I just finished a great interview with Laura Toggs. Laura and her husband Pete are the youth pastors of Hillsong Sydney Church, a great church, and they also head up a young people's movement globally called Young and Free. Laura also has a secret garden TV show, especially aimed at young mums, young women like herself. We spoke about all of that and some of their joys, challenges, concerns, hopes for young people now and for the future. It was a great interview. She's a lovely human being. You're going to love this interview. Don't forget to subscribe to my podcast channel. Thank you. Before you get started on today's podcast with Paul Scanlon, we just wanted to let you know that he now has a free course available to you. If you head over to paulscanlon.com forward slash free course, you'll be able to sign up to his video series called the five behaviors of successful people. We hope that this course adds value to your life. Now enjoy the podcast. How have you felt about the pandemic, Laura? I mean, I've come to decide three months in almost that perhaps it has, it had some hidden blessings for us all that we didn't think at first. Do you think that and what do you think some of those are? Yeah. I mean, well, if I'm honest with you, for me, I have my health and so in that sense, I've been really blessed and I've really enjoyed, I've actually really enjoyed being in isolation surprisingly. And I think for, for me, it's been like, I've realized that I don't need or want as much as I thought that I did. So I thought, I think I had this idea of what I, what I love. I had this idea that I love to be on the run. I love to be on the go. I love to kind of like be traveling and, you know, going from place to place and event and so on. And I've realized that pulling that all back and not having that as even an option has shown me that I actually, I don't need that to find, I guess, fulfillment or even like the satisfaction of that. I think I've been surprised at how much I've loved just simplifying the way that we live and that quality time with family. I've just, I've loved that. I think I've loved like, I've loved, I'm going slower, but, but more intentional. And I found that having, having more time, but being intentional with my time, I've gained a whole lot more knowledge about even like, like skills wise. Like I've realized that I've got more in me. Whereas before I just didn't have the time to kind of explore, like and try new things. So for me, like really simple, but like I've, I've realized that I can cook. Or at least there's potential there, there's potential. But yeah, that was something that I just, I just wrote off. I was like, no, I don't cook. I can't, but having, having more time and putting the thought into it, the, the effort into it, I realized that, yeah, that's a skill that I could, that, that I could develop. I've also started painting. Yeah. Um, look, I'm no Picasso, but a lot of people think Picasso is crap. Yeah. No, I think, I don't know. It's just, I, I mean, I don't know. I don't know how to really describe it. I've been doing like some, I don't know. I was that surprised you the whole sort of, like I, would you say an introvert extrovert? Have you ever thought about that before this? I think that I, I think before I was a mother, I was quite introverted. I was happy to be like at home. But then I think when I became a mother and I had people in little people in my personal space constantly, um, I, something within me, like something within me changed where I really enjoyed going out socializing with adults and that would re-energize me. So yeah. The way does the painting in you come from? Have you done that before? Is that a new thing? I think I've always been a creative. Um, and I've always been curious if I could paint, I, I did art when I was younger in school. Um, but I had never picked up a paintbrush in my adult life until, um, probably at the beginning of the pandemic actually. And it's interesting because, um, because last year I was, I was pregnant and I knew that I would be going into a new season having a baby.  I'm going to try and paint. Um, and so I already kind of had it within me, like that idea within me. But um, but yeah, I think for me, I think creativity runs in our family. My mom is very, very creative in her, her own way. My dad is creative in his very unique way.  Um, and so I think it's, I think it probably comes from, from that. Yeah, from, from the family. What will you keep after the pandemic? What, what about this? Will you keep, as opposed to, you know, people talk about going back to normal as if normal was great anyway, which it wasn't, but all realizing as you said on the world, what are we in a rush to get back to kind of thing? So what would you, what do you think you'll keep out of the pandemic and the lockdown that you've discovered should now be a constant in your life kind of thing? Yeah, um, I really practically speaking, I think, um, I think just, just kind of slowing and simplifying things down. And like I said, just being really intentional with your, the days, like down to the, down to the very moments of just, like for me, I've just, I've realized that even this, like this, this is my phone. Yeah. Even like, I feel like I'm even more aware of how much I am on screens as opposed to doing things with my hands. The one reason that I love painting is because I've got something in my hand and I am doing something that's not like, not engaging with a screen and such as tangible. And the same thing with cooking, I feel like it's like, it's kind of practicing this like mindfulness, but it's, but it's practical and it's tangible. And, um, and so I hope that, yeah, I hope that that remains that I don't, when things return, I don't get so consumed with, uh, the hurry and, and busy and so on that, um, that, yeah, I just lose sight of the value of, yeah, of, I don't know, yeah, doing some of those like practical creative things, I think. Do you think you've been happier in the lockdown to use that word? Have these things made you, do you think a happier person? Yeah, I do. I think I have, I think I have had a deeper level of contentment than I have in, in many years. Um, and, you know, for me to wake up in our our suburban home and to walk to the coffee shop and, you know, pass by people in our neighborhood who are also on their daily walk and at those little things like have been really sweet and, um, and I think for me, because like I have family who are now living across the other side of the world and, you know, I have people who were here and there and so on. There was a good, uh, portion of the last few years where I was, my mind and my heart was somewhere else, I think. Whereas I think for me, I'm like, I actually feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be and I'm happy. I'm happy where, where I'm at and, um, that's a huge win for me personally that I'm, I'm finding that deep sense of contentment where I am. I've noticed people posting throughout the pandemic and the lockdown about noticing much more the birds or nature or the weather or the environment around them, you know, as if it just suddenly appeared rather than that, that was always there. Maybe you just slowed down long enough to realize it was always there. You were tuned out to it. That's got to be a great thing for our humanity and simplifying our life, don't you think? Yeah.  It's, it's a huge thing.  It's like we'll be sent into our homes just to sort ourselves out a little bit. For me, I relate to that because I think, you know, I think it's been a really rewarding experience of, yeah, like I said, just understanding what's important, dealing with some of the things that we have. But in the process, it's like creating this mindfulness that is actually very good. It's very healing. And it's, yeah, it's a, it's very like a practical way to deal with things like anxiety or, or whatever else you might be dealing with. So I think loneliness, anxiety, depression, etc. is huge at this time amongst young people as well. I know you guys work a lot amongst young people and talk to you, talk to you about that in the minute. But is it something you feel has come on the radar more in the lockdown? Have you had more people reaching out for that? Does it become a bigger thing for you to address? Yeah, I think, you know, like I have, I felt really sorry for some of my friends who were around my age who were single. And I know they went into this year, you know, hoping to meet new people and, and in a, like in a, in a way that's been postponed, you know, like there's been like many things that we can think about, like, you know, events being postponed or canceled or whatever. But for many people, they just felt like, oh, even their hopes and their dreams or their desires for this year at a personal level, you know, and so I feel for those people. And I, and I know as well, like I'm blessed because I live in a quite spacious environment. And I have my family and so on.  And so there is that element of connection, whereas a lot of people don't have that. And so I, I know that there are a lot of young people, a lot of people in general who have been doing it really tough. And my heart goes out to them, you know, but I have a feeling that we're going to come out of this pandemic and we are going to feel like it was all a dream. Like it already does feel a little bit like that, like a bit of a blur. And so I, I believe that it's not going to be wasted for people that we would have learned many things. And if anything, we're going to come into this next season of life, whatever that looks like, with a greater sense of intentionality and purpose. Yeah, I've been teaching about the prosperity of the soul for quite a while now around the world. And when I met you guys at Youth America, I was speaking to the young people there about the soul, out of this awareness that I think the emerging generation, as you know, you guys are with them all the time, are not looking to live anymore from the outside in, but to live from the inside out, the much more aware than my generation were of the need to look after yourself internally. And I wonder if the lockdown is making them aware of that more, that happiness actually is much closer to you than you thought it was. As you said, it doesn't require as many things or people or travel or opportunities as you thought it would require. I wonder if it will have a good effect on the emerging generation, especially with you guys working with so many young people, that they will come to see things, we've been trying to tell them for decades, that as you get older, you figure out what matters is not what you thought that mattered. And maybe a pandemic will accelerate that understanding amongst young people, you think? It's funny because I saw a meme yesterday that said, in the matter of this generation, in a matter of days, went from making banana bread to eradicating racism. And I thought, oh yeah, if that kind of puts my generation into perspective, I think that up until now, we live in the digital age and for us, as a generation, we've got challenges that we're figuring out. And I think we are masters of putting on facades, creating an image, projecting that image online. But I think, if anything, that has got exhausted and young people, especially, I think they are just so hungry for what's real and also, I guess, not projecting, but giving that, I mean, living with a sense of encouraging that in others, of being real and not projecting this false image of yourself and understanding that it does start from within. And for me, one of the things that I do is The Secret Garden, which specifically for girls. But I was, how that came about was, I felt like I wanted to do something online. I wanted to do some sort of blog. I was interested in fashion. I was interested in interior design and beauty and all those sorts of things. But I looked and I thought, well, that's being done. Like that's like almost oversaturated. And I just didn't know if that was my lane. And as I began to kind of think about what I was supposed to do, I really felt like, well, you know what, it's all good. Like if you're creating this appearance and there's nothing wrong with that. But if you are going home at the end of the day and put laying your head on the pillow and you are empty, or like there's no, you're tending to, you're not tending to what's within. And all your energy is on what's external, but not on what's internal.  