. He says they really draconian sanctions, but we don't know what they are. And I'm not sure that that puts Putin off the track at all. He's just playing. And at the end of the day, no matter what Biden does, Putin knows that Biden not going to be able to get Congress behind him. So he's going to do what he's going to do. And I agree with you. The big question is, what is he going to do? And for what purpose? And I think the answer is to expand his influence over Ukraine, which could be a buffer state or could be part of NATO. But if he holds Ukraine, controls Ukraine, he's out of the woods on that. And he looks good to the Russian people and to the world. He looks powerful. You know, Putin is the next KGB spy. He actually kind of excelled in communications and propaganda. That was his forte and certainly he's been able to pass that on down the line to certain leaders here in our country. But the bottom line is, Putin says he wants legally binding agreements between NATO and Russia that weapons will not be sent to the Ukraine and or into any neighboring country and certainly doesn't want Ukraine to join NATO. He's compared this situation to the days of, you know, the October crisis, missile crisis of 1962 when Cuba had missiles and, you know, President Kennedy said vehemently, those missiles have to go. And he's comparing the two as exact same situations that how would the United States like it if Cuba had missile, nuclear missiles back again? Is that a fair comparison on Putin's part? No, how would Western Europe like it if Putin puts nuclear weapons in Ukraine? You know, it's the same thing in reverse, which he will do. I mean, he's trying to get them to stand down on everything. Don't include them in NATO. Don't give them weapons. And there's probably other parts of that deal, too.   You know, you can always get there indirectly once you couldn't do directly. So how do you achieve the territorialization of Ukraine without actually firing a shot? I think that's what we may have here. So he has the soldiers on the border. He makes threats. He uses hacking to knock off the utilities. He's done that a few times.  He is trying to intimidate them in every which way. And he's trying to intimidate Western Europe. Don't forget the pipeline.  And they never really resolved that, I think. So I think you're right that Putin is going to use this quote agreement and Biden thinks everybody, everything can be resolved by an agreement, even if it doesn't favor your party. So this agreement is very crafty on the part of Putin. And I think he is going to use it. He is using it as a way to control the situation without ever firing a shot. All right. Winston, I'm going to bring up a question from one of a member of our audience. And we certainly appreciate all the questions we get. And it kind of goes along track to what we're just talking about. And the question is, what are the comparisons drawable between Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, and Ukraine and Russia, where America attempt to establish a substantial military presence in Taiwan, it would most certainly lead to war, hence our light touch. Is that the same reason we haven't integrated Ukraine into NATO? I think there are reasonably similar comparisons. And you have to think about it. We're thinking about it from our point of view, which makes sense from defending a freer world. But historically, these nations consider this their area of influence. So when the Soviet Union fell apart, now we have to think about this conglomeration of nations. A lot had nothing to do with each other except imposing this horrendous political ideology of communism on people, which was disastrous. Then it fell apart. And you can imagine, though, that there's a lot of people in Russia that pying for those days when they held that suzerainty over the entirety of then what became the Commonwealth of Independent States later, but they saw their power evaporate. Then they have a savior in a man like Putin, who I think is still pretty well regarded inside of the Soviet Union, whether it's propaganda or not. He is the strong man that seems to be desirable in not just that country, but increasingly around the world. We're seeing the strong manism really make a resurgence. As far as what's actually going to happen, it's like the Wall Street Journal says today that he's going to do what he perceives as in Russia's best interest. So that will continue with the bullying, the threats, the incursions, whether it's... I don't think it will be military this time, actually. I think he'll send in his special forces in destabilizing things and the cyber attacks and all the things that we're used to. But I think that he's pushed it pretty close. And he realizes that Anthony Blinken has been pretty clear that whatever we did or did not do, more importantly, in 2014, when he took over the Crimea, that there could be some very serious consequences this time around economically. That said, he also supplies Western Europe with our...  So there's a lot of geopolitical interests here that are not going to be solved in a day. And it's not just political. It is economic. It's corporate. A lot of things here.  