Hello everyone, welcome to another NARC survivor live video. It's very early in the morning here only 7 30 a.m but I just got out had a shower and I thought it'd be a good time to do a video as I do often like to do a video in the morning. I feel fresh just as I first wake up so yeah let's get into it. The narcissist pretends to move on it may seem like they're moving on but it isn't real it's an illusion it's an orchestration they plan and coordinate the elements of the situation to produce a desired effect it isn't real but they use it because serves a purpose and that purpose is to project their feelings onto you however they feel it's how they want you to feel so if they feel envious or jealous of something in your life they want you to be envious and jealous of them so they pretend to move on to project those feelings onto you and whether or not you feel that I don't know but if you do it will regulate their emotions it will make them feel better about themselves and their lives and it will make it a lot easier for them to move on because they think they've left you it behind and you're miserable you're depressed and it boosts them up remember as I've said before my videos they can't feel good unless you feel bad they can't feel good unless you feel bad and if you feel good about yourself and your life then they feel bad as crazy as it sounds that's just the way it is that's how it works with narcissists because their emotional state their happiness is determined by how you feel they can't feel happiness unless their target is miserable and if you're not miserable then they have to make you miserable and they try to do that by pretending to move on by pretending as though they found someone else and they may have found someone but trust me that person ain't half as great as they're making them out to be they ain't even a fraction of what you were they're nothing it's all just stories lies and fabrications because they know you're a good person they know you want to trust them they know you want to believe them so it's so easy for them to manipulate you good people unfortunately are very easy to manipulate but as you become more wiser to their games you can still be a good person and be on to them because you learn through experience but unfortunately their experience in life seems to only have made them more and more dark to where they play these mental games where they will discard you and run off and the whole point of that is just to hurt you just to make you feel like you've lost out on something because maybe in the back of the minds that's how they feel so they want to make you feel like you've lost out when in actuality most often they're just taking a break and when they go they're still watching you behind the scenes they're spying on you and they already know when they're planning to come back when they're planning to prove to you because this isn't their first rodeo they've played this game enough times to know that even if they do move on to someone else at some point they are going to get bored just as they got bored with you so they know it's only a matter of time whether it's a few weeks or a few months they know at some point they're going to get bored of this new person especially if they already know that this new person is not going to measure up to you because it isn't that easy for them to find a new grade A source of supply it's hard enough for a normal person to find someone that they get along with or for a narcissist to find a grade A source it's 10 times harder it's not that easy for them to find a fool a doormat someone who will believe their lies someone who will do whatever they want someone who will listen to them i mean we may think of ourselves as grade A sources of supply but in the end even we were willing to do that for them eventually even we woke up so yeah even that even in that rare case where they do find another grade A source even then it's not going to last forever because just like us they're going to wake up they're going to realize what's going on but you know what narcissists are already ahead of the game they already know that no one's going to put up with them forever they know that no one's going to be able to tolerate them and that's why any prospect any person that they get involved with they just see it as something temporary it's just for recreational use it's just for their own personal enjoyment and amusement rather than actually sharing something with that person because they already know it's not going to last despite the arrogance the audacity despite the elevated sense of their own importance and abilities the reality is that narcissists actually believe that they are unlovable they believe that if they showed who they actually are no one would love them and that's why they hide behind a mask that's why they don't show who they really are not at least they've been involved with you for a few months then they start to show you but that's only once you're emotionally attached and you believe the lie you believe in the false character but they're not going to show you who they are in the beginning because they know you're not going to love that character or actually that that real person of who they are they know you're not going to love that and that's why they hide it from you they don't want you to see that because they know you'd run a mile they know you'd drop them like a hot potato and then it'd be all over before they're able to sink their claws into you before they're able to drain you of everything you have and that's why when you first meet them they give you the false character they put on a show they make you believe they're about this and that they give you false promises they future fake so you're holding on for something better you think that something better is going to come because they've told you all of these things and then one day you realize it's all a lie it was just something they use for supply because when they're able to get you to believe the lie and the revelation it fuels them it makes them feel good about themselves because how you see them reflects back to them it tells them oh yes wow i am amazing i am this great person as long as you believe it it doesn't have to be real it doesn't have to be true as long as we share this fantasy together that i am something it's sad but all they really want is to be something and there's nothing wrong with that we all want to be something in this life but you've got to do the work to get there you can't just one day say okay i am something now what about the work but that's what these narcissists do they cheat their way through life they cut corners they act like they're already something they're already what you want they already have what you need when in reality they ain't got shit and that's why we end up so hurt and disappointed because we believe the lie we believed in this false character that they were actually about something and just like we were i mean that's the most painful part about it is that in our entire lives we suffered we went through the trials and tribulations we went through a lot of things to get to where we are today we did the work and we bring all of that to the table after all of our suffering after everything we went through and yet they bring nothing but a lie the best you will ever get from a narcissist is an illusion and that doesn't change when they proclaim to move on from you 100 lie viewers please give this video a thumbs up let's get this message out there yeah the best you will ever get from them is an illusion and that does not change when they say that they've moved on it's still more and more lies because they never do the work to move on for real just as i never did the work to be something for real with you to build a relationship with you and what makes you think if they couldn't do the work with you for all of those months or years or however long it was what makes you think that one day they're just suddenly going to be everything that you wanted them to be for someone else it doesn't work that way people don't change overnight and we should know that ourselves it took years of our life to become the person that we are today so these narcissists are not going to change overnight and become everything that you wanted them to be for someone else i know that's how we think sometimes after the relationship but it's just completely wrong it's wrong that doesn't happen for anyone so yeah they pretend to move on it's an illusion they're not really moving on to nothing it's just a dream a fantasy it's something that they've implanted in your head and they expect you to believe it and if you believe it that reflects back to them and they begin they begin to believe it even more they begin to believe their own lies and then that fuels them to move on which makes it even more believable to you because then you're sitting back they can hold on they really are moving on they actually do look happier without me when in actuality no you're just fueling it so take away your belief and you put the focus back in your own life and watch what happens it will fall apart very quickly because the only thing that's supporting it is your belief your belief is very powerful that's why the moment they got with you they had to lie they had to future fake they had to give you false promises about the future because of how it made them feel about themselves and their lives because your belief was so powerful so take your beliefs your thoughts and use them for something productive instead of letting them distract you and wasting your power on something that's not going to serve you use it for something good for your life so that you can be happier so that you can live well I mean we say sometimes it's good to believe in something it's good to have faith especially in God because we hope that something will come back to us we will get something in return so yeah those times it's good to put your belief in that because something can come back to you it's not wasted but trust me when you're dealing with a narcissist it is a waste of your energy it is a waste of your power because nothing coming back to you you ain't getting nothing you will be wasting your energy your power your belief you should take that and just believe in yourself invest it in yourself then you'll see something come back but as long as you have faith in the narcissist nothing's gonna happen there I've talked to people I've seen people wait around for 10 20 years they're never going to change they're always going to be that way and what you should do now is just accept it accept that that is who they are who they're showing you is who they are there's no other side to their personality there's not this magical wonderful side of them that you haven't seen that they haven't given to you there's just not if you've known them for months or even years you've seen everything they've got you've seen everything they have to show to you so just accept that that's who they are it doesn't matter if they pretend to move on that's who they are so don't believe that there's anything else you're wasting your belief you're wasting your power your energy take that back and put it into your own life invest it into yourself and watch how your life begins to change because the reason why everything was going down in your life while you were with them is because you were wasting all of that on them you put all of your hope and faith into the narcissist when it was a lie so of course you're not going to get nothing back of course your life is going to get better because you're wasting it on a lie on a dream a fantasy but you put that back into yourself and watch what happens things will start to change things will start to get better because you have power you have a lot of power just don't waste it on someone who cannot reciprocate that power back to you they have to trick you into giving your power to them they can't generate any power of their own that's why they always play these mind games that's why they're so manipulative because it's all about sucking your power out of you that's all they can do they lost their power a long time ago when they abandoned who they really are their true identity and they created a false character they lost all of their power when they did that because your power comes from being yourself beautiful sunrise here gotta share this with you hope you enjoy it as much as I do okay that's all for today I hope this video was helpful for you if it was please give it a thumbs up down below it helps the youtube algorithm it gets this message out there and it helps to grow our community as well so please do that right now hit the thumbs up button down below and leave your thoughts in the comment section I'd love to hear from you I read your comments every day share this video and if you'd like someone to talk to someone to help you deal with a narcissist or with moving on from them I am available for one-on-one coaching you can book that from my website it's narcsurvivor.co.uk again thank you all for joining me and I look forward to talking with you in another one very soon


