All right, the recording has started. So let's take a moment just to pray together and we will get started. Could any one of us just please unmute your mic and lead us in a moment of prayer together, please? Anybody can do that. Okay, Rosalind, why don't you please pray and we'll get started. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you, Lord. Thank you for this beautiful morning. Thank you for this day. Thank you for your grace upon our lives. Daddy, we come before you in the name of Jesus.  Give us the spirit of wisdom and knowledge that we may know, we may know you, we may know your word. I also pray, Lord God, anoint our dear pastor as he teaches us your word. Speak through his mouth, Lord. Thank you, thank you for hearing our prayers. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Amen, amen. Okay, good morning, thank you. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for connecting to the class. All right, so in this course, we are talking about our identity in Christ. We're making progress week after week as we discover from the word of God what God has done for us in Christ, what is the inheritance he has given to us in Christ. And we're also learning how to live out of that inheritance and the identity and inheritance he has given to us in Christ. How do we live out of that? And that's the Christian life. The Christian life is a life that we live out of our identity and inheritance in Christ. That's what the Christian life is all about. So we've been journeying through it. Last week, we spent almost all of our time in Romans chapter five and Romans chapter six. We started going through that. We were talking about identification. And I just want to quickly review and then we go forward. We talked about from Romans chapter five, we talked about this truth of identification that is the entire human race is identified in the first man, Adam. And whatever happened to Adam is passed on to the entire human race. So Adam sinned and because of that came condemnation, judgment, subjection to sin and Satan and death. So everything from sin to death came upon the human race because of one man, Adam. But Adam was only a type of the real man. The man with the capital M, that is the Lord Jesus Christ. He's called the second man and he's called the last Adam because in Jesus Christ, Adam's race comes to an end and a new man begins. That is in the image of a Lord Jesus Christ. So those of us who from Adam's race become believers who are born again, born from above be now are identified with not the first man, Adam, but with the second man who is the Lord from heaven. Natural in the natural, we're all identified with Adam. But those who have experienced spiritual birth who are born again or born from heaven are identified with the last Adam, the second man who is Jesus Christ. And being identified in Christ, Romans 5 tells us that we receive the free gift of God, salvation, eternal life, the gift of righteousness, abundance of grace. And all of this puts us over, puts us in a place of authority and dominion because we are in Christ. So that's our identity and that's our inheritance through identification, through this truth of identification. But then Paul doesn't stop there in Romans 5, he goes on into Romans 6 and he says, okay, I want you to know something more. Let's go into a little bit more detail. Now, not only are we identified with Christ in order to receive the free gift of God and righteousness and grace and salvation and eternal life and all of that, but I also want you to know something, we're identified with Christ in His death, in His burial, in His resurrection, in His ascension and in His exaltation, our seating at the right hand of the Father. And we saw this in detail from Romans 6 and each of these stages, us being identified with Christ in each of these stages, has an implication, has a meaning for us. It impacts our life today in a very powerful way. To be crucified with Him means that the old man is crucified so that the power of sin over our lives has been done away with so that we no longer need to serve sin. We are free from the power of sin over our lives. And the reason you and I can resist sin and resist every form of uncleanness is because of this. The old man is gone, it's dead. The power of sin over my life, over our lives has been broken. We are buried with him. That means the old life has no more claim over us. It's gone. We have transitioned from darkness to light. The darkness has no more claim over your life. You're resurrected with him, which means God has raised us up to walk in newness of life. This new life is the life of God, the Zoe. It's the God kind of life.  It's in us. You've got to learn to walk in it. And then we are raised up with him, which means we're taken out of the influence of this world system.  