He's going to continue to bully his neighbors. I just saw in my newsfeed that Slovakia signed a defense agreement with NATO, allowing troops to be used to be, I don't know, stationed, transited their airports. I'm not sure what it is. And so that's right on the border of Ukraine. It came precipitously. This week, right before and during these negotiations in Brussels and Geneva and wherever are also going to happen. My sense is that they're going to back down. They'll find a pretence, they'll pull back. Russia has a lot of problems on its own. But this is a way where he can huff and puff, make himself look good, turn around, say, we've achieved our objectives and go back. Okay. Jay, the more things change, the more sometimes they appear to remain the same. And I'm reminded back in the history lessons of post-World War II when Churchill and Roosevelt met with Stalin and Potsdam. And they basically carved up Eastern Europe, specifically Poland got the shaft. They basically traded away their sovereign rights. Where has been Ukraine in all these discussions? Or has Ukraine under the wire been, you know, are they at the table as this conflict's being unfolded? You know, it's a huge mistake to exclude somebody that should be included.  Absolutely. This is what happened in Afghanistan too. We didn't negotiate with all the parties at the table or Trump didn't back when. As I recall, Afghanistan wasn't included in the discussions. Everybody else but not Afghanistan.  And there's no good reason for that. It does indicate that we don't treat them as very important. We don't treat their government as very important. It's a mistake. And who's to say that Biden and Blinken are doing the right thing? They've been criticized pretty roundly on a number of points. I mean, they didn't mess up, I'm sorry to say, the Afghanistan withdrawal. But I think they might be in retrospect, you know, history will judge, but might be messing up what's going on in Eastern Europe. So I think, you know, it's a very good comparison to see this as the way Hitler dismembered Europe by his bullying and threats and his special deals and what have you in the late 30s, you know, and of course, Chamberlain and, you know, appeasement and all that. And we are probably on a path to do that, do some kind of appeasement and let them get away with it. Whether they actually take the territory, I think, as I said before, I think they'll do it by some circuitous route rather than by direct force. I'm not sure that you could say they would back down because they will achieve what they want indirectly. I don't know if that answers your question, but my feeling is that we are living in a time when Europe is becoming destabilized. Russia is doing it for its own purposes. This is very troubling. And one of the reasons it troubles me, I'll tell you, is that they really need to do this. Does Putin need to do this to retain power? No. Does Putin need to expand his borders? No, not really. Nobody is really challenging his borders. NATO is not being aggressive on the border. And so why is he doing this when he doesn't have to? This is the same thing with Xi Jinping. Why is he going after Taiwan? Is it really critical? Why did he do in Hong Kong what he did? Is that really critical? And in Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs are, does he have to push them around like this? Probably not. He's being more dictatorial as we go forward. And maybe that's part of what Winston said. We live in a world where autocracy is emerging. Power corrupts absolutely. And these guys see their mission, these autocrats see their mission as doing these bold, aggressive things, not for the rational benefit of it, but just to expand their own personal power. And that might be, in fact, in my opinion, it is one of Putin's major drivers here. It's not because he needs to do this. Okay. Thank you, Jay. Winston, we've heard President Biden basically say there will be grave consequences of sanctions and economic deterrence levied upon Russia. Should they invade Ukraine? I guess for negotiation purposes, it's best to keep that generic and not lined out specifically. One specific thing I heard was that Russia would be prohibited from the SWIFT system, which is to say all international wires for banking requires a SWIFT number and a SWIFT authorization. And that Russia would be prohibited. Therefore, all Russian rubles would be contained within Russia. And they really couldn't interact with the rest of the international community. Could you imagine what other kind of economic sanctions we can levy about Russia and prevent them from you invading Ukraine? Oh, who knows what they've really got on the table there? I mean, it might be just that everybody involved in the government at certain level, and their family members are not allowed to be given the permission to travel to the West or to places where they want to go shopping. I mean, honestly, so they're just going to have to shop at the luxury stores in Moscow and be content with that. Order it in by Amazon. Or Amazon. Yeah, cutting them off from amazon.ru. Jeff Bezos won't like that. Yeah, it might be other types of sanctions like that, cutting them out of the international banking system. They'll find another way to get around that. But I think whatever it is that they have cooking, the Russians know what it is. We know our leaders know what it is. But I think the point of Anthony Blinken saying it will be much more devastating, much more severe than anything that was ever proposed before is just, we haven't heard words like this out of the administration for the last year. And now Joe Biden's come up and he's kind of, yesterday was kind of a moment for him, or this week where he's kind of rearing up and putting out his head, whether it's for the filibuster and putting through voting rights and equating people who, as he was giving the speeches at the Black colleges yesterday, do you want to be remembered as a politician as Jefferson Davis or as Abraham Lincoln? And you're sort of making this equivalency of which is, I think, well, obviously different circumstances. But that idea that do you want