And so, and so I really felt like that was, that was a good thing for this generation. Is like inside first, that's where it starts. Like you said, the prosperity of our soul and our heart and tending to what's within. We have to start there because these are interesting days that we're living in and that this generation is a part of and yeah. And I think the stillness, I think the stillness we talked about getting still long enough for that part of your humanity to connect with you that moves you into painting or moves you into some other interest that you didn't know was in you. I wonder if out of this pandemic will come a lot of entrepreneurial ideas, a lot of new businesses, a lot of new initiatives in the church because we've all got still long enough to connect with a part of us that is normally crowded out by all the business and all the noise. Yeah. Hey, I was going to ask you to, sorry, Laura, I was going to ask you to about, you know, the racism thing that's going on in the world. What has been your feeling towards all of that? What has been your thinking about it? You know, a couple of weeks on, of course, from George Floyd's death. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I feel like we are in the thick of it at the moment as pastors, as friends and peers. So for me, initially, it was, you know, I saw the video of George Floyd and it was just heartbreak. It was just feeling that sense of just helplessness and hopelessness for this man. And, and then it quickly moved, oh, actually, I took a couple of days, but it moved into this space where I realized that this has opened up a deep wound for people. And it's not just this thing that's going on in the USA, but we are a part of a really beautiful, diverse community. We have a large African community within our church. We have people of color and, you know, our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here in Australia. And, and, and we, I've, you know, realized within the last few days that people are really, really hurting. They're in pain over, over this situation and what it has exposed, this, this wound that has been there for a long time for hundreds of years, generations. But it has just, I guess, I feel, I really am, I don't understand. And I'm admitting that I may never understand because I am a white woman. But, but I am, my eyes are being open and I feel like there's an awakening happening across the earth where we realize that this is, this is a huge thing. This is a huge thing on, on the radar for the, for the earth of humanity. And, and I think we're, we're having to, we're being forced to wake up and pay attention. And Linda is listening here for Peter and I, the last, the last week has been just not speaking too much, just having conversations and just listening to people in their pain and understanding the reality that they live with daily. So yeah. Is it something you guys have spoken about in the past quite a bit to young people, the whole racism thing, especially with you and Peter being mixed race or whatever the right terms are these days. But have you felt because of that, that you guys are standing in front of these young people and you therefore perhaps are able to have a voice to them about that. Obviously it's very raised in our consciousness now, but has it been a thing you felt has come up a lot in the past with young people or you've intentionally raised it or what? Yeah. I mean, I think there's, there was a, a knowledge of it as such. But even for Peter, Peter Fiji and he migrated to Australia when he was one, one year old and with his family. I met him when I was as young as six. You know, he's grown up in our church. Yeah. And I never thought, I've just never crossed my mind to ask if he ever had dealt with racism. Right, right. Racism until this past week. I asked him, I said, Pete, have you ever, have you ever experienced racism? And he shared stories with me from his childhood that were actually extremely traumatizing. And I just had, I had no idea. And that's something that, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to feel guilty about that because that's not productive. But, but for him, I think he's like, well, on one hand he has, he's felt like Australia has been wonderful to him and our church has been inclusive. And he, you know, he, we mentioned it, we recorded a conversation for our Sunday service. And he was saying how, you know, he was this week in a board meeting and like, you know, and so in on one hand, he's just felt like he's had incredible opportunities and so on. But there is also this reality where he has, he has felt real prejudice towards him.  But in reality, we have a really dark history ourselves. And so, and so we have to acknowledge that. And, you know, I just, I, I truly believe that this is an awakening and that this is really close to the father's heart. And this is, this is close to God's heart. And as Christians and the church, I don't think that we have the choice, I think that we have to step in into this space and move into action here. Yeah, I think one of the big weaknesses of the church historically and still around the world has been our inability to be in other people's shoes that are different to us. You know, 98% of our country and Europe are not in church, they're quite anti-church, because I think generationally, we have not empathized enough with people different to us. And our approach to them has been with our agenda to teach and to convert and evangelize rather than to listen and to learn. So I think that this awareness that's in the world now is a great opportunity for us to listen and learn. I was talking to, I was talking to a black guy a while back and it's things like, and this is a lot of this is on social media now, as you know, like the stories Peter's told you, that you just can't believe because we are white and privileged and don't see it. So this guy said to me, when it gets, when it gets in the elevator, as a black guy, he always presses the button straight away so that others don't think he's in there lingering to perhaps commit to crime. Yeah. And I heard Bishop Jake speaking the other day on interview with Carl Lentz that when his son had a car crash and the cops were called that Bishop Jake said his main thing was to keep his son, he said, keep me on the phone, keep the phone in your hand, keep me on the phone when the cops arrive, keep me on the phone because he was terrified that his son would get in trouble with white cops. That's the main concern. The car was fine. There were other things that should have mattered more. And as a white person, we wouldn't have been aware of a need to keep our kids on the phone. That's it. Yeah. The biggest danger was the cops, you know. Yeah, it's funny.  And so, you know, it's, you're right, like this is, this is a moment where we, I have been, you know, I think if there's been one message that I have been, that I have been preaching for the last couple of years, at least it's, it is empathy. And here I am in a position where it's like, okay, now, now it's time that we put out, we put ourselves in other people's shoes and we truly take that time to seek to understand and, and to listen. I remember being in South Africa a while back, when I was asking Black people to help me understand this race thing from their perspective, and a guy said to me, um, what color are Band-Aids? And I said to him, well, they're flesh color. And he said, what flesh color? And I said, oh, hmm, a good point, they're Caucasian. And he said, especially ridiculous in South Africa, with 60 million population, 40 million of whom are Black, and there's no Band-Aids of their skin color. Then he began to ask me how many Black dollies are there or toys for kids to play with, how many, how many Black superheroes and so on and so on. What kind of shampoo, what kind of, whose, whose hair is the shampoo for in hotels? I didn't even know Black people needed a different shampoo for their hair.   