Wow. Hello, float friends. Oh, my gosh, it's so exciting to be here. My name is Jennifer. I am a writer, maker, professional wanderer, and I am a floater.  And I just had to rewrite my talk completely after Dr. Feinstein did his thing. It was a little funky work with me. If you had met me ten years ago, you would have seen the picture of success, history PhD, awards for teaching, writing, high-power job in the humanities institute world at the University of California. Behind the scenes, I was tanking seriously. Five years ago, I was a woman on the edge. Almost two decades of chronic pain, fatigue, anxiety, diagnosis, alternatively, fibromyalgia or hypothyroid, celiac issues, probably all of them combined. So five years ago, I was totally swirling the toilet bowl. I could not function. I couldn't work. I was on weekends, two things. I could do two things, like the bank and the grocery store, the grocery store and the dry cleaner. So it got to a point where I just, I didn't know what I was going to do. I left my job. I moved to Nevada City to the mountains to try to find some inner peace, some calm. And I tried everything on Dr. Feinstein's list except marijuana, which makes me really paranoid. So, but I was utterly failed by conventional medicine and most alternative modalities just didn't click for me. Short-term, great, long-term, no. So then I tried floating and OMG. My first float was the most transformative thing I had ever experienced. I walked out of the float tank an hour, I might get a little overclimped here, after an hour and I couldn't find pain anywhere in my body. You'd understand, it had been almost 20 years since I could say that. And it just, it was amazing. All, I experienced all the benefits that Dr. Feinstein talked about, the declining muscle tension, the upper, you know, more relaxation, body awareness. For me, that was amazing because I had spent almost 20 years trying not to be aware of my body and to be in a situation where I could pay attention, where I could learn the lessons that my body wanted to teach me. Amazing. So, and as he said, this didn't, this didn't last forever. It wasn't like, you know, one float and I'm cured. But it did open a door for me. It gave me a gateway to imagine that I could live in this body again, you know, happily and productively. I think the number one benefit I got from that very first float was hope. And I need a shirt that says hope floats because it really, it changed everything for me. And now I'm back. I'm here. I'm fully present and alive in a way that I could not have believed five or 10 years ago. So, wow, floating. It works. Thank you. And I have an amazing life now. One I like a lot better than the one I had before when I was successful. I now live and travel full time in a rehab 1965 Avion camper with my dog Fiona, the Wonder Pug. And I continue to float. So I just want to tell you just a couple of stories about how I continue to use floating and how it continues to impact my life and, you know, sort of save my life. So Fiona and I just did an 80-day, almost 10,000 mile tour of the United States, the Heart of America tour. And it started out great. And then we hit Texas. And all the heat, the heat was crazy. And it didn't let up anywhere, everywhere we went. It was 90 degrees plus. My dog is a pug. They don't cool well. They don't do well in heat. I was not doing well in heat. Everything was going wrong. I lost my purse. My engine exploded. My dog had explosive diarrhea. I mean, it was bad. It was bad. And I was in total overwhelm. I was ready to give up and go home and say, you know, this isn't fun anymore. This is supposed to be fun. And it's not. So, you know, okay. And I was in Oak Park, Illinois, staying with some friends.  I know how to fix this. I need to go floating. And so I did. I got online, Googled floating in Chicago. Hello, Float 60, River North. They put me in the giant float tank that like athletes, professional athletes use. This body could be spread eagle, not touch any walls. What an amazing float experience.  I continued the trip. There were challenges. Yes, indeed, there were challenges. But I had a new attitude. I was traveling with a different brain. And the rest of the trip was amazing. So overwhelm to reset is one of my key float strategies. Floating for creativity. I just last weekend had multiple projects in the works. And you can just like monkey mind, which one to work on first? How do I coordinate all of this? And so I did something that I've never done before. I did three floats in three days at my home float tank or revival in grass valley. And three floats in three days. I nailed every project, including this talk. And I'm going to say claim it. I'm nailing this, right? Thank you. So reset, creativity, relief from pain. Floating does so many things on so many levels. But for me, the really the most powerful thing, the thing that's going to keep me floating for the rest of my life is I'm going to go totally woo and I might be sucked into this blue thing. But soul retrieval. I think floating floating just it connects us to the mysteries to our truest selves and the collective unconscious. It just the me you see here today is not a different me, but it's the me I was supposed to be all along and I and floating is what started that journey for me and it's what kept me going and it's wow. Huge gratitude. So I'm incredibly grateful to be here today, you know, here in this body in this world. I'm grateful to be in this auditorium with all of you. Well, we're getting woo woo. Let's bring in a little science quantum entanglement. We are now all connected. Thank you. I love you. Namaste.


All right, so our next speaker is Leland Schoen. Leland is driven by his desire for ranchers to gain more wealth for the land. You get a chance to visit with Leland, and I've known Leland a long time. You might find that grazing critters he is referring to are those in the soil. In the grazing perspective, it is rekindling the relationship with landscapes and livestock. He's over 30 years of career with the USDA NRCS. He has a range science degree from North Dakota State University and a farm ranch management credits from Dickinson State University. So he's well trained. His NRCS career has taken him from North Dakota to the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming. In his last 20 years, he's been at South Dakota. Most of his career, he's served as a district conservationist. He's currently a rain land management specialist in the Rapid City Field Support Center. He keeps his technical skills acute by applying grazing management to land with sheep and cattle on his land with the help from his wife and five children. They must be getting older little by now, huh? Yeah, nine to 18. Leland is a keen observer of native range land and applies his motto of learn, practice, and teach. Believing that having practical application as a rancher is an credibility to be a great teacher and coach. Leland's talk today is staining out smooth brown grass invasion. So welcome Leland. All right, thank you. Yeah, thanks, Kevin. It's great to be back, I guess, on campus. To be honest, I graduated in 95 and this is the first time I've actually been in a building since 95 on campus. But definitely a Bison fan. So just how I teach my kids, when you have a presentation, you wanna give a good attention getter. So this is it. I'm gonna ask you this, what's the big deal about Big Bluestem with your appropriate pause?  Or our two species such as Western wheat grass and Big Bluestem, just what we know of is the native smooth brome grass in Kentucky bluegrass compared to what we originally had. That's just my attention getter. I've got so much to offer in so little time that I really appreciate this opportunity just to share an experience based on some information that I had and studied and stuff. So I have notes, otherwise I get too off track and I probably will anyways, because what I'm better at doing is small groups or individual interaction. And some of you that know me well is if you ask me a question, I'm gonna ask you about three back before we come to a conclusion. And that way we both learn instead of me just regurgitating stuff that I've learned academically or that I've seen on site. But what I'm passionate about is to share my experiences with you because it's gonna change the difference of our bluegrass and our smooth brome grass invasions. And so this last two sessions really set me up well. And if I were to ask you to ask the same questions that you did of Rachel, I'd have some answers of which some were already offered, but there's some cool things. So I'm wasting time here. So thank you again for the introduction. I left here in 95 and I went to Napoleon, North Dakota. It was my first office I went to and it really set the foundation. I had really good DC that he didn't have to push very hard, but he pushed me in the field. I got my boots on the ground. I'd really saw what I learned academically applied on the land and it really set a fantastic my career up very well. I'm a partnered a lot and I value a lot in partnerships, the conservation districts over the years, ducks and limited partners for wildlife with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the grassland coalitions. We're all trying to figure out this non-native cool season invasive thing and whether it be bluegrass, crested or whatever. During these years, I continued to study and read and work at the Mandan ARS or I've looked at their work. Dickinson Research Extension Center and basically what I'm trying to say is all the solutions are right here in the NDSU repository library. They really are. If you dig in and you find them like you offered with whether it's Kirby's stuff or Cetavec stuff or current stuff, it's all right here. We just need to get in there and look at it and I've done a lot of that over my 30 year career. And so I think where credit is due where you're gonna see me go here is the twice over rotational grazing strategy. And it's work that's been done by Dr. Llewell and Manski at a Dickinson Research Extension Center and his work is at the repository as well as other places. And that's where I really think, at least where it's led me is where I wanna give credit to. So with that, what's the problem? Right? If you've been in the field long enough, you've seen this dark green cancer that's trying to spread across our native range land. It's a monoculture native smooth brome that does that. And somewhere I've had 31 years of career with NRCS about my 15th year, I'm just sick and tired of it. I'm sick and tired of hearing the same old solution that's not working. And so what we're trying to do is repopulate the native soil organisms through grazing strategies. And what I wanna offer here to the left is climate field view, which is a satellite information that's used mostly on agronomy, but I had the fortune as I worked with a lot of different ranchers as I asked them this, I said, there's some way, because there's just not enough range cons in the world to really go and really evaluate the range land. I said, there's gotta be a satellite way for us to look at indicators, from a computer screen or whatever. So then we can go out there and see what's happening. So I met Hancox, I think it was in 2018. They listened to me at a little conference and they asked me to their place. And so prior to 2018, they basically had a two pasture deal where they're rotating cows. It wasn't very intentional at all. And just focus on this right here. So May 4th, what should be happening in May 4th, right? A lot of cool season invasives. Dark green patch here, smooth, brown grass invasion. I started working them in 2018. We implemented the grazing strategy to really stimulate soil biology in native