to be on the right side of history when it comes right down to it. You know, we have to also remember that NATO was almost given a death blow five years ago when you had the former president of the United States saying he questions it. It's very existence. Why should we be in that? I don't know that we should. Maybe we should pull out all of our troops or whatever that solid alliance was, was shaken to its fundamental core to the point where the Germans and the French really had to say, we're on our own here and we need to chart our own. Well, I remember that discussion distinctly and I remember that a lot of it was popular. And that was it's time for the NATO nations to pay their bill. And a lot of people said, yeah, it's about time and we like Trump for that and good for him. And well, he politicized it, Tim. Yes, he did. And we have a question. I don't know if you noticed we have a question. I was going to ask that to Winston straightforward. Yeah, we have to remember, though, that paying the bill is a different thing than dissolving the alliance. And when you that forced Angela Merkel to say, you know, we have to have a different arrangement in Europe. So the Europeans may be looking at this very differently. And I think that they are because they have no great desire to be involved in any conflict or pawns in conflict with Russia. They're dependent on them for their fuel supplies. Now, of course, I think they're working as fast as they can to be renewables and whatever else they can do to get away from that. But fundamentally, there's a giant Nord 2 pipeline coming in through the Baltic that's been drastically approved by this administration.   But hopefully they will present a united front on this realizing that, yeah, this could this could spill over into something much larger as well. All war spill over into something that was unintended. That's the nature of war. Okay. Thank you, Winston. Jay, you're right. We do have a second question. And before we go to it, I just want to thank Miss Zimmerman for the very first question. So the second question is from Tom Yamashika. And the question is this, could you speak to the criticism that used to be levied against the US for being self appointed policemen of the world? Is it worth it for the United States to expend troops, lose lives, etc. to police the Ukrainian and or Chinese situations? Oh, I mean, that raises the politicization I'm talking about. You know, Trump not only attacked the NATO to east Western Europe on the basis that they haven't paid the bills. It was more than that. He was he was telling his base, we don't want to support them. We don't want to be part of them. And thus politicizing the whole issue. So there were a lot of people asking what Tom Yamashika is asking. Why should we do that? Why should we put America? Didn't we just get out of Afghanistan? Haven't we sworn to avoid putting American boots on the ground, American lives and spending all that money? We spent tons of money, trillions in Afghanistan. Why do we want to do that now? And this is a political feeling that if you went through the base right now, the base would say no way. Okay. And the base and the GOP saying no way means that Congress, even if it might otherwise take action, I mean, I firmly believe Congress is not going to act on anything, not until the elections are done and the GOP wins, then the GOP will do what it wants. But for now, I don't think, you know, he can Biden can count on Congress for any of that. So it's a paper tiger. You know, the answer to Tom Tom Yamashika's question is the American people are at least the ones who control things. That is the GOP. They effectively control it by, I call it a legislative veto. You think Joe Manchin is going to back up an adventure in Europe? No way. And that means nobody will. So my feeling is that when Biden goes and Tony Blinken, they say they're going to do draconian things to Russia, really, really, when's the last time you did that? And so I think they know the Russian snow. Putin knows that it's paper tiger talking. It will not happen. Then what's the preventive from going in? If you really believe that Biden's talk is paper tiger talk, what disincentive does Putin have to stay out of Ukraine versus going in? Optics. Optics. What does Putin care about optics? What optics? Well, he wants to be seen as a global leader. He wants to be respected, held in awe, but not necessarily in fear of war, although we might have that fear by Europe. He has a long plan that will get him, as I said before, that will get him to where he wants to go without firing his shot. Isn't that better? I mean, he's got to deal with people in Russia, too, who don't want to put boots on the ground. So he's not going to go in. He can get there indirectly. It's like what he's done to the US, what he's doing to the US in the election. He's got the internet research agency working night and day to try to divide us and make bubbles and fragment the American public and fragment our government. And he has, assuming he's largely responsible, directly or indirectly for all of this trouble we have in terms of fragmented public opinion, he's done a pretty good job without firing his shot and without admitting that he did anything. You can't be sure that he did it. So the problem there is that he's done a very good job at that without firing a shot, without seeming to be bellicose. In this case, I think you have to see a strategy in other areas and then you can figure out, you can connect the dots on what he's doing here. So A, he's not going to go in, I agree. And B, we're not going to go in either. This is all a chess game. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Jay, for your comments. Winston, President Biden already proactively stated that the United States has no intention of responding to this conflict with military aid. Well, at least as far as boots on the ground, that may change as far as military equipment and assistance to Ukraine. Hard to say how that pans out or not pans out. How is Joe Biden doing specifically to this crisis? Jay says the United States is acting like a paper tiger. Do you agree with that? Or has Joe Biden provided a tone that has Putin's attention and his concern? Maybe both. Are we really going to go and defend Ukraine in some meaningful fashion and provide boots on the ground? It's not going to happen. No, Biden said he won't put boots on the ground. That was a definitive comment. It's not a member of NATO. It is a buffer state. I mean, maybe what will come out of this, let's be optimistically naive and say that Ukraine becomes some sort of neutral state, like Austria after the Allies pulled out of it after the war. Or perhaps something like Sweden or Finland, a buffer in effect. And within this zone, remember, we pulled out of that nuclear forces, intermediate nuclear forces. Those could always be reintroduced. Those types of threats as well. At the end of the day, Putin sells a lot of military equipment to third-world countries and second-world, first-world countries.  So for them to stand up to the world's great power, the United States and its allies, and says, hey, we can do this, and they back down. So why don't you buy some of our whatever military equipment that we're selling? He stands to win in this. He might face some sanctions temporarily, but he's going to go back home with a win. Let's face it, you don't want to be living in Russia. COVID is running rampant. Their life expectancy is shrinking every single year. They've got a lot of issues at home. This is a good distraction for him. He's a bully, so he gets to satisfy that part of the ego. But at the end of the day, maybe we'll come out with something that results in it, hopefully, a little bit more pulling back from the edge. I hope that's what happens. We'll know in a week or two what will happen, but maybe it could be something where there's some face-saving. And the shenanigans are going to continue. Let's not be that naive. It's still going to be poking in at Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania and flying over NATO territories and everything that they can do, destabilizing our own nation, our own elections, as Jay was saying. That's not going away. But if we can avoid something right now, I'd say more power to him. You used the term face-saving, and that's an important term, because whenever you get into a conflict that doesn't look like it'd be resolved, saving face seems to be paramount for our leaders of every nation, not just Russia here. But there was a 1990 Conventional Armed Forces European Agreement, and that agreement didn't just pertain to nuclear weapons, but certainly conventional arms. And there's comments whether or not that can be dusted off, and that treaty be used as the basis to unwind this particular conflict, thereby allowing Putin to save face, and all other parties to save face. You think that's a possibility? Remember, he got kicked out of the G8 when he invaded Crimea. He's still in power. He's still selling gas to the Europeans. It's not a lot has happened since then. Maybe the route with Russia, although Europe and Russia have always kind of wanted to treat each other as cousins at arms length a little bit. But let's face it, Victoria's kids married into the Tsar's family, they all had their blood disease. Maybe this is a route where Putin says, you know what, my basic geopolitical interest for this nation long term lie in tying us firmly into Europe so that we don't have to face that threat on the western part of our border because our underbelly is completely exposed, and who knows about the Far East. So maybe in the long run, he's playing a longer game here that uses this as a platform for neutralizing that and becoming maybe a, I don't know, look down the road 10 years and say, we're partners rather than adversaries or potential adversaries. Let's hope for that. I mean, that would be the best outcome for him so that he can face all the other threats that he's got at home. Alrighty. Hey, we're out of time. Jay, your final comments on this topic? Yeah, we're about climate change. The whole planet, humanity is suffering under climate change and COVID and here we are screwing around on the border of Ukraine. It's the wrong direction and he's not being altruistic. The other thing I want to mention is I think there's a connection here between the paper tiger problem where, you know, we didn't get the build back better bill through and, you know, Biden is all but given up on that. And, you know, he's making, he's stamping his feet about voting suggesting that we have to, you know, change the filibuster on that. But, you know, that's not going to happen either. And his inability to get his initiatives through in this country affect his clout overseas, right? If you're Putin, you are looking at how effective Biden is in the U.S. and you're seeing how powerful a president he is and I'm afraid that he's losing these initiatives. He doesn't look too powerful. At the same time, you know, I think Putin knows how to play the game and look powerful, look strong even if he isn't. So it's too bad we're in this place because as the guns of August by Barbara, the guns of August, great book back in the back 20 years ago evaluating the start of World War One. It was just like this. And if you