We weren't reaching other people in our city that were different to us. We were praying and singing about them, but we weren't reaching them. And when I began to reach into the worst parts of our city, I determined then that I must educate myself of what it's like to be, um, an outsider, to be socioeconomically excluded or skin color, or gender, or lifestyle. Um, and I think the church has been very poor at that. I'm hopeful that out of this pandemic and also the racism consciousness now will come out of it with, with a better result for the church around the world. And I think as you said a moment ago, the intentionality is a massive word right now. If you're not intentional about this and stay intentional after the awareness fades because it will, I think we'll lose a massive opportunity. Lord, tell us, tell us a little bit about what you do and try and explain it to me like I'm a stranger. Okay. What I do? Yes. Okay. Um, so, well, um, I work for my church. Yes. And my husband and I, yep. What do you do for the church? What's your role for the church? So we, with, along with my husband, we are our youth pastors here in Australia, but also globally. Um, we lead young and free, which I say is our, global youth expression of our church. Um, and so for me, that includes, uh, given, giving creative direction, um, vision, um, like prophetic vision. Um, but also, uh, leading our team, um, even, uh, making decisions, uh, key decisions on, uh, our music. Um, and, uh, I guess delivering that. Um, and then, uh, we, I also, uh, I initiated a, a online, um, platform called the secret garden TV, which is, uh, targeted towards young women. Um, and then just, uh, involved in our week to week church services, um, from sisterhood to, um, you know, involved in our, our college, uh, and then also our church services. So how have you guys managed, you know, when, when you, when people work together and live together, there's very little separation between those two worlds. So how have you guys managed to, um, have different identities as it were, different spaces because your work life is your home life and your home life is your work life kind of thing. Cause I think a lot of people have not done that well over the years and still are not. How have you guys managed to balance that? I think when, when Peter and I became, uh, became the youth pastors, um, my dad actually, he said, make sure that you guys do different things. So figure out what you want to do and, and figure out what your strengths are and, uh, and take ownership, um, take ownership there and create those clear roles and those clear differences and make that really clear as well for your team. And so we did that, uh, from, from, from early on, like Peter is very pastoral. He loves young people. He's, uh, he's a great leader. He like, he loves speaking into leadership. Um, and, and so for him, he took on our day-to-day week-to-week runnings of our youth, um, from leading our youth pastors, age group pastors right across Australia and, and being there as a support for our youth pastors on a global level as well at, at our global campuses. Um, and, and for me, I know, like I'm creative.  And so I love ideas and I love, um, seeing a gap and seeing a need, need in, in the world, like in society and, and creating, uh, things to that end. Um, and so for me, young and free was pioneered out of that, out of, uh, it didn't exist, but, um, but I saw a gap and I saw a need. I knew my strengths. I knew my giftings and I, I knew that I could do that. So What do you love about what you do in terms of the youth pastoring and leading? What do you love about that and what, don't you like about it? I love, um, well, firstly, I love young people and, um, and that's, that's number one. I think if I was in it to give myself a platform or, you know, like if it was to bring that sense of like self-fulfillment, then I've got it all wrong and, and I know that I wouldn't be effective. And so for me, it has to, it has to be about young people. It has to be about, um, serving them first and foremost. Um, and you know, I'm getting older and I've been in it for a while now. And so it's interesting whenever I feel like, you know, I'm disengaging, uh, within my heart, I, I pray about it and like, God, break my heart, break my heart for young people again. And, and, and every time, every time I'll hear a story, I'll have some sort of encounter where I'm reminded why I do what I do. And so that's number one. Um, and then, sorry, what was the question? I forgot. And I think the frustrations of working with young people, I was going to ask you about that. What are some of the frustrations in your role towards young people? Um, I think there is like, kind of like there is an, even for me, like, I think I would be classed as being a millennial, but on the older, like on the older side of a millennial. And I find that there's even differences between how old I am and where I am and how I see things and, you know, how I have, uh, lived my life and functioned. And even people just a couple of years, a few years younger than I am, there's a bit of a divide there. And, and so for me, like, you know, I often find myself going, well, don't you know what working hard is? Like, I think, like, I just, I think I get, I get frustrated at just that difference, but then at the same time, like, I also learned so much from young people. And I think who are younger than I am. And I think that they are brilliant. They have so much to teach me and people who are older and who have been in the church for a long time. And so, um, yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't, to be honest, like, not much frustrates me about young people. I think they're pretty amazing. What are some of the major challenges that you feel young people are dealing with right now? Is, is there something that, you know, despite nationality or race or gender that you feel are common issues and challenges? Is that a top three or four things that you guys are always feeling you need to be talking to them about? Um, I think, yeah, I think stress is a huge thing for young people, especially when it comes to their study, when it comes to them finding what they want to do, what they're, I'm sorry, my kids are going to leave. I think, um, yeah, so, um, yeah, that's been a huge thing.  Mental illness is a huge thing. Um, so anxiety, depression. Um, and then I think as well, just, um, yeah, I think, I think that young people, they work in ways that are unconventional. Um, and, but it's, so it's kind of like making that work in a world that is, is changing. Yes. If that makes sense, which I know, I'm, that's something that, um, that I've heard you speak about, but so many, well, I guess for generations, people have been out of the box as such, but we're living in this time where, uh, I think young people are rising up and kind of proving that you don't have to fit into a box, but it, there's still this like element of like proving themselves in that, um, that I think can be quite stressful. I think part of the stress for young people, don't you think, is that, um, the education system seems to lead them to believe that, and the parents often are part of the problem in making them have to get certain qualifications and certain results. And, and what my generation knew is that that was put on us strongly, but my kids and my grandkids, it's a whole new world is that intelligence is a much broader definition now than it was when I was at school, that intelligence is multifaceted, but my generation was, you know, left brain logic. It wasn't at all celebrating right brain creativity. I think the kids neurologically, uh, wired differently to my generation.  I think that message still needs to be loud and clear to kids that you can make a living out of your art or your creativity or your particular form of intelligence and brilliance, but the education system doesn't celebrate lots of that because it's not on the school curriculum, right? That's it. Yeah. You know, I personally, like I remember when I was, uh, as young as kindergarten, uh, and not understanding, just not comprehending what was going on in the classroom and from that moment on, I believed that I wasn't smart and my whole, whole school experience, that was the foundation. That, that was my core belief within myself that I wasn't intelligent and it wasn't until I finished school and I found myself, uh, in the workplace and someone that I realized, well, I, I am intelligent. It just, it just looks differently. Um, and so I, I am a huge advocate for, for that. Yeah. And when you talk about depression and anxiety among young people, what is that normally linked to? Cause my generation would think, well, what have you got to be depressed about in terms of the quality of life these days that the emerging generation have compared to wee baby boomers? And that comes back to that work ethic thing. We worked for everything and many say that a millennial generation have this entitlement thing, which our generation didn't have kind of thing. So what do they tell you the depression is linked to? Is that a common thread? I mean, I think, I think time will tell. Um, I, I think that we are learning about the world that we're living and being a part of the digital age. Um, you know, there's the obvious things that we are all aware of. Um, and so there's the, you know, my daughter, she has a, um, we have a family phone. So she doesn't have a phone, but she, we have a family phone that she had access to it on the weekend. And so she has, she has TikTok, um, which, you know, I, I keep very close to and monitor it for her. But he came in, she came in crying. She's nine years old. She came in crying because she realized all of her friends were hanging out with that without her.  Um, you know, when I was nine, I didn't, I wouldn't, I didn't know that, you know, if my friends were hanging out with me, I wouldn't have a clue. Um, and so there are things that I think that, um, play into, uh, insecurities into things that are happening here that perhaps were seated when we were young and now it's right in front of us. And there's also, you know, it's changing, but for, for years, there was an actual numeric measure of value, um, on our social media.   And all those things, I think play into insecurities. Some people care about that. Other people they couldn't care less. Um, and it, and it looks differently for them. But I just think that this day and age that we're living in where we are just, it's just in front of our face, you know, it's just right there. Um, you know, that's, it's, uh, it's, it's a lot. And I just also think it's like what we're talking about. I think like just being on the go and, um, and, you know, um, being exposed to so much content and so much media and so many things. Um, and forgetting to breathe and forgetting about this beautiful world around us and, uh, you know, all those things, I think definitely have a part to play. Um, um, yeah, yeah. What do you do, Laura, yourself now to develop internally? Are you a reader? Are you a listener? Um, uh, do you journal? Um, what are your personal, some of your personal development things that are go-tos behaviors and habits for you that you kind of feel are non-negotiables for you in your life? Um, oh, that's a good question. I think, I think I'm on a journey of figuring that out. Yeah. Like again, um, I think in the past I have loved to journal, um, I read, but not necessarily like books, um, but I'm always reading, uh, articles and, uh, content and the news and, and so on. Um, and I, I do listen, I am a listener. And so I, I do kind of like to engage in, um, whether it's, um, conversation through podcasts or whatever. Uh, so I'm interested in all of those things, but I think, I think I, I'm still learning how, what really works for me. And, um, I feel a little bit exhausted by all the talking, to be honest, and all the opinions and all the things. Um, and so, and like we, we were just saying, like, I think that, that the pandemic has been good for me just to kind of switch off and just connect a little bit and feel more, I mean, it sounds a little bit cliche, but just feel more connected to what's present. Any big discoveries in the last, do you feel, if that's the right word, um, aha moments about something, about