range land. That was in 2019 is when we started. By 2022, you can start seeing a change. Now I didn't really notice that until I started looking at their climate field view information. Now this is designed for crop land, but he says, you know, I can put these polygons wherever, we'll just put it over this section of range land and let you play with it. And so I went out there and wanted to ground truth it. And the smooth, brown grass was thinning out in four years and we were getting native species back. Primarily, right around this area is where we've been focusing last and just paying attention the last few years is this big blue stem, the warm season component. Now with my experience, what I learned there is what I had been seeing over all these years is with the right strategy that's focused on soil organisms and the proper bite, we're getting more native species back where we don't even have, you know, primarily it's on land that hasn't been taken over by brome or whatever. We're seeing more of a 50% warm season component. So that takes me to this slide, which makes me think of Rachel's talk. Now we have really thought about the seasonal microbial activity and what their needs are. You know, based on calendar date, starting in January, February, March, April, May, June-ish and into September, October. It's very interesting, depending on when you choose to have your cow that the nutrient needs for the cow match up with the growth curve of our cool and warm season native grasses as well as what our microbial activity is. So I just offer that as a challenge to go back and kind of try to line up those growth curves and those needs of the animal or the cows as well as the microbial community underneath the deal. We've learned really good to build habitat on the surface of the soil, but have you really thought about the habitat for our soil organisms below the surface? Okay, rest of my story here. So by year 2013, I had been in South Central, South Dakota for 10 years. Yeah, and I already told you this, I just tired of watching brome take over. So, you know, what's Albert Einstein definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and not seeing the same results or whatever. So by this time, I understood what Manskey was teaching through NDSU, I dug hundreds of soil holes and I still do. That's the best tool you can have as a sharp shooter. I studied individual grass auto ecology. I drew parallels of work done by Christine Jones, Michael Phillips and John Sticker. And I'm like, these guys are all saying the same thing. And they're all born at different times, but they're saying the same thing. It all matches the research that's already been done in North Dakota. So in 2018, I met Van, a farmer rancher from Clome, South Dakota. He's asked a question at a grazing tour about how to get rid of smooth brome grass on native range land. The key speaker didn't have a good answer. And so I introduced myself and said, I had some novel ideas. He was interested in giving anything a try. So let me show you what we found out. What are we doing different? This is my co-authors, by the way. Here's Van, here's his nephew Heath. And they opened up their world to me on something I'd always thought about. I just needed some place to try it. Because fortunately, a lot of my career has taken me in places where we didn't have environments that were just totally consumed with smooth brome, but he had this. So this is South Central, South Dakota, still west of the Missouri River, or probably 60, 80 miles north of Nebraska. What we're doing here is we're ignoring smooth brome grass. Smooth brome grass, and there's a couple of different types, but it's really non-micro-isle. So if we didn't learn anything this morning, what we should have learned, is from, if I get his name right, Lanelle's talk is the fungi, and he had in there specifically the mutualist. When we talk about soil organisms, there's mutualists and there's decomposers. The mutualists are the ones that are really doing the heavy lifting. So what did Van do so different? He went to school and he got a coach. That's probably the thing that's lacking the most in the ranching industry is good coaches and consultants that know what they're doing and getting out there really to help. He was so excited by what he was seeing just in a couple of years. I started working with Van in 2018. We started working with his first raising rotation in 2019. He was so excited about what he was seeing already. Then he wanted to have a pasture walk at his place. And that was in 2020, then we followed up just last year on more on thinning out a smooth brome grass. So let me bring that here to you. How do you make it work? Basically we ignored smooth brome grass, but when I say that, the cows don't ignore it. They're still gonna eat it, but we're ignoring that from just a mindset. If we didn't have brome grass there, how would we manage the native range land? One thing that's probably different that you'll see just because the amount of biomass from smooth brome grass is we're stocking. Whoops, we're stocking fairly heavy, heavier than what I typically prescribe. So I'll try to come back to that. We're using five pastures. And basically what we're doing here is if you think of it simply as we're stimulating, growing and harvesting our native cool and warm season species, that's our goal. So we're using the twice over rotational grazing system and we're using the first rotation to stimulate those natives. And then our effort, and we saw that this morning we're trying to grow primary and secondary tillers. So that's how you rebuild a population of native plants. And we allow proper recovery through that growth period. And then we come back and we do our second rotation, harvesting, our goal is proper management. And finally, we understand that there's fall tillers out there and we don't wanna overgraze those. So stimulate, grow, harvest. Something else I've seen a lot in my career. These are van soils. It's basically loamy and thin upland, but you look at these state and transition models and basically what we're thinking is that once we have over 30% bluegrass or brome invasion, it's extremely difficult to get back into this more stable state that still has invaders. But what we're finding is we're getting back there fast. Now, I caution van, I say, okay, we've only been at this for since 2019 and we're gonna get down the road here maybe five or six years and maybe we're just gonna really piss brome off and it's gonna come back into vengeance. But right now, where he started, where are my slides? When we started, we were at least at 80% smooth brome grass. I mean, it was really hard. I think I'm a pretty decent range kind. It was really hard to find any native species out there. It really was. And we could have probably crawled around for days but I don't have time for that to find something. But it was mostly just smooth brome grass, okay? So, we did what we should do. We did a similarity index. We looked at range line health assessments. We implemented a plan. That's really important. I think the work or what Dr. Hendrickson offered us the first day was talking about these things. You need to have a plan. So we did that and we came back and we did the monitoring. And what we've found starting in 2021 anyway, is that we're back up to about 42% natives. I mean, you can actually find them and you have fun looking at them and they're flowering and all the stuff is happening that we've been hearing about. So levels of disturbance, okay? I'm not a big disturbance guy. I believe in the health principles when I'm not big on disturbance. But this was something also a teacher for us is observation. So we started this twice over rotational grazing system in 2019 and Van was really pumped about this, right? So he calls me July 5th and he says, Leland, he said, now what do we do? We just had a major hail event. It wiped out my soybeans, wiped out my corn. This project we're doing at Range Land. Everything's destroyed. He says, now what are we gonna do? Well, what do you do when you have too much defoliation or too much disturbance on a plant? What do you do? You need to follow with recovery, right? So his fifth pasture was a mile and a half away from these other four pastures. And I said, have we been there yet? And he said, no, he's still on the plan. Well, I knew that best part of teaching. And I said, that's where these cows need to go. We need to have recovery on this land if we're gonna try to get our native species back. And I didn't have this revelation until after this happened, all right? So I went back there about whatever it was, 10 days later after this hail event. And I could see these light green patterns. I was like, this is incredible. I mean, it could be in sunlight or whatever. And I was like, this is really cool. What is this? What we got going on here? Obviously, if you've been out in the cancer world, you'd know what this dark stuff is, this broom. Well, green needle grass was like, all right? So like I said, we could have crawled around for days and we wanted to found those apical buds and things that were offered earlier this morning. But the hail event stimulated those tillers. So in 2020 and 2020, you can still see these patterns, right? And it's just getting to be more and more native. But the, oh, where am I at? I'm gonna run out of time. All right, so anyways, you can ask questions if you're wondering about more about that. All right, so this is where the magic happens without hail, okay? But those, it's basically right here. And this is work that's been done in North Dakota. Actually, that's why I bought this book up here. It's sitting out on the table over there and I was like, this is really cool. I wanna check out this rancher's guide to grass management. Page 54 talks about grazing readiness. It's right here. It's not my stuff. I mean, all this work's been done right here at this university and we just need to implement it at the right time and it's talked about timing and stages of plant physiology. Three and a half leaf stage to flowering for native grasses is what we're trying to do if we wanna increase them. It releases the growth regulator cytokinin which brings about cell division, roots and shoots, this whole apple bud thing that we're talking about this morning.   Here's Western wheat grass. Here we have a little bud tiller. These screens are awesome because you guys can see actually what's going on here. And then here's buffalo grass. The other really cool thing is not too long ago just few ago, we didn't dare use the word rhizosphere or rhizosheath because we say that it's too complex but it's all soil organism habitat. Buffalo grass and Western wheat grass, look at the rhizosphere or the rhizosheath that's on those roots. That's the habitat that's the home that these bugs need. And it's using the biological or the biological effect of grazing process is what we're referring to this makes the grassland function at a biological potential for livestock weight performance for their genetic potential. What was Rachel just telling us about? The genetic potential of those cows and this is the way we're gonna get those nutrients back in the gut of those ruminants. All it really is, it's as basic, it's as simple as photosynthesis management.  Just think about what do I do to keep my native grasses greener, longer? It's the soil health principle that I will live on and that's the active living root. Well, Leland, these are perennial species, perennial ecosystems, they're living roots all the time. No, they're active. That's our goal, active living roots. All right, it creates more buds and tillers, more leaves and deeper roots, more solar capture to feed soil microbes to root exudates and water infiltration. It reestablishes this rhizosphere that's really lost. If you dig as many holes as I have, you know what unhealthy range line it looks like by soil aggregates and the lack of rhizosheaths on these roots. So April, this is on bands place. Remember, we started the grazing rotation in 2019. We had a hail event recovered from that. The precipitation, annual precipitation conditions that decline everywhere we've been into this so we can't control the rain. But here's a, we stimulated big blue stem. Remember just three or four years prior to that we couldn't even find it. After 40 days of recovery, we have almost 2,000 pounds of green biomass of the blue stem. It's like, where'd that come from? Axillary buds stimulated tillers. Within four years, smooth bone grass has lost vigor. Anyone knows it's been in the bone grass world would know that even in August, where you still have porcupine grass that's a seed head there and some stuff. But anyways, you should be walking through knee high or waist high of smooth bone grass. And that's what we had. We're thinning it out. Not only are we thinning it out, but within four years, our native species diversity has restored native soil function and structure. So I could sit here and I could point out the natives. You obviously know what that one is. But native diversity in 2018, 80% smooth bone grass. 