looked back at World War Two, the things that happened in the 30s were a pretty good signal of what was what was going to happen. And I think mistakes are made even if Putin does not intend to have war. And Biden certainly doesn't want war and the base in this country don't want war. And the people in Western Europe don't want war. It could happen anyway. By the way, it's Barbara Tuckman, the guns of August. And it is haunting now because all these things are programmed for violence for war, just as they were before World War One and two. Great comments. Thank you, Jay. Winston, you get the last word and the last comment. Not going to happen, Jay. We're not going to war. I don't think the shenanigans will continue. No one has any interest in making this a hotter conflict than it already is. My hopes are for de-escalation at this point. Putin goes home, declares his victories, gets whatever accolades he needs.  And we can pull back from this brink. I want to be optimistic, not naively so, but I would like to err on the side that we can come out of this a little bit better.  He doesn't have a lot of room to maneuver here regardless whether it's domestic or support for any policies that he's got. So whatever that he can get accomplished, more power to him as well. Tim, the word endemic does suggest itself. At the end of the day, as far as COVID is concerned, we're going to have a long-term model. It'll be endemic. It won't threaten human race so much, but it'll be insinuated throughout. And the same thing with this country. We will lose the democracy that we've had, and we'll have some other dystopian form of it. And it will settle down to some kind of endemic situation in terms of the political arrangement in this country. And I suggest from Winston's comments that what is going to happen in Europe is that Biden, or rather Putin, will find a way to be more influential economically and politically throughout Europe. And it'll settle down into a new system where Russia has more influence. It'll be endemic in that too. Yes. Okay. Alrighty. Well, we ran out of time. I want to thank both my guest, Jay Fidel, Winston Welch for their wise and insightful comments. Please join us next week, Wednesday at 11 o'clock for What Now, America. I'm Tim Epitle, your host, and I hope to see you then. Aloha.


Okay. Excuse me while I put this thing in my back pocket. Okay. All right. So, hi people. Welcome. And I'm going to start off today on my talk with the title you can see here. But what I'm really going to talk about is what do we do as front-end web engineers? So before we start, let's take a quick poll here. Like how many people here consider themselves programmers or engineers? Anybody? Okay. So you've done some programming. Maybe you've worked in a technical role. How many of you consider yourselves web engineers or web developers? Okay. A few. Yeah. So today's talk is actually more for people who are not already front-end web engineers. Maybe you are a back-end web engineer or full stack. But today's talk is really just focusing on what it is that front-end web engineers do, what it's like, some of the really gnarly things that we deal with, but also some of the really cool things that we do. So if you're not a front-end web engineer, this talk is for you. If you are, it will not be offended if you had to take a toilet break. So we're going to start. My name is Sherman. I'm actually a Malaysian. Yeah. Don't be fooled by this. A lot of people think I'm Singaporean, but I'm not. I'm currently a front-end web engineer at Vicky, which is where we are hosting this event right now. What I do is front-end web engineering things. What exactly is a front-end web engineer? What do we do? It's such a mouthful front-end web engineer. Some other terms that you might have heard that sound similar are web developer, web designer, back-end web engineer, full-stack web engineer, UI engineer, UI UX developer, so on and so forth. But for the purposes of this talk, I'm going to be using the terms engineer and developer interchangeably. And you just have to know that all these terms are really referred to different specializations in a larger subset that I just call front-end web. So yeah, it can be kind of confusing at times because people use different terms, but generally there are some differences. But generally, we refer to the same thing. So to define what a front-end web engineer is, we talk about what a web engineer is. And a web engineer is someone who builds, designs, maintain things for the web. And the web in this case refers to the worldwide web, which a lot of us are familiar with in terms of websites. Like, you know, who has visited a website today in the past five minutes? Facebook? Yeah, I know. But the tricky part comes in talking about, you know, what is front-end referred to? And in order to talk about what front-end is, we need to talk about how the web works. So is that like a back-end? Is that like a middle-end? We don't know. So think about a website. Like, when you visit a website, you pull out a browser. Let's say Chrome, Edge, Firefox. And then you type in the URL. So in this case, if I want to visit Vicky, which I do every day because this is what I work on, I go to like, you know, www.vicky.com. I hit enter. A website appears magically from somewhere. We don't know where. And so what really happens is that there's you, here's you and your browser, which is in your machine. And then there's a server.  