yourself, or about God, or about the church, or about humans, some big, anything you thought, you know, this, yeah, when I journaled that six months ago, that's kept coming back in my mind on a repeat loop. My awareness is taken by that issue, or that concern, um, that can be to, that could be to do with your own breakthrough in your own development, a framing of something, a new belief or habit that you've stepped into with regard to personal health or development or habits of life that are big, that you think now will stay with you for life kind of thing. Yeah, I think, I think there is, uh, for me, I feel like I have got to a point where I have become really self aware, and I know what have been the pitfalls for me in in the past. Um, and so certain things that have maybe triggered, um, things that like a, um, a frat, like fragile form for me, I'm more aware of those things now. Um, which is really, I guess a sense, a feeling of like, just maturing and, and growing past things, um, and not being stuck, not being stuck in old ways of thinking and feeling, but, um, you know, I kind of, the way that I kind of explain it is, um, when my children throw tantrums, uh, they, I, I, I kind of get down on their level and I'm like, you can't, you can't do that anymore. You're, you're growing up, like you're, you're getting older now, like this, like what you're doing, you can't do that, that anymore. And I kind of, I feel like that for myself, like when I start going down old ways of thinking or checking little tantrums to God or whoever to my husband or whatever it may be, I kind of, I feel, I hear my own voice, like you can't, you can't do that anymore. Like we've got to grow past this, we've got to get past this, um, which, which does, you know, feel like a little bit of a, a maturing, um, in that sense. Um, and where was I going with that? I think, um, I'm interested in personal routines that you feel have become non-negotiable because clearly, even just a few years ago, I decided, you know, I decided that I wanted to feel the best that I possibly could. Um, and, um, and so I had to make decisions about how that, how I was going to live my life, what I was going to prioritize, what I was going to eat, like, uh, all of those sorts of things.  It changed my life when I decided to prioritize being my, my best self. Um, um, and, um, yeah, that, that's been very rewarding for me. So then non-negotiable is now for life for you. Some of the personal disciplines, like, is this such a thing as a typical day for you? Not usually. I think like sometimes I can, uh, at the moment, at the moment we've kind of found ourselves in a little bit of a rhythm. Um, it looks different than it did a couple of weeks ago, but I think we're starting to kind of be like, okay, on Thursdays, we, on Mondays, we plan our youth program for Friday nights. On Tuesday, we have, you know, a certain meeting. On Thursday, we're recording for church. On Friday, we're recording for youth. On Sunday, we're watching church now. Um, and so, and my kids are back at school and so there is a little bit more of a routine. Um, but I, this kid, honestly, he's right away now. Um, but, um, you know, in, when, before, before COVID, my life was, um, it looks very different because it would felt like it was, it was like just going from like event to event and it's not a normal way of living. It's, uh, you know, I think just, even just being on a, on a platform in front of, you know, people all the time and, uh, in green rooms and so on. Like that, that was my normal. Um, and do you miss that? I don't at the moment. I think I, I think I will, but I don't at the moment at all. Do you miss traveling? I love traveling. I really do. Um, I'm not missing it right now, but I think, I think I will, I think I will get to the point where I, my parents, my parents actually went to the USA. They got special clearance, clearance to go and the day that they left, I said to Pete, I am so glad that I'm not getting on a plane and heading to the USA right now. Like I was happy to be here. Um, but I think I will get to the point where, um, where I, where I want to travel again. Um, yeah, but, uh, but what I was saying was like in the midst of that abnormal kind of lifestyle, I have had to work out how to create rhythms and, um, and work in disciplines because, you know, you've always got an excuse for like, Oh, well, I don't need to prioritize my fitness because we're at a conference or I can eat bad because it, there's always some reason like, uh, you know, like it's, yeah. So you have to kind of find those disciplines in the midst of an abnormal way of living. Are you, are you a goal setting person? And if so, do you guys talk about we want to be here in five years time, or we don't want to be doing this in five years time, or we want to do less of this? And what do some of those look like? Uh, you know, Peter and I are definitely having conversations about what our lives could look like in the future. There is, there is most certainly a sense of unknown at the moment. And, and I think for a long time we've been okay with that, but I do feel like there is this, like this kind of thing within us that, that is kind of wanting to know what's next for us. And I think for us as well, you know, we're, we're young, but we're not like, we're not super young, you know, we're both in our 30s now. And, and we've both been in youth since we were 12 years old. And so, and so on one hand, we, we love what we do, and we, we don't want to do something, anything else. But then on the other hand, we know that we are also growing older. And so, um, and so we do have, uh, no, I have, I feel like I have long term vision and short term goals. That's kind of how I lived my life. And so, um, I try to kind of be open, be open to what the future, future looks like, but then be very intentional about the immediate future at the same time. How can the listeners find you guys, find what you do Laura, tell me a little bit about how people can track with you. Um, so, uh, for me with the girls, it's thesecretgarden.tv. Um, I am uploading content on that. Um, we are, right now, we have youth programs that are available and we're encouraging youth ministries right across the globe. Perhaps they're not able to, um, gather physically, but also don't have the resources to create content. Um, and so they're welcome to join us. And that's, uh, hilsongyouth.com. Uh, for, uh, young and free with our music and so on, uh, that's available on all, all music platforms. Um, and we have an album that's, that's due to come out in the next month, which is really exciting. Um, and so yeah, and then there's our social media as well. And where can people find and buy your artwork? I'm actually, I'm just practicing at this point, but I, I have had a few people ask and so we'll see. Yeah, you could have a, you could have a gallery opening, perhaps even before COVID is over at the back end of the year, a social distancing viewing of your artwork or a remote one online. We'll see, we'll see. Listen, I want to thank you for your time, Laura, seriously and your attention.  It was lovely to bump into you in Oklahoma a couple of years ago. I'm sending love to you and to Pete and your family. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. I think our listeners are going to love this interview I have. Great. Thank you, Paul. I appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you for taking the time to listen to Paul Scanlon's podcast channel. We just wanted to remind you about the free course that's available to you on the five behaviors of successful people. So go and head over to PaulScanlon.com forward slash free course to sign up for that today. And please do subscribe, share and review this podcast channel.


Hello developers! My name is Matt Rable. Today I'd like to show you how to develop a reactive microservices architecture using J-Hipster. If you're a Java developer, you're probably very aware that microservices have really taken off in the last five or six years, mostly because of Spring Boot. And Spring Boot and Spring Cloud have really made it easy to develop a microservices architecture. And with Spring Boot 2.0, they actually brought Spring Web Flux to the table. So let's show you how to use those frameworks to develop a microservices architecture using the awesome open source project J-Hipster. Let's get it up! This screencast is based on a blog post that I wrote back in January. And if you click on the changelog, you'll see that I actually updated it recently for J-Hipster 7.0.1. And so what this blog post goes through is talking about Spring Boot, Spring Security, and how J-Hipster marries all those together to make it easy to generate microservice architectures. Spring Boot introduced a framework called Web Flux to complement Spring NBC. If you're familiar with Spring NBC, it works great for developing many types of job applications and APIs. Spring Web Flux makes it so you can use reactive programming to make your system scale more on less hardware. And so if you have over 500 requests per second, you might want to look into Spring Web Flux. Otherwise, Spring NBC will probably have the same performance up until 500 requests per second. So if you read through this article, you'll see there's a number of topics covered. We're going to build a reactive microservices architecture. We'll define it with JDL. That's J-Hipster's domain language. We'll run it. We'll test it. We'll prepare it for production. We'll make it use Okta for OIDC. Then we'll create Docker images and run it using Docker compose. And then I'll talk a little bit about why or why not you might want to go reactive at the end. So if you scroll down a bit, you'll see there's some examples of Spring NBC's code for creating points, for instance. You'll see it looks pretty straightforward, very synchronous in a sense. And then the same code with Spring Web Flux, you'll see it's more fluid. It uses Streams API for the most part. And you know, it does a flat map and then map and then returns everything from that. So it's non-blocking and it makes things a little bit more difficult to wrap your head around. But like I said, you'll get much better performance at high load. So you will need to have Java 11 and Docker installed to do this tutorial.  