2019, the first natives that we're seeing come back is our cool season bunch grasses. Green needle grass and porcupine grass. By 2020, it was mostly the warm seasons that we're seeing come back. The big blue stem and Psydotes grama, or Psydotes, yeah, grama. And so some of you might be thinking, which I was thinking, I was like, well, where's the state grasses South Dakota? Where's Western? You know, is it supposed to be the increase or is it supposed to be the one that we should be showing? It was the last one to come back in this smooth bone grass environment. It was in this draw that it had a history of being overgrazed, you know. And Heath, Van's nephew texted me a picture. He says, hey, check this out. We've got some Western wheat grass and very small remnants is just kind of these draws in 2021. In 2022, all these other species plus Western was starting to, you could find it about any corner of the pasture on the hills, on the slopes, in the draws, whatever. So by 2022, we're up to 42% natives. We're thinning out the smooth bone grass. So it's matching, you know, the proper timing of our defoliation, especially that stimulatory period between the three and a half leaf stage and flowering and the growth stage of the native grass. So something I learned and I hope you guys ask really hard questions because that's the way it stretches me and learn. But the timing, so you're thinking, well, okay, so what about the brome? Cows are obviously eating the brome. But based on the information I saw this morning that the cows are biting the brome when it's in that reproductive stage. Pete asked a good follow-up question. If it's in that boot stage or whatever, what's really gonna happen, let's say two or three years from now based on bud creation under the smooth bone grass.  So I'm gonna be receptive to that and be watching when these cows graze this year as far as the boot stage or reproductive stage on brome. But that's what's really cool about grazing rotations, right? We have five pastures where you pick the number and that's why we change season of use, right? So if we're looking at this as a long haul and we're just trying to find the answers this first year and we're rebuilding soil health within four years, we're getting enough of our native plant species back and they're getting bitten at different times based on change of season of use, right? Sounds kind of like a scheduled thing but what's really adaptive? If we wanna use kind of the coined words nowadays, what's adaptive or whatever, you know what's adaptive? You know what changes of prescribed grazing schedule is the weather.  That's what's adaptive. We gotta do what we can with the wisdom that we have that God's created us and kind of stick to the plan and Mother Nature or whatever you wanna call it's gonna throw out that adaptiveness. So we're also doing some soil sampling. You know, what do you soil sample nowadays because you don't have any money. These ranchers are paying for this. We did have a little bit of soil health money out of South Central RCD that helped this kind of get started but we're measuring at zero to six in the blue. Six to 12 is the orange and 12 to 24. I believe in going deep because we've got plenty of science that shows that in an active root system under bromine, bluegrass, we got all kinds of biological activity. That's fine and dandy, but if we're lacking root depth and density, we've gotta look deeper. And all we're looking for is because it's cheap, is soil organic carbon or basically organic matter, ammonium nitrogen and nitrate nitrogen. So yesterday we were talking a lot about nitrogen, nutrient cycles, nitrogen, nitrogen, nitrogen, but the mutualist organisms are gonna release nitrogen different than the decomposer soil organisms. And so if we're ammonium nitrate heavy and that's where the decomposers win, then we don't have enough protozoa to pee out their nutrients to supply plant-available nitrogen to the plants. It's the fungi that do the work on the nitrate nitrogen. We combine the ammonium and the nitrate nitrogen for a total mineral nitrogen is what we're looking at. This is our results in 2022. Van's really passionate about this. So he was testing since 2019, but what I wanna show you here basically is what you see here. What I'd challenge you is if you'd start doing this on most of the range land in South Dakota or the Northern Plains, it's gonna look a lot like this. We're gonna be heavy with soil or mineral nitrogen in the zero to six and weak on the other two. What we're finding this trend to go is things are becoming more equal. You see that we're having more equal proportions of mineral nitrogen throughout the entire depth. That's telling me that we're getting deeper denser roots. Now we're looking too. We had a couple of soil pits out there and we're looking and we're seeing soil aggregation and root depth and rise of sheath and all that fun stuff. But our goal based on North Dakota research is our goal is to use that nitrogen on our native plants to achieve a hundred pounds of production. Once we're at a hundred pounds of mineral nitrogen released for a native species, that's when we're gonna keep the invasives out. Well, we haven't seen a rise of sheath. There's a cool one. That reminds me, do I have any time left? Oh, wrong. Fine. Okay, fine. Okay, I wanna leave most of it for questions. But so what do you look for? If you've never looked in the soil for the rise of sheath, a good question that you would have asked me to say, so which species would you look for for indicators? I don't know. I'm just a rancher. I'm gonna go dig a hole. I know enough about species that I learned it in 4-H or my kid knows it. What are the species that we wanna look for? Any guesses? No, you're looking for the grass species. Which native grass species would you look for to get there, to look for the rise of sheath to see if you're going in the right direction? Western wheat grass, porcupine grass.  You use this strategy, you will. Within two years, you'll have porcupine grass. How about your warm seasons? Any guesses? Someone said big bluestem? It'll come, but the first one, cytoschroma, and if you're on sandy environments, prairie sand reed. Prairie sand reed, it's like Western, it's non-faculate, hateable, whatever, and so it's just gonna have it. But those are the ones to look for if you're trying to say, well, what's this thing even looking like? What's that guy even talking about? Does he know what he's talking about? That's what you wanna be looking for. That's porcupine grass right there. All right, so timing of grazing. This is what, I probably don't make a lot of friends this way, but what I hear continuously is, and that's why I say ignore smooth brome grass. We're trying to pound the hell out of this stuff. And what we're doing, especially on native range land, is we're hurting our native constantly. If we're out there in late April or early May when these native plants are trying to grow, we're nipping them off too. Either that or else we're not describing what we really mean by grazing brome grass or bluegrass off in May. You know, maybe we mean to graze it higher, but people are getting the wrong impression. So here's an example. I mean, this is only four years. I mean, this range land is not even healthy yet. Scurvy, four inches, mid-May. Porcupine grass, eight inches tall, mid-May. Coneflower, five inches tall, mid-May. Our non-native plants are becoming less competitive. We're getting this native diversity back in that's been driven by, we're repopulating soil organisms is what we're doing. You know, what about the rest of the season? Heck, it's dormant or it's whatever. So long as we don't have snow cover, we're just gonna graze it. No, fall tillers are a very special and important component of this. And I hear the information coming out of this college. And it's important. It's bringing attention to fall tillers. So we went out there, ah, heck, why don't we go out in the field? That's fun to do anyways. We clipped 450 pounds of dry matter in January. Fall tillers and look how green they are. That was 2021 probably. The spring of 2022, we're out there May 24th. We're actually before there, but look at this, American vetch flowering at five to six inches tall. If we're out there trying to pound out that brone would be eating that off. We'd be throwing it backwards. November of 21, porcupine grass right here where my finger's at is where it was grazed. Probably three inches tall. The rest of the stuff sticking up here is plant recovery. We had built into the plan to have the recovery time and you can see it there. That's photosynthesis. That's going to continue to create photosynthesis and feed the soil organisms through the winter.  We have winter soil organisms too. They can withstand temperatures down to 30 degrees below the soil surface. So those lead and fall tillers are super important. We can't just think that it's free grazing or something. So Provenza, Teague and Baskin probably say it better than I can. In Provenza, Spread Provenza's book, Nourishment. And that's basically this. You can keep this mindset as you travel around and think about managing rangelands properly managed, foraging by livestock can enhance biodiversity of rangelands as the plant they consume nutrient life below ground and above ground while sequestering atmospheric carbon. You know, that message right there should satisfy everybody in the world, right? Whether they're grazing or not. And using the right timing, the right mechanism to biological effective grazing in the twice over rotational grazing system is the way we're going to restore these native rangeline systems. I'm confident of it. How many of you in the room are real life ranchers? You got livestock at home, means it. Okay, all right. So what this research has shown and I've tried to validate it in numbers because I'm a rancher too. From a rancher's perspective, especially these fall tillers are important, one animal unit might equal 780 pounds. You know, for 30 days is kind of what we're looking at. But anyways, we're increasing forage production by 42%. We're increasing water holding capacity by 44%. Our nutrient density for our forage, therefore our livestock performance is increased by 14%. And our rhizosphere weight, right here out of North Dakota is 176% compared to where we're at right now is about 30 or 40% on most of our dysfunctional rangelands. So that's me. That's my story. That's my experience. So some of the questions might be like this, but I'm going to, and feel free to offer your questions. But I'm going to say this is whatever mechanism you choose to use on your native rangeland or as you do as a, as somebody's coach or consultant, whether it's fire or hail or, or a Degelman disc or something, after you think you've solved the problem and you have healthy rangeland, then how are you going to manage it? So I'm not, I'm not saying that fire and those things aren't the right tools in the right environment, depending on what your situation is. But once you think as a human that you've achieved that goal, then how are you going to manage it? It's got to be managed biologically. And we have the data, over 30 years of data right here out of, out of India, you out of North Dakota that supports what I just showed you and it's working.  And he got frustrated a few years ago and he says, why don't, we'll see this, why don't they come look at it? He was getting so frustrated. I said, we'll just have to show them. That's all we can do. So if you can't travel down to South Central, South Dakota and he'd love to have you, follow me on Twitter. A lot of times I have a lot of, you know, stuff that I'm discovering out in the field or I want to show it off. You know, check that out and, and come look.