What do I need to like display this website? And so the server will be like, okay, hey, cool, I got you. And the server runs some code and to get the assets that you need in order to display this website. So the server's like, hey, all right, here's all the stuff that you need. And it sends a response back to you or really your browser. And the response may include things like, you know, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, like, have people heard of these terms before? Kind of, I see not. Yeah, which is like, yeah, that's like her life, you know. And so what happens is that the browser takes this response, this HTML, CSS, JavaScript and uses that to create or render your website. So the important thing to note is that it's not that the server, you know, builds this website for you, you know, colors and fonts and everything and sends it to your browser. The, what we really have here is like, all this HTML, CSS, JavaScript code, which is like, you can think of it as a bunch of rules on how to display your website. And that bunch of rules get sent to your browser and your browser runs it to show you the website that you see. So we've done it. It's kind of interesting because I like to think of Frontend Web as bridging the gap between users and content. I actually created this to like Jason for this here. And what it really means is that usually when you visit a website, you are there for a reason, you're there for content, you're there to check your email, there to like watch cat videos. And what Frontend does is that we are really talking about all the stuff that happens here on this site, like whatever is related to the user, the browser and what the browser needs to display your website. So it's really creating, like for example a website that makes it easy for users to access their content. So that's just a way that I like to think about Frontend Web. And because we are dealing with users, we also need to understand how design works. There's a very human interaction element to it. And it may include things like, what makes it easy for a user to read this article? What makes it easy for users to find episodes? So we have to keep that design mindset there. But at the same time, we also have to work with technology because we are dealing with browsers and browsers can be difficult, which I will talk about later. And this combination to me is something that's pretty special to Frontend Web. And you don't get it necessarily in other fields of software engineering or as much. I believe mobile is also like, it has a similar marriage of design and technology. So I think it's something that's really special to Frontend Web. All right, so I'm gonna be talking about the two parts. So I'll talk about what goes on in the design side, how do features get created from the designer to the actual product to the actual website itself. And I'll also talk about the technology that we deal with. Like for example, browsers, like why are browsers so difficult? Why do, if you have friends who are Frontend Web engineers, like why do they complain so much about IE8? You know, things like that. Or yeah, or like, so yeah, I'm gonna start off with design. So in the Frontend Web world, what typically happens a lot is that we are required to build features. So let's say we want to revamp sign it, sign it, sign up page. And what happens is that we usually work with designers and designers will come up with a mock of how they want the design or the feature to look like. And from that, it's our responsibility to take that flat image, which is usually created in Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator, and convert that to code that achieves the same effect. So like, you know, one of the examples that I worked on recently was to rehaul our login page. So this is actually like the design mock. It's like a flat image itself that the designer sent to us. And from that, we actually created so that it displays in your browser. And you can see like there's some differences, like it's not exactly the same. And you know, design is an ongoing, growing process. So things change along the way. So I'm gonna run through like a really simple example of like how, you know, that process happens. And in order to talk about how that happens from an image to code, we need to talk about the building blocks of websites. So there are three parts, like most of us hear the terms like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together with the whole like web development thing. And what you need to understand is that the first part is HTML, which is a markup language that we use to structure our content. So for example, like the content article, the titles, images, all of that is created in HTML.  And then there's JavaScript, which in the simplest form is used to add behavior or interactions to your website. So it interacts with both HTML and CSS to create interactions.  So in the case of a sign up form, like this here is just an image, like how do we get from this to this something that we can actually use and like interact with. And so yeah, let's just, I'm just gonna show like, you know, the different parts and how they kind of relate to each other. So this here is the sign up form with interactions. And I'm just gonna comment this out so you can see what parts are, what parts come from where. Most of the time when I talk about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, it's like, what's the difference? What do they do? And we always start with HTML. And this is, I think, the most underrated part of web development because good HTML is really important. And what HTML does is that we, this enables us to add things like your forms or like your input fields, labels, titles, things like that in a very semantic kind of way. So I can look at HTML, I know like, oh yeah, there's a form here. And then there's