So we are in the world. But we're not in subjection to what's in the world. We don't have to be because we've been raised up with Christ. And as believers, we can live above the influences of this world. I'm not saying it's not there. It is there around us, but we're not subject to it because spiritually we've been raised up with Christ. And we've been made to sit together with Christ, which means we're in a place of authority and dominion. And from that place, we exert spiritual authority, spiritual dominion, spiritual influence into this realm. So having understood this truth of identification, what are we supposed to do? Romans chapter six, Paul of course says in Romans six and verse six, he says, I want you to know this. So obviously, when we study the word of God together, we get to know this truth. And believers need to know this truth everywhere, all over the world. God's people need to know this truth of identification. So Romans six and verse six, knowing this, so we must know it. But once we know it, what are we supposed to do with it? Verse 11, he says, reckon yourself to be dead to sin. That means you count it as a fact. I am dead to sin. This is reality. This is truth. I have nothing to do with sin. I'm dead to sin. I'm alive to God. I have nothing to do with sin. I have everything open. I'm open to God. I'm dead to sin, alive to God. And verse 12, therefore I'm not gonna give sin any place in me. Do not let sin rain in your mortal body. Sin, you have no place in me because I'm dead to sin, alive to God. So reckon that it's counted as a fact. Embrace this truth and give no sin, no place in your body. And then he says in verse 13, present yourself as a weapon of righteousness to God which will result in holiness. So you say, God, I'm all yours. Every part of me, every my hands, my feet, my eyes, my ears, every part of me, my part of me is yours. I present myself as an instrument of righteousness. And so that we went till that point. I want to just, and I think we also, yeah, we also talked about verse 17 where Paul, Romans six, and I'm looking at Romans chapter six where Paul explains that you were one slaves, but verse 18, now you've been set free. You're one slaves, but now you're set free from sin. You are slaves of sin, you're set free from sin. How do that happen? Because you obeyed from the heart. Romans six verse 17, you obeyed from the heart. This doctrine, this form of doctrine that was given to you. So we explained that the word form means type. It's a mold, it's a die. So the teaching that is brought to people shapes their life. So they move from being slaves of sin to being set free from sin. And so as we live out of this truth, what happens? We are able to present ourselves as slaves to God in no longer slaves to sin, but we are slaves to God resulting in holiness. That is Romans six verse 19, the latter part. And also verse 22, we are walking in holiness before God. So you're with me so far. I just did a quick review of what we spoke last week. Everything is clear, any questions? Okay, all right. So we covered all of this. And then we, but then Paul doesn't stop here. He brings us this revelation. And then he continues through into chapter seven and chapter eight. There is one problem, there is one problem. The power of sin over our lives has been broken, but there's still one problem. And the problem is the weakness of our flesh, which he mentions here in Romans six verse 19. So the truth of identification deals with the power of sin over us and it's such as free, but we are still living in a body, a physical body. And the physical body has its appetites, its desires. And the ungodly desires, ungodly appetites of the physical body is what is characterized by the word flesh. That's Romans six verse 19. He says, I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. So he's saying, okay, I understand. There is the weakness of the flesh. So our human body, we're living in this physical body. This physical body has desires. They are good desires and they're wrong desires, evil desires. You know, there are natural desires.  There's nothing wrong with that, but even good things could become evil desires if it's not controlled, if it's not within boundaries that God set for it. And so that's when the desires of the body, which are evil, which are ungodly, which are not pleasing to God, the Bible refers to them as flesh. And we all have the weakness of our flesh. So what do we do with it? Now in Romans chapter seven, I'm just going to quickly summarize Romans chapter seven. Paul is talking about life under the law as an unsaved man. So in Romans seven, he's talking about living under the law as an unsaved man. So in Romans seven, he's talking about living under the law as an unsaved man. This was his life. It was a good life, meaning he was a Pharisee. He was a man who studied the law, who wanted to serve God. He sought after God. He was a good man in the natural, good man, good person. He was under the law, but he realized something. And I'm just summarizing Romans chapter seven. You can read it and look at it in detail, but he realized something. He said, with my inward man, I want to do what's right before God, but I find something stronger in my flesh. I find that sin is dwelling in my flesh. So he's talking about these evil desires that are controlled by sinful desires in the flesh. So he says, in my heart, I want to do God. So this is in Romans chapter seven. And verse 17 to 24. Okay, let's read that. Romans chapter seven verses 17 to 24. Could somebody read this passage for us, please? But now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, nothing good dwells, for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do, but the will I will not to do, that I practice. Now, if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then a law that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good, for I delight in the law of God, according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warning against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members. O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Yeah, thank you. So this is Paul's struggle as a man living under the law. Now remember, he's not born again. There's Romans chapter seven. He's not talking about his born again life. He's talking about his life under the law. And you can, you'll pick it up if you read the first part of Romans seven. He talks about being under the law and I'm not walking the newness of the spirit. So under the law, he knew what was right and wrong. He desired it to do what was right before God, like he saw here. You know, I want, I delight in the law of God. Verse 22, I delight in the law of God, according to the inward man. But there is a problem. There is a law of sin. That means there is something that is controlling me in my body, my flesh. And so what happens, even though in my heart, inside me, I want to do what's right? Paul is saying, I always end up doing what is wrong.  