Howdy everybody. I am your brand new holiday weekend preacher. How do you like that? How do you like that? So I got called off the bench. This week I went on vacation and we had a scheduling conflict with Johnny Vareken. He thought he was coming next weekend. We thought he was coming this weekend. Pastor John's on vacation. Caleb is, I don't know where. And it's the fourth of July weekend. And so they called me in and I said, put me in coach.  Presto, I got a message for you guys. Ready for heroes this weekend? All right. So turn with me and your Bibles to Luke chapter nine. Luke chapter nine, by the way, Johnny Vareken will be here next weekend. And so we're very much looking forward to that. Then Rick Renner in a couple of weekends. It's gonna be fantastic. Jane and I will be here just to sit on the front row and absorb that. It's gonna be incredible. And then the first weekend of August, Mike Bickel from the International House of Prayer is going to be here. And so we've got some incredible, incredible weekends. You're not gonna wanna miss any of them. So look with me at the words of Jesus in Luke chapter nine. And it starts in verse number 57. It's talking about the cost of following Jesus. And it says, as they were going along the road, someone said to him, that's Jesus. I will follow you wherever you go. And Jesus said to him, foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. To another, he said, follow me. And he said, Lord, let me first go and bury my father. And Jesus said to him, leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.  But first, let me go and say farewell to those at my home. And Jesus said to him, no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. It's very interesting that Jesus is answering three different people with three different answers in response to the three different excuses of why they could not radically and totally follow Jesus. And I know that we're in a series in July called Heroes. So we've been working through some well-known heroes. We've talked about John the Baptist and we've talked about Mary of Bethany, James and John, the Sons of Thunder, and we're gonna cover some more heroes. But when I was preparing for this weekend and thinking about a message that I hadn't prepared for, because I had pretty much laid out the whole summer series, I just kinda asked the Lord, Lord, what individual do you want me to highlight this weekend that I didn't plan on or I didn't have built into our summer series?  So the title of this weekend's message is could have been heroes. And what's interesting is all the other ones, you know their names. And in the story that we just looked at in the few verses, we see highlighted three different pronouns, someone, another, and yet another. These are pronouns that are referring to individuals and we don't know their names. And the reason why we don't know their names is because Jesus gave each of them an opportunity to become very, very significant followers of Jesus in their own right. They could have responded the same way that Peter, Andrew, James, and John did. They could have followed Jesus like Mary, like Martha, like several of the different leading women had followed Jesus. But in response to the invitation to follow Jesus, when they saw the price tag of following Jesus, they had excuses. Instead of sacrificially paying the price, they doubled down on the things that were significant and important to them instead of God. And therefore we never know their names. We don't see what they could have potentially done in history. We don't know the impact that they could have made. We don't see their names recorded or their stories or their interactions with Jesus. We don't know. And I think it's important because even on this fourth of July weekend, you know, just a couple of days ago, we celebrated our independence as a nation. And I know we focus on fireworks and hot dogs and brats and sitting by the pool and, you know, different things like that on the fourth of July. But as a nation, we look back 200 and, you know, a few decades ago to some of our founding fathers who made a declaration to the British crown that was exerting tyranny against the colonies. And they said, we are declaring independence. So they signed a declaration of independence. And when they signed it, most of these founding fathers, the signers of the original declaration were risking their lives because by declaring war against England, if they had lost, their lives would have been taken for treason. Most of these founding fathers, like James Madison and Monroe and Jefferson, Washington was by far the oldest with Franklin, but yet several of them who were 18, 19, 20 years old when they signed that declaration of independence. And now we call them our founding fathers. They're heroes of our American Republic because of the sacrifice and the courage that they exerted. They're heroes. Well, as we go through the New Testament, this summer we see all these people that were human beings just like you and I, dreams and desires that they had, but they were willing to do something that was extraordinary. They were willing to sacrificially obey Jesus. And that's why we know about them. And here's what I wonder this weekend. I wonder if the excuses that they gave Jesus of why they could not radically respond to his call to follow him. I wonder if these excuses are sometimes the very same things that keep us from being fully devoted to Jesus. I wonder if they're the same three battlegrounds. Turn with me over in your Bibles to 1 John. If you hopefully brought a Bible this weekend with you, you're gonna be able to turn over there.  Some of you are just gonna fake it till you make it and look like you're doing it and that's okay as well. But I wanna draw your attention to what the apostle John wrote in 1 John chapter two, verse number 15, all the way down to 17. He said, do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him. For all that is in the world, this is the ESV, but I learned it out of the New King James. The ESV says all that's in the world is the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes and the pride of life. I learned it, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. And it says, and all of these things are not from the father but are from the world. And this world is passing away along with its desires. But whoever does the will of God, think about this, whoever does the will of God remains forever. I believe that in the story of Jesus interacting with these three individuals that we never hear about, potential prospect disciples, that each of them represents each one of the battlefields that Paul, or that John writes about in 1 John, that is universal across the board, that we all battle with desire. We all battle with, are we going to obey Jesus or are we going to give into the other paths, the off ramps that offer us an easier, more convenient way of living our lives?  He's been through Samaria, the disciples who we know are following Jesus and word is spreading about him. And because word is spreading about him, a lot of people are kind of writing, they're drafting off of Jesus and many of them want to be part of his entourage. When you read Mark's account of this same story, he describes one of them at least as being a scribe, which means he's a theologian, he's a lawyer. And so he knows the teachings of Jesus, he's seen the miracles, he's been around, he's heard that Jesus is multiplying the bread. He thinks that this is a messianic moment for all of Israel and you know what, when there are big moments in history, a lot of people want to draft off of those moments. A lot of people want to say, I want to be a part of that. I want my name attached to that. And that's what these guys were doing. They were coming up to Jesus and they were saying, hey, I'll follow you wherever you go. And Jesus confronts the first guy and he says, well, you need to know this, foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the son of man has absolutely no place to lay his head. What was Jesus referencing? What he was referencing was if you're going to follow me, it's going to be a journey that's going to lead you all the way to the last breath of your life. And you won't find rest until you enter into the heavenly kingdom. If you're going to follow me, then you're going to have to, you're going to have to give up and you're going to have to bypass the comforts of belonging in this world. The comforts of this world. Birds have high nests that are protected and are comfortable. Foxes have solitary dens that nobody can see where they can get away, where they have safety, they have protection. But if you're going to follow Jesus in this world, you're going to have to see yourself as a sojourner and an exile that is on a journey and your home is in heaven. You know what the world offers us? Comfort. John in 1 John, he makes a reference, he says, all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh. What does that mean? Or the desires of the flesh. The number one desire that our flesh has is comfort. We all want to be comfortable. The reason why we have nice padded chairs in both of our campuses is because we know that when people come to church, they want comfortable chairs. Because nobody comes in and says, I really wish we had those old wooden pews, you know that you slide on and can't get comfortable on. And then you gotta pinch your kids because they don't pay attention and they're just slouching. How many grew up in church where they had just had uncomfortable chairs? How many know comfortable is far better? That's why when we, you know, you go to somebody's house, they've got these nice padded upholster chairs. Nobody's got like lawn chairs or those like wooden chairs there. Cause when you come home, you want comfort. That's why you got nice beds. The first bed that Jane and I had when we were newly married, we, you know, it was given to us by her mom and dad. I think it was her grandmothers for like 25 years before we got it.  I mean, you rolled to the middle. It was a Jane and Lee taco. You wrote, it was like rolled in a, and the bed just like formed around. And I remember when we got a new bed, it was like, oh, this is heaven. This is heaven. My back's not hurting.  That's what's going on cause we're sleeping in a tortilla. And you get a new bed and it's amazing how comfort just makes you relax. You know, we want physical comfort. We want worldly comforts. We want to, we want to feel that if I'm working hard, if I'm doing the right things then there's going to be a payoff of comfort. If I work a long day, then when I come home, I want to relax. I want comfort. What Jesus was saying is if you're going to follow me, it's not going to be an easy way. It's going to be the best way. It's going to be a way that leads to life. But you've got to see yourself above all things as an exile and a sojourner. Peter writes in 1 Peter 2 11, he says, beloved, I urge you, urge you as sojourners and exiles.  