I think it's two gigs by default. I typically run with anywhere from six to 10. So I do have a 64 gig RAM laptop MacBook Pro. And so if you're able to or you're not able to do the same sort of things, it might be because your memory isn't quite there. So you can see you can find the completed source code for this example on GitHub. And I have that open in my browser here. And I also have a demo.adoc open in that folder. So this is the instructions that I'm going to use that basically just condensed the blog post. So it's, you know, easy to follow. And I'm not copying and pasting out of the blog post. So I wrote it in ASCII doctor. And you can see I can use my handy Danny ASCII doctor plugin for my browser. And it renders quite nicely there. So I'll put that on the left and then go down here. So the first thing you'll need to do is install j hipster generator dash j hipster. And I already have installed so I don't need to do that. I can just run j hipster version. And you'll see I have the seven dot zero dot one version and then Java 11 and node 14. So you'll need all those installed to do this tutorial. And then I will create a reactive stack directory and take does make their and CDs into it. So it's all in one command that comes with oh my ZSH. And then I will go ahead and do get init. And the reason I'm doing this is because j hipster will create different directories for each application in my microservices architecture. And if it doesn't detect, it's going to get repository will create, you know, get repos for each one of those. And we're just going to do it all in a mono repo. I'm going to use this JDL to generate our microservices architecture. You can see at the top here, we have an application that is a gateway, and this will use spring cloud gateway. So in spring boot two dot four, spring cloud gateway is the best way to do any sort of gateway. They've deprecated the use of Zool in spring cloud. So you can no longer use that to develop a gateway with spring MVC. There is an open issue to add spring MVC support to spring cloud gateway. But basically reactive is forced for a gateway. We're using OAuth 2 for authentication. We're using Gradle. And I'm going to use view because that's new in j hipster seven kind of fun to use a new web framework. And then test frameworks is Cyprus. And Cyprus is new in j hipster seven as well, before we just had protractor support. And then you'll see here, we have a blog that we're also going to develop. And that is going to be a microservice. And you must make sure that the authentication type matches, right? So that's where using OAuth 2 again. And then we also have a store. So the store is going to be a microservice as well. The difference is the blog is going to use Neo4j. The store is going to use MongoDB. We're going to use Eureka for service discovery. So we'll use j hipster registry to actually allow all these applications to talk to each other. And then we'll have a number of entities. So you can see we have a blog, a post and a tag. And those are all for the blog microservice. If we were to go up to the blog microservice, you can see them listed right there. And then we also have a product that's just used by the store microservice. And then we have relationships, the blog has a many to one relationship to user, as well as post to a blog. And then many to many posts can have many tags. And then we have pagination rules here at the bottom, as well as a microservice indicator and a deployment type for Docker compotes with this architecture definition, we can actually create everything. So we'll go ahead and copy that. And just to let you know, there's also a JDL samples repository. So in fact, we don't even need to copy this because it's the same one that's in the JDL samples repository. So when you type J hipster JDL, it'll look first on your file system, and then look in that samples repository. So a shortcut we can do is j hipster JDL reactive MS. And even though we don't have it locally, it'll pull it from the samples repository. You can see this took a couple of minutes to generate everything that time will depend on your hardware, your internet connection, as well as whether you're recording a video or not. So usually this is around a minute, but it does create all the applications in parallel. So it's as fast as it can be. The MPM install is what really slows things down. So that does happen for the gateway, because that's where all the UI code is. And so now that we have everything generated, we can start it. And one of the things that J hipster does is it generates Docker containers for all the different things you need that aren't quite in the project. So we have key cloak involved, we have Neo4j, we have MongoDB, and we have the J hipster registry. So first of all, I just want to look at the JDL that was downloaded and make sure that matches, you know, what we looked at earlier. And also to make you aware that reactive true is the basic difference between spring NBC and spring web flux. That's all you need to do to be reactive in your microservices. So you can see it's there for the gateway, the blog and the store. And so we can go into the gateway to start things off, and we can start up key cloak. The long way is Docker compose dash f source main Docker. And it'll start up key cloak for you. I also have a number of shortcuts installed with an oh my zsh plugin that J hipster provides. So from now on, I'm just going to use those commands. So I can start up Postgres with jh Postgres up, and then jh registry up. And one cool command you might find useful is jh registry logs that will tail the logs. So you can see if the registry is starting up and all that that should be enough that we can start the gateway. And then we'll go in and start the blog as well. And we have Neo4j in this. So we need to do jh Neo4j up, start that Docker container, then we'll run our app. And then the last one is the store that uses Mongo. So jh Mongo up, we're still in the blog, go to the store, jh Mongo up, and then start that one with Gradle W. While those are all starting up, I'm going to open up a new terminal just to make sure I have key cloak in my Etsy host file. So you'll see I do at 127 001. That is necessary when you're running everything in Docker. Right now we're running everything, you know, just using Gradle. So it's not an issue yet. But when you get to the Docker phase, what'll happen is it'll redirect to key cloak in the URL. And so that's why you need it here. If you have a better way, and you know, Docker networking, then please let us know if we can fix that, but we haven't found a better solution than that. So now everything's up and running, we should be able to log in. We'll go host 8080 make that a bit bigger. And it redirects us to key cloak admin admin can also use user user. And now we're logged in. If we were to look at our entities, we can see we have a blog and we have some data in there that's from a previous demo I did so I can delete that. You always got to practice before these things right. And look, we even have a product in there. Let's add a new product. I happen to like beer, Belgian beer, which can be a bit pricier. So we'll say $10 for 10%. Add this icon here, you can see it even saves images in your database that alerts coming from view since we're using view on the front end, and everything appears to be working. If we go to the administration, we can see the current routes under the gateway, we can see the metrics for all the timings and how fast things are happening. We can also look at the health of the project and see that everything's up, everything's working nicely. And there's also swagger if we wanted to actually, you know, execute some commands in our browser, we could check out the user's account information, for instance, execute it. And you'll see not only the curl command, but you'll see the response there. So that's all working quite nicely. And we can log out here. Keycloak is a superb OIDC and OAuth solution. It's open source, you can run it in a Docker container. I have no problems with it. I admire it very much. And I love to use it with Jay Hipster. However, going to production, you might need something that's always on and maybe you don't want to manage your identity provider. So that's where octa kind of comes into play. And we use spring security to do our OAuth implementation. So everything happens on the back end. And people have asked about this, why don't you do it on the front end? Why don't you do the authorization in view or angular or react? Well, part of the reason is that if we had to do it on the front end, then we'd have to do it in all three of those various frameworks. And they might not have OIDC libraries that make it happen. Second of all, if you're storing the access token on the client, it's not quite as secure. So that's why we do it on the back end. We do all the OAuth close there, all the OIDC logic, and it just works great. And we don't have to worry about the front end, you know, coding each of those to make it work. So spring cloud gateway makes it very easy to relay and access token between a gateway and the downstream microservices. So it's just five lines of YAML that you can see there. It's just a token relay filter that makes it very easy to implement and very easy to use. And so to make this work with octa, first of all, we'll shut all these down. We can even take keycloak down with jh keycloak down. And in the gateway project itself, we use the octa CLI. So if you don't have the CLI installed CLI to octa.com, that'll get you the information that you need to install it. And I'm going to run octa register, it'll prompt me for my first name, my email, and it'll create a new octa organization for me. And it'll prompt me to verify that that email works. Then I can get my verification code for my email, paste it in. And it's created everything for me. And you can see you can set your password opening this link. So I'll go ahead and do that. There we are. Now we're all set up. We can close that tab and we can run octa apps create j hipster. This will prompt us for an application name. So I'll say reactive microservices. And it'll already know what we need for the redirect URIs. You can see we have the first one is for our gateway app that's going to handle the OIDC authentication. And this is what spring security expects. We use OIDC at the end instead of octa because we want to be generic between key cloak and octa. And then this one is for the J hipster registry. So you can use OAuth and OIDC to log in there as well. So we'll just accept the defaults and accept the post log out redirect URIs as well. So you can see it not only created an app for us, right? That's right here. And it has a client ID, but it also created groups for role admin and role user, which J hipster expects. And then it added our user into those. So if we log in with our user will be an admin. And then it writes it to this dot octa dot ENV file. So you can see our issuer URI, our client ID and our client secret. And the reason we put it into an ENV file is we don't want to check it into source control. So that's what we're trying to prevent. So we can add these settings to our J hipster registries configuration. And what it will do is share those for all the microservices. And how it does that is spring cloud config, it's embedded and J hipster registry. And so all the apps will look for configuration in spring cloud config and use it if it's there. So we can take this value right here, and we'll open up a new