So what is happening? And I'm just summarizing Romans chapter seven that he wants to do what's good. He knows what is good. He wants to do what's good. But sin is dwelling in his members, in his body. And so what happens? He eels to sin and it only results in death. So that's what he refers to. I verse 24, who will deliver me from this body of death, my death doomed body, because sin is working in my body and the result of sin is always death. So two things are happening in his body. Sin is controlling him and his body is death doomed because sin always results in death. It's producing decay. It's pulling him down. The body's being destroyed because of sin. So what is the answer? So then that's where he points to Jesus Christ in verse 25, Romans chapter seven, verse 25. I thank God through Jesus Christ of a Lord. Romans seven, verse 25, I thank God through Jesus Christ of a Lord. So now he's telling, look, if I move from being under the law to coming under Jesus Christ, things are gonna change. The sin that is working in my flesh, producing death, will no longer have its power. So in my inner man, the power of sin has been in Christ, the power of sin has been broken. He been set free. We know that we can live out of that truth. How are we gonna live out of that truth? Romans eight, verses one and two. So let's read Romans chapter seven, verse 25, and Romans eight, one and two. These three verses somebody could read for us please. Thanks be to God who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself in my mind, I'm a slave to God's law, but in my sinful nature as slave to the law of sin. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus, the law of the spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. All right, so in our lecture notes, we are now moving into, let me just quickly show it to you before I start explaining. We now are moving into this one, section six, which is the spirit of life in Christ. So what we have just done is we have finished Romans six, which is this identified with Christ. That notes, which is lesson zero five. We've completed that identified with Christ, which is basically a close look at Romans chapter five and six. And now I'm starting lesson number seven as LO six, spirit of life in Christ. And we're going to go through this, the law of the spirit. So we just read Romans eight, one and two, right? So what the apostle Paul is telling here in Romans seven verse 25, he says, I thank God through Jesus Christ. That though, you know, I'm in a mind, there's the law of God and there's the law of sin working in the flesh. But where's Romans eight, one and two, what's happening? There is no condemnation to those who are in Christ. So now he's talking about his life in Christ. What's happening in Christ? You do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. So here's the difference. Under the law, he always ended up doing things according to the flesh because he knew what was right and wrong, but he had no power to overcome the sin that was in his flesh. But now in Christ Jesus, that's what we're talking about in Christ Jesus. What about those of us who are in Christ Jesus? We do not walk according to the flesh. So we all have the flesh. We have our body and the sinful desires of the body. That's what flesh is. Now, some translations translate the word flesh as sinful nature and in some way that translation is misleading because the word flesh, there is the word sarks in Greek and it just talks about anything that having to do with the body. Sarks means flesh, physical flesh. So when you translate that word flesh as nature, sometimes it's misleading. So you need to, in your mind, you need to tell, it's talking about desires of the sinful desires of the flesh and the soul, those kinds of things. Anyway, verse one, it says, those of us who are in Christ Jesus, we do not walk according to the flesh. That means there is the flesh. You all live in a body and we have a soul and there are all these evil desires. It's the weakness of our flesh, but we don't walk according to it. But instead we walk according to the spirit, according to the spirit. And what about the spirit? Verse two, Romans eight, verse two, the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus. So in Christ, you have the spirit of life and the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me or made us free from the law of sin and death. So remember in chapter seven, towards the end he said, look, there is the law of sin in my body. That means the word law could be understood as dominion or control or influence. So the law of sin in my body and it was resulting in death. So sin and death, the law of sin and death. So my body, my flesh, my body was controlled by sin and only produced death in my body. But in Christ Jesus, what has happened? The law of the spirit of life, the influence, the dominion, the prevailing influence of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free. Okay, let me mute, say the totally. All right, so the prevailing influence of the spirit of life in Christ has set me free from the law of sin and death, the law of the spirit of life. The law, you understand the word law as meaning influence, control, dominion. So the influence of the dominion of the spirit of life, spirit of the Holy spirit is the life-giving spirit. Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. That's what we're studying in Christ. What does he do? He sets us free from the law of sin and death. So I want us to understand, this is very, very important. So identification with Christ is a provision given to us by God. It provisionally, that means God has provided for our freedom from sin. God has provided for us the ability to walk free from the past life. God has provided for us the ability to walk in newness of life through resurrection with Christ. Through our ascension with Christ, God has provided for us to live free from the influence of darkness in this world. And through our sitting with Christ, God has provided for us the ability to walk in dominion and authority. So identification is God's provision for you and me. But in order to walk in that provision, we have to do something. The challenges and the weakness of our flesh. Your sin working in our flesh. And we are so used to giving in to those desires. But now we must break free from that and instead live out of what God has provided for us. But how do we do it? We cannot do it by our own strength. As Paul explains with Romans 7, when he was under the law, he knew what was right and wrong, but he didn't have the power to do it. But we can do it through our life in Christ Jesus. So he says, thanks be to God, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Because for those who are in Christ, we don't walk according to the flesh. The flesh doesn't control us. But we walk according to the spirit. How? Because the spirit of life in Christ sets us free from the law or the dominion or the control of sin and death over our bodies. So the key here is this. We must learn to walk in the spirit of life, in the spirit of life. Then we can walk free from the law of sin and death. So Romans 8, 1 and 2. We are free from the law of sin. The law of the spirit of life in Christ has made me free from the law of sin, from the law of sin. We are free from the law of sin. And this is what we had read in Romans 7. He'd been talking about that sin working in my members. It's producing death. There was the law of sin in Romans 7 he talked about. But the spirit of life sets us free from the law of sin which he had referred to in Romans 7. So this is the key. And we're gonna talk more about this, about how do we walk according to the spirit. But this is the key. And you and I walk by the empowering of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We can walk free from the dominion of sin over our flesh. God has set us free and the Holy Spirit now comes and empowers us to live in that freedom. Okay, so let me pause before I go forward. Is our things clear? Any questions? Are you all with me so far? Yes, sir. Okay. I don't hear that. Thank you. Any questions? Okay, it's clear so far. So the spirit of life, the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death. Okay, so we must understand. What is the law? Okay, that's a question here. What is the law of the spirit of life mean? So the word law, you can understand as influence or dominion. So law, don't think of it as Old Testament law. That's not what he's talking about. The law means the control, the influence, the dominion. So you can read that phrase as the control of the spirit of life or the influence of the spirit of life. The positive influence, the spirit of life in Christ Jesus sets me free from the law, the control of sin and death. If you aren't, you can understand it that way, right? So Romans eight verse two, the influence of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the influence of sin and death. Or if you wanna use a stronger word, the control or the dominion of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the control or dominion of sin and death. So that's the answer, right? That's the key. So he says, look, sin was controlling me in my flesh. So I couldn't do the good things I wanted to do. But in Christ Jesus, there's something more powerful than sin that controlled my flesh. It's the spirit of life, the life-giving Holy Spirit. He exerts his influence in me, in you as a believer, and he liberates us. He sets us free from the control of sin and death. That was at work in our body. Is that clear? Okay, good. So Romans chapter eight is very important because it is telling us how to walk in the provision of identification, how to live it out with the help of the Holy Spirit, right? So first, remember, the spirit of life sets us free from the law of sin, the first part, the law of sin, the influence of sin. So Romans chapter six said, we are free from sin and sin will not have any dominion over you because of you were crucified with Christ and you were dead with Him and you were resurrected. And so sin will have no control over you. So that was a powerful announcement in Romans six. But we know, in our flesh, we are struggling with it. Our flesh is so used to living in sin. So for many people, Romans chapter six seems like, oh, how do I live in it? How do I walk in it? How do I walk in it? Well, the answer is there in Romans eight. When the Holy Spirit and he yielded to the spirit of life, he is the one who enables us to walk free from the law of sin. So the word walk is important. Walk means how we conduct our everyday life. We walk in our everyday life. We're not walking