And an exile is somebody who has been excluded from their homeland and is trying to make their way back. You know what our tendency is? Is to get really too comfortable in this world.  I mean, he's given us all things freely to enjoy, but we got to remember this world is not our home because whatever environment you determine or you believe to be your home environment, you will adapt to its culture. That's what comfort does. You adapt to a culture. If we put you in a culture, you know, that's totally different from the American culture, you would have culture shocked for a period of time, but eventually you would adapt.   And you got to see yourself that way. Don't allow yourself to adapt. Don't find your comfort and your peace in the midst of this world and in this world system. You've got to be a citizen of the kingdom of God. And the way that we find our comfort is listen, it is through the invisible presence of God. It is spending time with the Lord knowing that in his presence, in his word, we find love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness. We find the fruit of the spirit. We find the presence of God in his word. Listen, if we're more comfortable in worldly environments, then we are in kingdom environments. We're not sojourners in the world. We're sojourners in the church. We got to be careful that our passport isn't stamped this world, that we continually resubmit the passport of our heart so that it's stamped by the kingdom of God. And we've got to see ourselves that way. This guy says, I'll follow you anywhere. And Jesus said, well, that's good, but you need to count the cost and you need to be willing to give up comfort. One of my favorite books of all time, I was just in Tucson, Arizona, where by the way, it's way too hot. If you are complaining about the cool temperatures of Michigan, it is so much nicer here. It was 110 degrees and they called it dry heat. I don't care. It was like a hairdryer on you the whole time. And so I'm preaching in this church and one of the guys who's on staff there asked me, he said, what are your like your top five books? Well, that's easy. One of my top five books that I've read almost every year for the last 20 years is a book written by a 16th century period and by the name of John Bunyan and it's the Pilgrims Progress. Anybody ever read the Pilgrims Progress before or seen the animated version of it when you were a kid? It's an analogy of a man named Christian who is on a journey to the celestial city. And at every stop along the way, he has to overcome the things of this world that are trying to hold him down from getting to the celestial city. And what I love most about the story of the Pilgrims Progress is that John Bunyan actually wrote the book while he was imprisoned in the London Tower because of his convictions of who Jesus was. And he wrote the story. So when I read it, we're not just reading some novelist who lives in Montana and has a good life in a cabin on the side of a mountain. This is a guy who's paying the price. He gave up all comforts. All he had to do was recant. And by the way, he didn't even have to recant Jesus. He just had to recant that the Bible was more authoritative than some bishop or some pope. And they would have released him from the imprisonment. And by the way, the prisons of medieval time were not like ours, where you get cable TV and steak dinners and can work out and get your PhD. We're talking about rats, cockroaches, ew. Where they change you up in a tower and forgot about you. And there is where he wrote the Pilgrims Progress. That attitude, that mindset is required in each of us if we're going to be devoted followers of Jesus and we're going to live like those who are our heroes of the faith. Who's the second guy that Jesus addresses? Well, listen, he says this to another. Here's another guy. He said to him, follow me, the very same words that Jesus called Peter, called James, called John, called Andrew, the rich young ruler. Follow me, two simple words, but they cost everything. Follow me, what's his response? Lord, let me first go and bury my father. Sounds legitimate, right? And Jesus responds and says to him, leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God. Wow, Jesus, this is really harsh.  That seems legitimate. What you don't realize is the guy's father isn't dead yet because number one responsibility or priority of the oldest child in a Jewish family was to make sure that they lived in the family home until the passing of their father at which time they would receive the inheritance. Just like the story of the prodigal son, what was wrong with that? It wasn't that he asked for his inheritance, it's that he asked for his inheritance before his father died. And so when this man says to Jesus, well, hey, first, I wanna follow you, but let me wait around until my dad dies and then I get the inheritance and then I'll go follow you. That's what he was saying. It wasn't an issue of dads at the funeral home and I gotta go and take care of the arrangements and be a part of a funeral in a couple of days and awake and all those kinds of things. Now, we're talking about this guy, here was this issue, his convenience. It was inconvenient for him to forsake his inheritance of wealth and reputation and business in order to respond to Jesus' two words, follow me. Jesus, I want you and my father's inheritance. Let me put it to you this way. I want my cake and I wanna eat it too. I wanna follow you, I wanna be part of what you're doing, but I wanna do it from over here so that I'm securing both bases. You ever know somebody like this? I know nobody in our church would ever do this, but you ever know somebody who was keeping their options open when they're in a dating relationship? Right?  Is this gonna be, are we a real thing? I know we've been spending a lot of time together and I, listen, I really, really like you, but let me work on this situation over here. I'm talking to this person, I'm not really, yeah, I'm kind of torn and ah.  If you like it, then you better put a ring on it.  And I had a friend in college who was like this, he always wanted to keep his options open and whenever it came down to commitment, he was afraid to make a commitment. He's like, but what if I make the wrong decision? That's what this guy's saying. Hey, if I follow you now, I forfeit everything. I forfeit wealth, land, reputation, name, family business. So here's what I wanna do, Jesus. I know you want me to follow you, but it's more convenient for me if I wait and follow you after I get all this. What's that the equivalent of? First John chapter two. First one was lust of the flesh. Second one's lust of the eyes. It's possessions, it's inconvenient. There's a cost and the cost is convenience. A lot of us, it may not be money for you. May not be, you know, when Jane and I first dated and then got married, I told her I was gonna be a pastor and my experience with what most pastors endured was that you live very poor, very, very poor. And I kind of told her, I set her up for that. It's like, hey, we're going in the ministry. Probably not gonna make a whole lot of money in my life. I'm not gonna be a millionaire, billionaire for sure. And we'll be lucky if we have a double wide.  So, and she went along for the ride. Well, praise God, he's done a whole lot better for us than what I anticipated, but we did not go into ministry thinking, this is a means for me to get wealthy. I promise you. And when I followed Jesus, it wasn't, you know what? I can have my cake and eat it too, because I knew that not only the financial cost, but I knew that emotionally and spiritually, every part of me, it was going to cost me everything. And listen, there is nothing convenient about discipleship because it's not just the lust of the flesh, our appetites that wants comfort, but it's the lust or the desires of the eyes where this guy could see everything that he could have. He could see dad's car. He could see the business. He could see the land. And Jesus is saying, hey, I want you to follow me. And he's over here going, well, yeah, I got some, I got some other stuff here. This isn't convenient right now. For some of us, it's like, well, you know what? Jesus, I want to follow you, but I'm not ready to give up a relationship yet. Or you know what, Jesus? Yeah, I really want to follow you. I want to be a Christian, but yet I'm not willing to deal with some of the issues that I got over here that are my pet issues that, you know, they satisfy a longing on the inside of me, a desire that I want. And what was Jesus' response to this man? Jesus said to him, leave the dead to bury the dead.  Why?  And there is nothing that is worthy to be compared to who Jesus is.  Listen, it says in first John chapter two, it says, if you love the world and the things in the world, then the love of the Father is not in you. It's not in you. You can't, you cannot be a obedient disciple of Jesus when you're living your life for convenience because there's nothing convenient about following Jesus. It's gonna inconvenience you every day along the way. In fact, if it doesn't inconvenience you, I challenge you that maybe you're just not following closely enough because in my experience of following Jesus, the cost associated with being a disciple of Jesus oftentimes is not a financial cost. It's actually what you have to say no to so that you can say yes to Jesus. But that's a cost worth paying. Here's what I think is radically different from what we're reading. And what Jesus proclaimed to be the cost of following him is that we have made being a disciple or a follower of Jesus or a Christian, whatever you wanna call it, we've made it all about what you intellectually believe instead of what you obediently practice. You see, we've made Christianity this thing that we mentally ascend to. It's like, well, I believe in the Bible, I believe in God, I believe in Jesus, so I believe it. Therefore, I am a Christian and I believe that we're saved by grace. I'm not talking about us being saved by our works because it is solely by the grace of God. But here's what I know is that faith that is real faith, James chapter one, James chapter two and James chapter three kind of faith is so real to us that when we're saved by the grace of God, a transformation happens on the inside of us that then produces obedient actions in following after Jesus. In our American culture, we got a lot of people walking around going, I'm a Christian because I'll check the box and say I believe those things. But when you look at the way that they live their lives or the decisions that they make, you would have to go down the road and go that doesn't look like Jesus, that's not what Jesus said, that contradicts. This has more to do with their will than his. It shouldn't have had me come back, it's all right. The on ramp to following Jesus is obedience. It's radical obedience. Third thing is this, yet another said, I will follow you Lord, but let me first say farewell to those who are back at my home. And Jesus responded, no one puts their hand to the plow and looks back and is fit for the kingdom of God. Why did this guy wanna go home and say farewell to his family? Well, this is a direct quote out of Kings. I think it's chapter 18, where Elijah, remember the prophet Elijah, when he's handing off the mantle of ministry, the baton of ministry to his successor, Elisha. Remember the story that Elisha was plowing with the oxen out in the field when Elijah shows up and flings the mantle on him. And then Elisha's response was, before I go, let me go say goodbye to those who are at home. So it's a direct quote out of that. Elijah let Elisha do that, but Jesus said, if you set your hand to the plow and yet then you turn back, then you're not fit for the kingdom. What was Jesus saying? Jesus was saying, the call to follow me is even more radical than Elijah's call to Elisha to become a prophet. Here's why, it's because when you are plowing, by the way, I've never plowed, but when you are plowing and you've got animals that are yoke together, pulling, your plow is a wooden frame, it's pretty light, but on the end of it is an iron tool, a utensil, that turns over the soil.  