terminal, and we'll go into source main Docker, that application dot YML, and go down to the bottom, and we'll add it there. And then we can grab our values from right up here, paste that in there. So now we should be good to go. And if we stop J his registry, or jh registry down, that stops the J hipster registry. Now I have seen this error before. So when it happens, you don't really have to worry about it, you can do Docker PS to see what's still running J hipster registry is not in there. So you can do J hipster registry up. And now make sure nothing's running for Java kill all our microservices. And then we can start everything up again. So in our gateway, we'll do a gradle there. And in our blog, we'll start that as well. And one thing I forgot to mention, even though we installed Cyprus, we didn't run it. So on the gateway, when using key cloak, you could actually run MPM run e to e from the command line in that same gateway directory. And it would do everything and make sure everything worked out that everything started, we can hit local host 8080, make that a bit bigger, and sign in, you'll see it took us to octa. And it logged us in. So you're like, how did that happen? It's because we'd logged in before a member when we changed our password. So if we were to use an incognito window, and do local host 8080, this time you would actually see the octa login screen. So I can enter my credentials, you don't need your whole email, you just need the part before that. And then you can log in that way. And of course, all the entities are still there. And all the data is still there because we didn't change anything, right? We didn't change any of the back end code. You'll see you can use Cyprus to test octa. So I didn't show you how you do it with key cloak, but it's very easy.  So now what we'll do is we'll stop all of our Docker containers, because we're going to run everything in Docker now. So back here, stop all our apps, and stop all our Docker containers, verify they're all stopped with Docker PS. And now we can build Docker containers for each of our apps. So we use this Gradle command, pass in the prod profile, and boot jar and jib Docker build. So jib is the one that's going to be doing the Docker build. So we'll start with the store, and we'll do the blog. And then we'll do the gateway. While those are all building, what we'll do is we'll modify the Docker compose file that was generated. First of all, we don't need key cloak anymore, because we're just going to run with octa. And then there's a different place where we have to specify the octa values here. This is in Docker compose central server config application dot yaml. So I will go ahead and open everything up in my ID. So the first thing is to remove key cloak from Docker compose just down at the bottom here needing that. And then in the gateway project, that's where we had the settings before. So that was under source main Docker and grab those values. And then in here in the central server config, it's just a different location when you're running everything with Docker compose will put the values there. And then let's see if all our containers have been built, we still have the gateway going here. Now our gateway is completed. So we can use Docker compose up, we'll have to see the into the Docker compose directory. And you can put dash D on the end. And then you won't see any output. But I like doing it this way without the dash D. And you can basically see the logs from all the different containers starting up. So it looks like everything started, we can open a new incognito window. And the first thing is to check on the registry to see if they say everything started. So 87 61, you'll notice it takes us to octa to log in. And it says everything's up, we can also look at the configuration. And you'll see our octa values are in there. And there is a way to encrypt those values. So you aren't checking in client secrets, I'll show you that in a future tutorial. Right now, I want to go to local host 8080 prove that everything works. Since we already logged into octa, it should bring us back here. Yep. And we're seeing tags. We're seeing products. And everything's working like we expect it to. So you might be wondering about Kotlin. We do have Kotlin support for Jay hipster. So there's a Kotlin blueprint. And you can install it using npm install dash G generator Jay hipster Kotlin. At the time that I wrote this demo, there wasn't support. But if you'll notice if you go to the releases page, it does have support for Jay hipster 7.0.1. Unfortunately, when I tried this specific JDL, there were some issues. So hopefully those will be fixed very soon. You might be wondering, how do I deploy this to the cloud? Well, Jay hipster has support for AWS, Azure, Heroku and Google Cloud Platform. So it's pretty easy to actually get it to those endpoints. The problem is if you're actually deploying to say Heroku, you'll have to deploy each individual app and probably what you want to use is something like Kubernetes, right, to basically do it all. So in a future video, I'll show you how to do that. But it's pretty easy. All you need to do is run the Kubernetes generator for Jay hipster. So that's Jay hipster k8 or Jay hipster Kubernetes, if you want to spell it out, Ray sang and I did a talk on this. And you can can see it's right here embedded in my demo. It's also embedded in the blog post. So if you start watching at 4618, you'll see Ray take a very similar architecture to this one and put it up on Google Cloud. And then you might be asking yourself, you know, should you go reactive or should you wait for project loop? So spring NBC is probably good enough for most crud apps, especially if you have less than 500 requests a second. But if you're dealing with, you know, millions of customers and millions of dollars a month for your cloud bill, and you can make things faster than maybe look into spring with flux project loom might make it so the non reactive code actually works as fast as a reactive code. You might want to look into that. I think that might be a couple years out from what I've seen companies are having a hard time even jumping from Java eight to Java 11. So project loom might be in Java 17. And if it is, and you can upgrade great, try it out. Let me know how it works. Currently, I'm investing my knowledge in reactive and I'll keep my eye on project loom. I think the beauty is that if you know the non reactive stuff, which you probably do, then you don't need to learn anything new for project loom. And by learning how to do spring web flux and code in reactive style, you will actually make yourself more aware of cool things like the stream API. So you can find this code for this example on my repo at Java microservices examples under octa developer. And then it's in the reactive J hipster directory. So if you were to go level up, you can see there's regular J hipster, there's spring boot and spring cloud and spring cloud gateway. And of course, you can find the blog post itself reactive Java microservices. I think if you Google for just that, it'll come up. So hopefully you've enjoyed this screencast. If you liked it, follow my team on Twitter octa dev. I'm at m rabel. We also have a YouTube channel at octa dev on Twitter. So subscribe and enjoy more videos like this one.


Let's see what's on thinking man's mind today. I'm adding access control to several openings. When do I need to make the lock fail safe? That's a great question with subtle code overtones. Let's take a look. First of all, the difference between fail safe and fail secure changes depending on if it's a lock set or an electric strike. When we say fail, we're talking about power failure. So a fail safe, cylindrical lock, mortise lock or exit device trim, on loss of power, the outside handle is unlocked. You have free egress from the inside at all times. With fail secure, on loss of power, the outside handle is locked, but you still have free egress from the inside at all times. This really isn't any different from a storeroom function lock set that's locked all the time from the outside. You need a key to get in, but you have free egress from the inside at all times. On an electric strike, it's slightly different. For fail safe electric strike on loss of power, the keeper is free and it doesn't provide locking or positive latching. So you can't use that on a fire rated opening. Fail secure for an electric strike on loss of power, the keeper is rigid and it does provide locking and positive latching. Maglocks are only fail safe. They need power to stay locked. And if you do use a maglock, you need to make sure that you meet the special locking arrangement requirements. I'll have several code corners on that particular topic, but let's take a look. If we have classrooms that have a classroom function, mechanical lock set, for example, this is the easiest way to remember if I'm swapping out and upgrading to access control, because the mechanical lock that's on there right now, A, have a cylinder on the outside that you can lock or unlock the lock, and B, does it provide free egress from the inside? If it provides free egress from the inside, which most functions of lock sets do, and it's locked on the outside, the ingress side, the access side where you're trying to get into the room, then it can be a fail secure lock of any kind. But when do we need fail safe? If you have stairwell reentry codes, whether it's NFPA 101 or the IBC, there's some form of stairwell reentry where the doors have to be unlocked during the time of a fire, either at the fire command center or a switch inside the main entry. And on corridor doors with egress in both directions, where perhaps you need access to an exit. If you're in a path of egress, you cannot lock the door on the egress side. And if the corridor door has egress in both directions, there is your answer. And whenever you lock a required exit or exit access door on the egress side, unless you have an exception, here is a very large town hall. You can see the card reader on the wall. This is a lighted exit sign you can see from the life safety plan. And because you're locking the door on the egress side, then you would have to make sure that it's some kind of fail safe device. And because you're locking the door on the egress side, it needs to meet special locking arrangements. For more information and continuing education opportunities, please visit ASSA Abloy Academy by clicking in the links in the comment below. Please click like and subscribe to this channel. You can follow me on Twitter at Art Consultant and or connect with me on LinkedIn for updates. If you have a code question or would like to potentially see one on a future episode of Code Corner, please email Catherine.Flower at ASSAAbloy.com. Thanks for joining me in the Code Corner today. My name is Katie Flower. And my goal is to help you achieve safety in the built environment.