like, you know, a field set with a label and an input that takes in text, for example. And at this point, it works, like you have all this here, but it doesn't look very good. So that's when we add on CSS. So something that we might do is we might change your background color or whoops, we might change your background color or we might change the layout, like maybe center it. Or if it still doesn't look good enough, then maybe we add your styles to the form and make it like prettier, pretty much. And CSS is a lot of fun because there's a lot of creativity involved in doing things. So it works now, but then we also need to think about, you know, how the user interacts with the form. So let's say you're a user signing up and you need to add the username and you have a restriction on how long the username must be at least. We need to be able to tell the user, hey, your username is too short. So when it comes to things like that, like we add, we use the magic of JavaScript in order to tell a user, like, hey, if my username is too short, please enter a longer username. And this is to, in my opinion, like the more interesting part of working with the front-end web because it's not so simple as like, oh, making things look good, but it also needs to make sense. It needs to be useful to a user. And as a front-end web engineer, like a lot of the time, the responsibility to make sure that things interact properly falls on you. So yeah, it can be challenging at times, but it's also quite interesting. So we saw how we use HTML as structure content, how you can use CSS to style content, and then JavaScript to add interactions. Yeah, so that's like for the design process of how things get made. I don't know, are people familiar with this? Like if you've worked with designers before, yeah. And then there's the technology side. So it's not good enough to be able to build something that looks good and does what you're expected to do. You also need to make sure it works nicely with your technology. So the web is a very egalitarian ecosystem. As long as you have a device and your device is a browser, you can access the web, which is pretty freaking amazing. But at the same time, different devices have different browsers. Like, you know, who uses Chrome? Like, oh, yeah, yeah. You are my favorite users because I also use Chrome, so I build things for Chrome. But then you also have people who use Edge, and who uses Edge? Yeah, all two of you. And Safari and so on. So because there's so many different types of browsers, remember how I talked about you only send HTML, CSS, JavaScript, which is code to your browser, and your browser is responsible for taking that code and creating a website for you. And the thing is like different browsers are created by different people. You know, like Edge is created by Microsoft, Chrome is, like Google Chrome is created by people at Google. And because of that, they behave differently. So what you may happen? What may happen is that, okay, well, I make something and I testing Chrome, it looks pretty cool. And then two days later, after we launched, someone like writes in and say, hey, things are broken on Safari. And I'm like, what? And you can see here the sidebar that we had, that we could see in Chrome is missing because it is for some reason, and Safari is not respecting the height of that sidebar and it's pushing everything off like that. So I'm like, ah, but we fixed it, it's fine now. And with modern browsers, it's all right. Like usually it's not a crazy fix. But then sometimes you get like IE8. And we don't support IE8, but I just wanted to show you this to you because I'm like, oh, I don't want to fix this. And it's okay if you don't support it, but I have been in situations where I had to like support IE8 for like bank applications and that was not fun. But yeah, unfortunately things are moving along pretty quickly now. So browsers do get up to speed on standards a lot faster than they did before. So thankfully for that, but this is just one of the things that we had to keep in mind every time when we were building things. Because we want to make sure everybody can use this in a reasonable way. And in addition to different browsers, we also had to deal with like different screen sizes. So laptops and mobile phones have very different screen sizes. One is like this and one is like this. And so sometimes you have things like this where you have a table, which looks great in desktop, table, table, table. Okay, there are your table. But then you also to think about like, what if someone on a tablet uses it, like does that still look okay? Still looks okay. But what happens when someone on a mobile phone looks at this? And if you maintain a table layout, it's gonna get really, really squished and it wouldn't look really good. So instead, you had to exercise a little bit of creativity and push things down so that it works nicely for a mobile screen. So instead of having the three columns, we like push that data under each like row here. So you get to work with things like that, which can be, it's like a bit of a brain teaser. Like how do I maintain this information but like also get it to work in a mobile form? And of course we work with designers on this as well. So it's lots of fun. And then there's JavaScript, like who here has tried JavaScript? Yeah, so I see a handful of people. And JavaScript is interesting because like on the web or front-end web, you don't really have a choice. You have to use JavaScript because that's the only thing that your browser supports. And that's okay, but it really doesn't help that JavaScript is actually kind of weird as a language. And it's weird