When you look back, what happens is you lose direction. And you're not able to direct the plow so the animals will get off course, but you keep dropping the seed and missing the ground. See this man, the reason why he wanted to go home and say goodbye, again, we have to realize all of these things that Jesus are talking about seem funny and seem odd to us because they are outside of our cultural customs but they made a lot of sense in Jesus's day and so when Jesus is talking to somebody here and they say, let me go home and say farewell to my family, why was that significant? Because his number one concern was he wanted to go home and make sure that those who were closest to him approved of his decision and that he wasn't going to reap consequences of leaving without saying goodbye. What is that? He cared more about the opinions of people back home than he did about Jesus who was standing right there. And you know what? This is one of the costs of following Jesus. There are gonna be people who do not like your decision. Hey, what happened to you? Well, one day you were partying with us, one day you were in the throng with us when we're out there and just, you know, we're out on the lake and I can't remember most of what happened and you used to be out there with us and then all of a sudden you just dropped off the radar, start showing up at that crazy church where everybody raised their hands. They got like drums up on the stage and some crazy pastor who calls people to obey. I mean, what in the world? Where you going therefore? You go to church on Saturday and Sunday, somebody. It's like, what happened to you? Where'd you go? How come you didn't come back and say to us? Because here's, if we did that, what we're doing is we're coming back and saying, hey, everybody, guess what? I really, I wanna become a follower of Jesus. Are you guys okay with that? Well, what's the world gonna say? Well, we're okay with it as long as you don't adapt an ideology in which you will look at us and tell us that we're wrong.  But as soon as your beliefs turn into convictions that radically alter your behavior, that challenge other people's behavior, all of a sudden you've become the problem instead of one of the bros. And that's what Jesus was saying. If you start by putting your hand to the plow and you begin to plow and you're making kingdom difference if you stop there because you wanna go back and get the approval of others because you're afraid of the consequences, then you're not fit for the kingdom of God. Paul says this to Timothy, he says, anyone who desires to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. Somebody said, well, I love the whole Jesus thing. I just don't like the pressure and the persecution that comes with it. One goes with the other because here's what we're saying. The third part of First John chapter two is this. Number one, desires of the flesh, that's our appetites, comfort. Number two, desires of the eyes. That's being willing to give up the things that we can see in this world for the things that we can't see in that world. And the third one is, lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life. What is that? It's our reputation.   In all three of these stories, there were people that were unwilling to pay that price. They said, well, that's too much Jesus. That's too much Jesus. And that's why we don't hear from them. Jane and I on Fridays for the last 25 years have spent my day off. And we're not super sporty. Let's go mountain climbing and do those kinds of things. One of the things we like to do on our day off though is we like to go shop. So, and let me rephrase that. Jane likes to shop, I like to buy. You know the difference, right? I can do more damage in 30 seconds in a store than she will do in 30 days. Now, Amazon has changed the game. Can I just tell you that, that one click button is dangerous. It's like a nuclear detonator in our house. But what I have noticed for years is we will go shopping and back in the days when you would actually go to malls, we'd go into malls and we'll go into one of her stores and she'll go to the rack and she'll look at something. When I go into the store with her, I immediately like look around for things I think would look great on her. So I'm just like, hey, what about that?  I like it and then she looks at the price tag and goes, eh, hangs it back up. I'm like, you should get it, eh. I'm like, do you like it? And I really like this thing over here. So she'll go over and look at it and I'm like, oh, how much is that? And she'll go, I don't know, let me, eh. And I'm like, why don't you get that? She'll hang it back up and here's her. I'll keep my eye on it. I'll keep my eye on it. I'm just gonna keep my eye on it. That thing's on sale. I'll keep my eye on it. Does she have like some secret list? I don't know about all the things she's keeping her eye on because here's my reaction. It's not gonna be there. When you come looking for it next time, it's not gonna be there. And even if it was, how can you remember what it was you're supposed to keep your eye on it? If you like it, get it. Come on, somebody. But here's, she liked it until she saw the price. And can I tell you something? That's very important. You will never find discipleship on the sale rack. It never goes on sale. Radical obedience to Jesus will always cost you full price. A lot of people walk into the store of Christianity and they pull something off that they like about Jesus. But as soon as they see the price tag, they put it back on the rack and say, I'll keep my eye on it because I like what's waiting for me outside. Go over here and I, well, I definitely want to have a sense of purpose for my life. So they look at it and Jesus says, if anyone loses their life for my sake, they will gain it. I gotta lose my life. I'll keep my eye on it. Narrow is the way. If you are they who find it, turn the price tag over. I'll keep my eye on it. But to every single one of the heroes of faith, there's one common denominator among all of them. They were willing to sacrificially obey. When they came to an intersection where their will and their desires went that way and what Jesus was calling them to do went that way, they were willing to make the hard call. Here's what sacrifice is. Sacrifice is when you willingly give up what you want in order to give him what he wants. That's sacrifice and sacrifice is not something that can be taken. Sacrifice is something that is offered. It's radical obedience. So I wanna ask you this, and you guys go ahead and play. Would you rather be a pronoun that somebody reads about 100 years from now as somebody who looked at going all in on following Jesus?  I think of men like Hudson Taylor, great apostle and missionary to inland China was told, it's impossible you can't do it, you shouldn't do it. But yet today, the gospel has penetrated every province of China because of one man's radical obedience. I think of John and Charles Wesley, who were told by the Anglican church, if you preach that radically, then you have no church buildings.  So they began to preach out in the farm pastures and 30,000 people would gather around to hear him.  I think of William Booth and Catherine Booth, the founders of the Salvation Army who saw needs in the streets of London and the established church was willing to overlook it because they were prospering and they didn't care about the needs in the streets but William and Catherine Booth began to give dignity and care to the poor without compromising the message of Jesus and they sparked a revolution and a move of God in the streets of London. The names could go on and on and on and on forever. Heaven knows them all. What's more important than the world knowing our name is him knowing our name and knowing that when he said, follow me, we said, yes with every fiber of my being with everything that it will potentially cost me my answer is radically yes to Jesus because in spite of the pursuit that we have in this world of wanting to be a hero the one who sacrificed and gave it all so that our lives could be changed so that we could receive eternal life he's the greatest hero of all. His name is Jesus and he's the one who went to the cross he was buried and three days later he rose again and because he humbled himself in the sight of God God has highly exalted him and given him a name above every other name so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord he gave it all so that you and I could have life. And you know what? I can't think of anything greater or worth laying it all down for and saying yes to than that. Would you stand with me wherever you're at? I wanna lead us in prayer before we transition tonight. Heavenly Father, I pray this weekend that you would challenge each of us it doesn't matter where we are at some of us may be listening and we've never had a decisive moment where we've made Jesus Christ the Lord of our lives I pray that today would be that day. Some of us are saying you know I've been shopping Jesus and I've seen the price but today I don't want the world's version of Jesus I want the real thing. And today I'm saying yes. I'm responding that today I'm offering my body as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable unto God which is my reasonable act of worship and many of us today are in a place where we're loved by God save but you're calling us even closer to live more radically obedient, to live more radically sacrificial. Just like you told the second person in the story that we would live our lives to proclaim the message of the kingdom. Lord, I pray that by your Holy Spirit you would speak to us, challenge us, call us to follow you like we've never followed you before. In Jesus' name, amen.