The mutual broadcasting system in cooperation with Family Theatre Incorporated presents Little Boy Blue starring Ginny Crane and Patrick McGeehan. Wallace Ford is your host.  As your host this evening, I want to welcome you to Family Theatre. All of our new listeners, and I want to say thank you to all of the old friends and whose loyalty and enthusiasm for the program and its purpose have been expressed in so many ways. Your letters giving suggestions and ideals and experiences of happy family life have been a great encouragement to all in Hollywood associated with the program. We like to hear from you because Family Theatre is your program. It was made possible by all those in the radio audience who wanted a program like Family Theatre to express the fundamental things we deeply believe in. It was made possible by the executives and the performers and the technical people in pictures and radio who believe, as you do, that a nation of happy homes is the most wonderful, the most important thing for our nation and for every nation. Yes, we want to keep our families, your family and my family, together and happy. And we sincerely believe that family prayer, prayers asking God for his help and prayers acknowledging that help will keep our families in close understanding and harmony. You'll find this true. Family prayer is the key to the kind of home you want to have. Family prayer is the key to a happy home. He wrote these words. God in his providence obscures the goal beyond this veil of sorrow and smiles at men and pity when they seek to penetrate the moral with faith that all is for the best. Let's bear what burdens are presented that we shall say let come what may, we die as we have lived, contented. Saint Joseph, Missouri in the 70s. Along the boardwalk of the main street a young man with hat on the back of his head and necktie streaming away from his high collar, half runs, half walks through the late afternoon crown. Excuse me. Excuse me, please. Well, really. Excuse me. Gene, Gene Phil, when did you get back? No time to talk now, Josh. Hey, Gene, wait up a minute. Here's me, please. Yes? Well, Mr. Field, I thought you were in Europe. I was. Yeah, I was in Europe. Tell me, tell me something. Has your father left yet? Well, I think he was just going out the side door. That's the side door. Thanks. I'll try to catch you. Oh, I'm very sorry, sir. Oh, Mr. Comstock. Field, I might have known. Let me help you up, sir. I was hurrying to see you. I just got back from Europe. And did you knock people down like that all the way? Oh, yes. Oh, no, sir. No, sir. Sir, I've talked to Julie. I assumed. And I've got to talk to you, Mr. Comstock. We want to get married. So you informed me two years ago. And what was my answer? Well, you said we'd have to wait two years till Julie was 20. Correct. And what else did I say? You said I should be established in business. Well? Well, I've decided that the most important business I have to attend to is Marion Julie. Indeed. Young man, don't you realize Julie is still a girl? Oh, she'll outgrow that, sir. It'd be a fool to give my consent. Well? Are you implying that I am a fool? Oh, no, no, sir, no. Well, as a matter of fact, I am. I always have been where Julie's concerned. Field, if you make that girl unhappy, I'll take it out of your hide. Julie. Yes, Jean. He said yes, Julie. Oh, Jean. We'll be married next week. And a honeymoon in St. Louis. St. Louis. New York, Julie. Nothing but the biggest and the best for the wife of you, Jean Field. That's the new elevated railroad, Julie. Just one of the sites in New York. You mean it runs way up there above the street? That's right. Oh, it's fabulous, Jean. Unbelievably so.  Unbelievably so. Waiter. Uh-oh. Waiter. Oui, monsieur? Uh, Pigsfeet, Alice St. Joe. For two, please. Pigsfeet, Alice St. Joe, monsieur? That's what I said, sir. Shirley, an establishment far famed as the Waldorf Astoria, would wish to make two honeymooners from St. Joseph, Missouri, feel at home. Oh, Jean. And tonight, Julie, we see Frufru. Frufru. A musical comedy at the Fifth Avenue Theater. Oh, I didn't think there could be another theater in New York. Well, I guess this is the last. Be happy, Julie. I'm with you, Jean. A trip to Europe, a wedding, a honeymoon in New York. Undoubtedly a costly one. And now I'm home, Mr. Gray. Yes, and I presume broke again. You came to ask for another advance from your father's estate. Is that correct, Jean? Uh, well, I came primarily to see you, Mr. Gray, but, well, I won't deny that some money would be welcome. Eugene, I think it's about time you and I had a serious talk. The estate your father left in my trust is not endless, you know. Oh, I know.  I consider the trip to Europe a reasonable part of your education. Your marriage, and I suppose even an expensive honeymoon in New York, can be justified. But you've got to settle down. Well, I, yes, I suppose you're right, sir. You've got to think of a career. And I consider it my duty to force you to think of a career. Therefore... Uh, therefore no money. No money. I deserve that, sir. You're absolutely right. And I'm resolved right now to launch on a career, on the variety stage. Now see here, you're not going to talk about going on the stage again. Oh, but I am. I forbid it. But you said I had to have a career. My friends consider me entertaining. Jean Field, you can't do this. A cheap entertainer. Think of the family name. Oh, I have, sir. I wouldn't think of using my own name, of course. Well, at least you show that much sense. So I've decided to use your name. Yep. Melville L. Gray, Banjo, and Specialty Arts. If you're Jean Field, you, you wouldn't dare. You wouldn't have the audacity to do... Yes, sir. Oh, this is another one of your preposterous jokes. Needing money is no joke, I assure you. Very well. Very well, you'll get your money again. But I tell you, this is the last time. Positively, the last time. Mr. Gray, you're one of the most understanding men I've ever known.  Well, you get out of here. Take this check and get out before I change my mind. Thank you, Mr. Gray. Thank you again. And, uh, Julie would want me to thank you. All by the way, I forgot to tell you... What now? I'm editor of the St. Joseph Gazette. You're what? I've got a job as editor of the St. Joseph Gazette. I start tomorrow.  Jean Field, you're impossible. Thanks for the check, Mr. Gray. Thanks indeed. If it weren't your own money, it would be robbery.  Jean, your first pay envelope? Uh-huh. Open it up. Not even a dime out for a haircut. But the envelope, it's made out to me. Oh, that's just, uh, just an error, I guess. Oh, thank you for a nice error, Jean. A valentine.  In all these months we've been married, you've thought of me as just a newspaper man. You didn't know I was going to win fame and fortune as a poet, did you? Oh, it's a beautiful poem, Jean. Of course. It was written for a beautiful woman. What in heaven's name makes you so quiet, Jean? Working on a poem, of course. It's entitled to the new baby. The new baby. Our baby. Wait, it's so wonderful. I'm almost frightened. Wait a minute. Frightened. Never be frightened of the future, Julie. We'll make a wonderful family. Something else, Julie? What, darling? A while after the baby comes, uh, I might make a trip down to St. Louis. I've heard tell they need a good man on the paper down there, and they might even be interested in someone like me. Oh, Jean. Well, here you are, Jean. Thanks for the lift from the station. I can't wait to tell Julie the good news. Oh, don't blame you. Getting a good job at a big town like St. Louis. Well, see you later. Thanks. Uh, give my regards to the family. Julie. Julie, I'm back. Julie, uh... Hello, Jean. Well, Mr. Gray. Mr. Comstock. Jean, this is Dr. Mason. Doctor. Julie, what's happened to Julie? Not Julie, Jean. I'm sorry, Mr. Field. The disease struck suddenly. I... I did all that could be done for him. The boy. We tried to send for you in St. Louis. We couldn't find you. Where's my wife? I want to see Julie. Julie. Jean. Oh, Jean. Julie, my beloved. Oh, we tried so hard to find you. I shouldn't have gone. I shouldn't have left you. Oh, don't say that. Oh, Jean. No, I don't know why I've been frightened. But it was so awful knowing I was powerless. Knowing there was... Please forgive me. Cry, Julie. Why don't you cry? We were too happy, Julie. I've been a fool to think that happiness can be of our own making. I've been too much of a coward to accept reality. What? Jean, what are you saying? I... I don't know, Julie. I don't think you do. I'm not afraid of the future, Jean. Are you? With God standing by us? I'm not afraid of the future, Julie. The St. Louis Journal, Eugene Field Editorial Writer. Candice City Times, Eugene Field Managing Editor, announces the birth of a daughter. Denver Tribune, Eugene Field Managing Editor-in-Columnist, celebrates the arrival of a son. Eugene Field? Oh, hello, Julie. What's the matter? Eugene Field. I want an explanation of this. Oh, I noticed you called me Eugene. What have I done now? We came out here to Manitou for a restful weekend. Is that right? That's right. To get a few days' vacation from the children. Uh-huh. And for the meeting of the Denver Press Club. Then would you please explain this poster? Yeah. Well, it's self-explanatory, isn't it? Tonight, Monster Benefit Show. Manitou Hotel Main Dining Room. Come one, come all, admission 50 cents. Isn't that clear enough? Ah, it's all too clear. Putting posters all over town, announcing a show. When you know very well there isn't any show is bad enough. But to suggest you might charge admission. But how else can you raise money if you don't charge admission? It's for a wordy charity. Oh, yes. What charity? Well, uh, the children need new shoes and they could use some new toys. Oh, Gene, you