for historical reasons, like when JavaScript was first created, it was created in 10 days before I shipped it in Netscape. So it's got a lot of historical baggage. But just to like show you like, why is this like, why is JavaScript weird? So let's say I have Ruby. Ruby is a pretty reasonable language. In Ruby, I have like, you know, for example, Division, Division works great. But then what do you think happens when I divide by zero? Error. Yeah, an error is reasonable, right? You'd be like, you try to divide by zero, that's not legit. Too bad. If you try to divide by strings, it's like, oh, you can't divide by string because the string can't be a number. I don't know if you all can see this. Oh my God, no, you can't. Yeah. Okay, anyway, just know that's just an error there. I'm just gonna like bump this up. Okay, no, that did not work. So okay, Ruby's reasonable. It's good to know like, something went wrong. But then let's say you end up with JavaScript and then you have, let's say, you know, let's say your regular division works fine, great. So far so good. But what do you think happens when you divide by zero? Undefined maybe? Some, no, yeah. So 42 divided by zero in JavaScript is infinity. And I'm like, I'm like, why? Why? And there's actually like a reason behind this is because like the way that JavaScript decides to deal with floating point numbers kind of makes it seem as though, okay, well, you're kind of tending towards infinity when you divide by zero, but I don't fully understand that either.  And I was like, really amused because it's actually negative infinity. And I'm like, well, what happens when you do infinity minus infinity?  Like, how does that work? Like, no, it's not a number.  So here's not a number. So you get those like weird quirkiness, but at the same time, like JavaScript is a bit of a misunderstood language. If you take time to like figure out like the quirks and why it's like that, it's actually a really powerful language because everything, literally everything that you see on a web is powered by JavaScript. Like this presentation is actually, you know, a website. It's built of the web. JavaScript is powering it. Like this Rappel here, this console that's powered by JavaScript. So any games you see, any 3D like crazy stuff that you see, all that is powered with JavaScript. So it's a really powerful language, very versatile, does a lot of things, but often misunderstood. So yeah, and then like my favorite thing to do is like, you know, what is, what is, so you have type, so type off, yeah, in JavaScript and it tells you the type of a thing. And then if you do like type of not a number, guess what type of not a number is? It's a number. But it makes sense because you are used, not a number is returned in place of a number. So it's a numerical value, but it's like, it's an invalid numerical value. So yeah, JavaScript. But it's a great language if you get used to it.  There are a lot of reasons like why I love it, like why I chose to do specifically front and web. And the biggest part is because, you know, you have this like creative thing combined with like a technical thing. And because of that, you get to do a lot of crazy stuff. Like just, there are just so many possibilities. And you know, my favorite example of like, you know, a thing that you can do with JavaScript is this, and it's called staggering beauty. And this is all it does.  I'm not sure like, and it's kind of loud. But yeah, if you want to look it up, you can look it up. But why would you do this? And it's because you can. And it's actually not trivial to be able to like, create this kind of behavior. So, yeah.  And this is all in JavaScript, it's running in the browser. So you can do this within the web. And you can share it with anybody because you know, it's accessible. And then there's, and then there are people who really push the boundaries of CSS. Like these are like single diff art. And it's literally like one HTML element. So everything that you see like all of this is created with CSS. And it's pretty freaking amazing. Like it's just pure CSS, just literally one diff and like some pseudo elements. And all this here, like all is created with CSS. But I can't even do this in Illustrator. So, yeah, it's pretty amazing. You should check it out. It's called a Single Diff. And then, yeah, and like I said, the web's for everyone. Anybody can publish through it. You don't have to have a device. You don't have to pay money. You don't have to be like an Android user to be able to use it. Anyone can use it. And that's, I don't know. I think it's pretty cool. And also it has a very low barrier to entry. So if you've never done web before, a good place to start is HTML CSS because it doesn't require you to know too much syntax. But at the same time, you very quickly get results. But at the same time, there's also a lot of room to grow. Like from HTML or CSS, you can always add on JavaScript and do crazy things with it. So there's just a whole realm of possibilities there. And my favorite quote about front-end web is this, which is from CSS Tricks, Geoff Graham. And he says, the practice of front-end web development is similar to playing the bass. It's easy to learn, but difficult to master, which is kind of satisfying. There's a lot to learn. But at the same time, anyone can get started a little bit. So yeah, with that, come to the end. You can find me on Twitter here. And then there's links to the slides at the bottom. If you haven't seen that, if you want to look at pretty weird things like staggering beauty. And yeah, thanks all for listening. I'm going to hand it off to the next presenter. Who's next? OK.