So, let me now try to go to the convergent-divergent nozzle and discuss what happens there. Very roughly what you can think about is that we already have a convergent nozzle. What we end up doing is that we add to this a divergent part and then at the end of this divergent part we have the back pressure which will be reduced from the value of P naught. So, let me try to draw the sketch quickly for this convergent-divergent nozzle. So, again I am dealing with a axisymmetric situation. Again, sorry I have, this is my exit plane, here is the back pressure which I am able to lower as I want, here is the throat, so this I will call a C D nozzle, here is the inlet plane as it was before and again the conditions just before the inlet plane are the stagnation values corresponding to which the velocity of the flow is equal to 0 essentially and then I have the flow going from left to right, this is my, sorry, exit plane already mentioned. So, up to the throat we have exactly what we just discussed namely a purely convergent nozzle and then I have a divergent part attached to it. So, again here when I want to start reducing the back pressure, if the back pressure is equal to the upstream stagnation value P naught then again there is no pressure difference to drive the flow and there is absolutely no flow. As you keep on reducing the back pressure initially the entire nozzle will behave in a subsonic fashion because the pressure difference is not large enough for the flow to reach the value of 1 in terms of the Mach number at the throat. So, let me try to draw this again in that pressure distance plot. So, we start with P over P naught equal to 1 and this is the exit plane, back side is where we are maintaining the back pressure and lowering it and here additionally I will add that throat location because now we are dealing with convergent divergent nozzle. So, as far as starting from P b equal to P naught is concerned when we have P b equal to P naught this corresponds to no flow as you start reducing the back pressure the flow will initiate and initially as I said if the difference between P naught and P b is not large enough everything will behave subsonicly and going back to that area velocity relation what I have is if everything is behaving subsonicly the convergent part will be such that the velocity will increase the pressure will decrease and the divergent part will be such that the velocity will decrease and the pressure will increase. Let us say this was the value of the back pressure that I was maintaining. So, it will smoothly come back to that back pressure. So, this is all entire subsonic. So, this will keep on happening until a value of the back pressure is reached corresponding to which the throat pressure becomes exactly equal to P star. So, you are coming from the top by reducing the back pressure gradually you reach a value of the back pressure such that for the first time in the throat the value of the pressure that is achieved is P star. So, then what happens is here is my pressure dropping from P naught to P star. Remember, it is still the limiting case of this entire subsonic case. So, therefore I will slowly go back again this will still be subsonic. However, I will call this as a limiting subsonic case. Why limiting subsonic is because the value of the pressure in the throat for the curve that I just drew corresponds to the critical pressure or the P star value corresponding to your P naught value. So, this particular pressure is a special value in the back pressure because corresponding to this particular value I am reaching P equal to P star at the throat and the operating condition in the nozzle is something that I would like to call a limiting subsonic. So, you remember that A over A star relation that we had discussed for every value of A over A star not equal to 1 we said that there are two isentropic solutions possible one was subsonic and one was supersonic. So, in particular now consider the ratio exit area divided by A star. If you look at this exit area to A star you have certain value for this. If you go to the A over A star relation corresponding to this particular value and look up for example, in the isentropic flow table you will come up with two values of the Mach number as I said in the isentropic flow table one of which is what we have just drawn. So, the limiting subsonic case corresponds to a completely isentropic flow, but fully subsonic through the entire nozzle and will reach some subsonic Mach number at the exit plane here where your back pressure is getting maintained. Now, while we are on the topic of that A over A star and the two limiting cases let me also draw the other supersonic isentropic solution. So, in which case what ends up happening is that that curve will simply come down to something like this. So, if you maintain a back pressure equal to this value this corresponds to the supersonic solution for this A E over A star value in which case the pressure continuously decreases from P naught reaches a value of P star at the throat will keep on continuously decreasing and finally will smoothly reach the value of P B which you are maintaining at the back pressure. So, this case is what is popularly called as the design condition. So, the design condition is when the convergent divergent nozzle is operating in a completely isentropic fashion with a supersonic solution in the divergent part. So, the pressure then that you reach at the exit plane here is what we call a design pressure design exit plane pressure and if you go back to your A over A star value whatever this is you go and you read off from the isentropic flow table that corresponding to this A exit over A star value there is one unique value of the supersonic mach number and if the pressure in the back side is maintained at this value what you will do is to realize that the exit mach number will be equal to that value from the isentropic flow table. So, that let me just draw it here M exit design is what you will achieve if the back pressure is maintained at this value corresponding to which the throat pressure is P star entirely the flow is isentropic and supersonic completely through the divergent part. So, these are the two limiting cases that will exist corresponding to the value of A E over A star one is what we call the subsonic solution the other one is what we call a supersonic solution. So, now the question is that what happens if we maintain the back pressure in between these two value. So, let me try to to draw a new figure for this. So, this is the throat location again. So, let me draw for the purpose of reference this limiting subsonic case the supersonic solution this is subsonic solution and this is the supersonic solution. So, this is what we called the design condition the supersonic solution in both cases the pressure at the throat is equal to P star. Now, let us say that this first limiting case corresponded to some specific value of P b let me call it P b 1 and the second one corresponds to some other value P b 2 the design value here in between if you want to maintain the back pressure somewhere between P b 1 and P b 2 what is the situation. So, let us go back to the limiting subsonic case here. Now, let us assume that you are operating with the limiting subsonic case and now you want to reduce the back pressure a little bit from the P b 1 value that you are maintaining to achieve the limiting subsonic case. What ends up happening now is at the instant when you reached this P b 1 value you reached P star value at the throat and therefore, the mach number at the throat is going to be equal to 1. So, therefore, if now you reduce the value of P b 1 below the value of or back pressure below the value of P b 1 there will again be the generation of those acoustic disturbances which will try to move up the nozzle and while doing so will try to change the conditions within the nozzle. However, when it comes to the throat location it will experience the same problem as it had when we were discussing the purely convergent nozzle namely that the flow itself has reached the sonic velocity at the throat and therefore, this acoustic disturbance is not able to go anywhere and change any conditions up the location of the throat. So, therefore, beyond the throat nothing changes this remains completely frozen here. On the other hand what ends up happening is that because let us say you are trying to maintain a pressure like this here which is P b 3 let us say that is neither low enough equal to P b 2 nor high enough equal to P b 1 which are the two limiting isentropic solutions. What ends up happening is that because the mass flow rate is chosen the nozzle is essentially forced to flow the frozen mass flow rate and the only way this situation is resolved is by generating a little bit of supersonic flow in the divergent part a shock situation occurs and post shock the flow becomes subsonic and will slowly reach back the value of P b 3. So, here is a situation where a shock occurs within the divergent portion of the nozzle corresponding to a value of the back pressure that is in between this limiting value of P b 1 and P b 2. It so happens that if you are going close to P b 1, but just below P b 1 this shock will be closer to the throat ok. If you go away from P b 1 below toward P b 2 the shock will actually occur at a later cross section. The location of the shock simply depends upon the back pressure that you are maintaining and the phenomenon that involves in formation of the shock is exactly the same as what we were discussing yesterday namely coalescence of individual acoustic waves etcetera. It is just that here we are dealing with a inherently steady flow situation, but physically there is absolutely no difference between the shock formation that we talked about yesterday and what we are discussing here today. As we are reducing the back pressure some transient flow take place and until the steady state is reached and within this transient flow what ends up happening is that there is that coalescence of individual acoustic waves to form a shock at a certain location within the divergent section. So, going back again to the board what will end up happening is that if I want to redraw the plot. So, I will now draw only that situation which we are talking about. So, here is where we have reached P star that is not going to change further there is a supersonic flow developed which ends in a shock. Post shock this is subsonic as we saw in the yesterday discussion this is from here to here this is supersonic in the throat it is exactly m equal to 1 and this is the value of the back pressure that you are maintaining which is achieved at the end of the exit plane. If you keep on reducing this back pressure what ends up happening is that this shock will keep on moving and at certain value of the back pressure it will actually stand exactly in the exit plane. Let me call this P b 4. So, if you are maintaining this P b 4 the shock actually stands in the exit plane the value of the Mach number here is exactly equal to the design value. However, the back pressure is not low enough. So, that a completely isentropic flow can be achieved, but there is a normal shock that is standing exactly at the exit plane. Now, if you want to reduce the back pressure further what ends up happening is that there are two possibilities. So, let me draw this in a new figure let us say that this situation is such that the normal shock is standing here corresponding to which the back pressure is P b 4 this is your design condition. So, anywhere in between this if you employ the back pressure what you generate is what is called as an oblique shock which is outside the nozzle which will eventually reach the value of the pressure that you are maintaining. So, this situation is what is called as an oblique shock that is outside the nozzle as against that under expanded situation which we saw in the case of a purely convergent nozzle. This is what is called as an over expanded nozzle the reason why it is called over expanded is because the exit plane pressure here is below the back pressure that you are maintaining and the back pressure is achieved by increasing the value through the oblique shock outside the nozzle. Again the oblique shock situation is something that we have not studied within our quasi one-dimensional framework we cannot really study those for that you have to go to multi-dimensional flow analysis. So, again when it comes to explaining to the students it is probably sufficient at this level to explain that there is this oblique shock phenomenon that will exist in case of these over expanded nozzle and the oblique shock is actually acting outside the nozzle and it is raising the pressure from this design value in the exit plane to a higher value which you are maintaining outside the nozzle. If you keep on lowering the back pressure you will achieve the design value again there is absolutely no waves generation everything is isentropic and this is where you want to typically operate the nozzle in it is not always possible. So, if you end up lowering the back pressure below the design value of the back pressure what will happen is what we have already seen namely an under expanded nozzle as was the case in the case of a purely convergent nozzle. So, whenever you encounter the words under expanded nozzle what we can understand is that the the nozzle is such the nozzle is operating such that there is an expansion from the exit plane pressure to the lower value of the back pressure that is occurring outside the nozzle through expansion wave. If on the other hand the nozzle is over expanded we we understand that there is an increase in the pressure from the exit plane value to whatever value that you are mentioning at the back back side through a series of oblique shock which are again outside the nozzle. So, this is how usually the the nozzle operations are are described and with the help of our isentropic flow tables and the normal shock tables it is possible to analyze more or less all these situations that we have we have discussed. So, what we will do is in the afternoon we will go through a couple of example problems where I will try to outline a few more features of how to solve these some of these problems and post that we will have our discussion session, but I will really request that once we have gone through our afternoon session today you please go back and try to solve the remaining the problem from the assignment sheet or the exercise sheet because many of these ideas which are described here you know cannot be fully understood unless and until you attempt to solve those those problems. So, with this I think I will I will stop this was more or less what I wanted to discuss as a part of introduction to compressible flow in case this topic is introduced in the thermodynamics course. Remember that we have already discussed far more things than what are typically available in the thermodynamics books as compressible flow chapter and the reason is because if you want to explain more details as to what is happening in these operating nozzles and so on you have to utilize ideas from fluid mechanics and it may not be possible for the thermodynamics book to really include all those fluid mechanics ideas and therefore the way at least I would look at it is that if this topic is included in the thermodynamics course my suggestion would be to stick to the minimum possible requirement and to provide these additional explanations through the kind of discussion that we have already gone through. So, with this I will I will stop.