wouldn't have the nerve to do a thing like that while people might really come. Of course. But there isn't any show where they can't just sit there. Julie, darling, I'm surprised at you. They won't just sit there. If the people of Manitou will provide an audience, heaven will provide the opportunity. Gene, please. I'm serious. So my precious. And by the way, here's your free pass to the show. I'll probably be busy at the box office tonight taking in the money. I can't believe it, Carrie. He's really done it. Yes, and quite a turnout, too. Looks like the whole town's here. Oh, what's he going to do, Carrie? Taking money from these miners. Well, they might not like it. Yes, I know. Oh, hello, Evans. Evening, Carrie. Hello, Mrs. Field. Evans, is there have any entertainers? No, Mrs. Field. No entertainers. There's no body backstage at all. Well, I hope Gene hasn't carried this joke too far. The crowd's getting a little impatient. Wait a minute. Diary is getting up on the platform now. Say he's going to the piano. Oh, no. He's not going to try to play himself. But he is. Oh, this is awful. This is simply awful. Well, Julie, how was it? Oh, Gene. Oh, I couldn't have been that bad. It was a miracle they liked you. Getting up there and entertaining for two hours all by yourself. Was it really two hours? It was. Oh, but that's not what I want to talk about. Gene, please listen to me because I mean it. I insist that you return every cent of that money. After working that hard, I'll really... No, Gene, please listen to me. I'm not laughing. I don't think this was a funny joke. You really mean that, don't you? I do. Well, I guess you're right. I don't exactly know how I'll get in touch with all those people again, but excuse me during the door. Oh, come in, Mrs. Arsatti. Mr. Field, I can't. Mr. Field, that was the most wonderful thing anyone has ever done for me. Oh, Mrs. Arsatti, my wife Julie. Mrs. Arsatti, what... You see, Mrs. Arsatti's husband was killed in the mines the other day. She had several children. Of course, if you insist on something... Oh, no. No, Gene. There's a little more than $200 in this envelope, Mrs. Arsatti. A gift from the people of Manitou. Oh, thank you, thank you. I don't know how I'll ever... The people of Manitou don't expect any thanks, Mrs. Arsatti. Now you go along to those kids of yours, then. You have an angel for a husband, Mrs. Field. Thank you. An angel.  But she needed the money, Julie. I had to. And you let me think you were going to use that money for... All I said was that the children needed shoes, and they do. I told you the money was for a worthy charity. You didn't really doubt me, did you? Oh, of course I doubted you. You don't know how many times I've doubted you. Really? But I won't anymore. I can promise you that. I'll never waste another second of my time doubting you again. You already have three glisbury tarts. I didn't either. I'll smidgee. Why, Junior Field, I saw you. Wait a minute here. Mother, I was under the impression there were knives out in the kitchen. Well, there were last time I looked. Then it seems to me this last tart could be cut in four pieces. That is, unless you all want meaty to do. Oh, no! I thought so.  Yeah, and I get to cut it. You don't either. I'm the oldest. Wait a minute. Mel? Huh? Say, that's a beauty of a shiner. Come closer. Let me look. Oh, it don't hurt. Doesn't. All right, doesn't. Say, did you see this, mother? Yes, I saw it.  I only fell from the first landing. Yes, and Freddy's always doing that, too, father. I think you should speak to him. Maybe I should. Remind me to speak to you, Freddy. Uh-huh. How would you fix my soldier? He's busted. He's broken, Freddy. Uh-huh. And he's busted, too. Hey, when are we going to get the knife and cut this tart? I'm awful hungry. Very nice, Mary. Bravo. Your music's coming along fine.  Concert after dinner? Well, I got another new piece I can play, too. Well, uh, don't you think we'd better let Freddy play his piece for daddy, dear? Oh, has Freddy got a piece, too? Uh-huh. Oh, he only plays with one finger. Well, just the same. I think we should hear it.  But, perny darling, not at a concert like this. Come on, Freddy. All right. Oh, gee. That is all imbedially. At last. Tired. A little. You working? Well, I've got pen and paper on. No idea yet, though. Slayson Thompson wants me to do a poem for the first issue of his new magazine, The American. Oh. Well, that's nice. I won't bother you, then. Oh, no, wait, Julie. Don't go just yet. What? I just want to say that's a wonderful family of yours. Oh, who's Gene? Grave Alice and Laughing Allegra. Edith with the golden hair. What's that? Children's hour long film. About his family, I guess. But it might be about ours. How do you mean? I was noticing tonight Grave, Freddy, Laughing Mel, and Penny with an appetite like a mule. To say nothing of our 11-year-old grown-up Mary. Oh, it's strange, isn't it? How they're each different, one from the other? Like snowflakes. They all look the same until you get them under a microscope. Gene. Esther. I wonder what the other one would have been like. Yes, Julie. I've often wondered about him, too. He would have been 14 and three months now. Almost a young man. On the football team, probably. Having his first sweetheart. And different from all the rest. Yes. Well, this isn't getting your work done. I suppose not. I'll go, then. Please don't stay up too late. Good night, dear. Night, blue eyes. Gene, I wonder what the other one would have been like. Ty soldiers busted. Broken. Busted, too. A poem about... Almost a young man. Having its first sweetheart. Freddy just left his old rag dog on the stairs again.  Little boy blue. Little boy blue.  The little toy dog is covered with dust. But sturdy and staunch, he stands. Breakfast. Oh, this is going to be so. I'm really hungry. Hey, oatmeal. Oatmeal, sir. Hot oatmeal for everybody. Hey, Penny. What'd you do with my skate key? Well, if you'd take better care of it, you wouldn't be losing it all at your time. All right, all right. At the table, everybody. Come on, Freddy. It's your turn to say grace. Uh-huh. Unto God, for health and food. And all that in our lives is good. We give our hearts and gratitude. Well, well, all the happy faces here. All right. Morning, blue eyes. You'd better have a poem for us after working all night. Oh, I have, Julie. I have. Oh, have you, Daddy. Will you say it for us? Not quite, everybody. Daddy's got a poem. Yeah, everybody's quiet. All right.  I think you'll know what it means. Well, has it got a name, Daddy? Uh-huh. I call it Little Boy Blue. Here it is. The little toy dog is covered with dust. But sturdy and staunch, he stands. The little toy soldier is red with rust. And his musket molds in his hands. Time was when the little toy dog was new. And the soldier was passing fair. And that was the time when our little boy blue kissed them and put them there.  And don't you make any noise. So, toddling off to his trundled bed, he dreamt of the pretty toys.  Oh, the years are many, the years are long, but the little toy friends are true. And faithful to little boy blue, they stand, each in the same old place. Awaiting the touch of the little hand, the smile of the little face.  Well, Julie, what do you think? I love you, Genefield. And saw through the many years he lived with his friends, his children, and his beloved wife Julia. And when, at last, the many years were through, his own words went echoing on. That we shall say, let come what may, we die as we have lived, contented. You know, while I was listening to tonight's program, I got to thinking of the past and the way our parents and grandparents lived a generation or two ago. Today you hear people worrying about the age in which we live. They say it's complicated and confusing. You read in the newspapers about juvenile and parental delinquency, broken homes, and neglected children. And you get to worrying about your own family. You don't want anything like that to happen in your home. Well, it's good to remember there are millions of us who feel the same way about our homes as you do. It's encouraging to remember that in every day and every hour of your life, it's encouraging to remember that in every day and age, the same fundamental things are true. There are the same hopes and joys, the same disappointments. It's always true that good people make good homes. No matter how complicated and confusing life may be, it's equally true that prayer, family prayer, will bring happiness and peace. Yes, and strength and courage to you and to your family. God's wonderful help can be had for the asking. So pray together as a family, tonight and every night, because a family that prays together stays together. Before saying good night, I'd like to thank Jeannie Crane for her performances, Julia and Pat McGeehan for his portrayal of Eugene Field. Special word of thanks also to Ever Tomlinson for writing tonight's play and to Max Tehr for his music. Mel Williamson directed, and John Ryder produced the program. Others who appeared in our play tonight were Ruth Peterson, Ralph Moody, Alan Harris, Frank Nelson, Joel Davis, Don Bender, Bill Blackburn, and Robert Ellis. Next week, our family theater star will be MacDonald Kerry in a point of law. Your host will be Caesar Romero, and this is Wallace Ford saying good night and God bless. This series of the Family Theater broadcast is made possible by the thousands of you who felt in need for this kind of program, by the Mutual Broadcasting System which has responded to this need, and by the actors and technicians in the motion picture and radio industries. This program is heard overseas through the facilities of the United States Armed Forces Radio Services. Tony Lothrano speaking. This is the Mutual Broadcasting System.