out of the flesh, but we're walking or in the spirit because the spirit of life, he enables us to live free from the law of sin. And we will get into the little details and how do I do this practically? But the answer is walk with the help of the Holy Spirit. So not only did he set us free from the law of sin, but he also sets us free from the law of death. What does that mean? We have to understand it, of course, in the context of Romans chapter seven. In Romans seven, what Paul had already told us was that sin working in his body produced death in me. So just as a reference, if you want, let's read Romans seven verse 13. Romans seven verse 13. Somebody can read that. Has then what is good become death to me? Certainly not. But sin that it might appear sin was producing death in me through what is good so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful. Okay. Thank you. So I just wanted you to see that phrase, sin was producing death in me. Now the context that of course is the law, that the law enhanced the power of sin. Sin became very strong because the law basically said this is right and this is wrong. And sin was accentuated because the law just made it stand out. But the verse 13 says sin was producing death in me. So what happened? The result of sin is always death. Sin doesn't give us life. Sin always gives us death, the result, the outcome. So sin controlling our flesh, our body, as we just give into that, what happens? We are actually dying. It's producing death in our body, physical body. But it says here that the law, Romans eight to the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin. It didn't stop there. It also says and death. What is this and death? He had mentioned it earlier in Romans seven. That means when sin works in our body, it only results in death. Things that destroy, things that are destructive. Death simply means things that are destructive. Things that are destroying our body and of course ultimately is death, meaning physical death and spiritual death. So sin working in us produced death, physical and spiritual, just working death, things that are decaying. But in Christ Jesus, you and I have the influence of the Holy Spirit, which we are just talking about the spirit of life in Christ Jesus. And he has made us free from the law of sin. The control of sin and death. So I'm emphasizing this and death part. Because many people, you know, we stop with the law of sin, but hey, it doesn't stop there. It says and death. That means you've got something more also. And Paul explains this in Romans chapter eight versus 10 and 11. Could somebody read that for us? Romans eight, 10 and 11, please. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness.  Thank you. What is he saying? See, Christ is in you. They are in Christ. Christ is in us. The body is dead because of sin. The body, our physical body is dead because of sin. So what's happening to our physical body now? It's not yet dead in the sense that it's, you know, lifeless, but it is dying. It is death doomed, like he spoke about in Romans seven because of sin. So sin is producing death in me. Romans seven verse 13 and Romans seven 24, which we read earlier, there's death working in our body because of sin. But the spirit is alive, spirit is life. And what else happens? If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, so the Holy Spirit, the spirit of life is dwelling in you, what does he do? He who raised Christ from the dead also gives life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you. So the Holy Spirit not only set me free from the law of sin, he is also setting me free from the death part. So I want you to understand this. Sin working in our body is producing death, but the Holy Spirit dwelling, living in us, not only sets us free from the influence of sin, the control of sin, but he's also giving life to this body, to this mortal body. That means this body can manifest the life of God. Now it doesn't mean this body will never die.   So don't misunderstand. I'm not saying our bodies won't die. What I want us to understand is that while we live in this body, the Holy Spirit sets us free from the law of sin and death. Death is caused by sin working in our body. It's destructive, but the Holy Spirit is giving life. So in Christ Jesus, the Holy Spirit is giving life. And Paul writes about this elsewhere in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 10 and 11. Let's read this. I'll share a little bit and then we can go for a break. Somebody could read 2 Corinthians 4, 10 and 11. 2 Corinthians chapter 4, 10 to 11, always caring about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus' sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So think about what Paul is saying. And I'll just highlight, you know, because he repeats this in both these verses. I'll highlight it and then we will look at it. See, he says the life of Jesus may be manifested in our body. The life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. Now, he's talking about the fact that he has been persecuted so much. He says, you know, we're caring about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus. We are delivered to death for Jesus' sake. So, you know, Paul's ministry, how in many places he was beaten, he was stoned and so on. But he has some other understanding. And it is that while all this is happening to him in his body, the life of Jesus is being manifested. One great example is in Acts chapter 14, you know, when I think it was an iconium and when Paul goes there, he is actually stoned and he's taken out of the city and he's stoned and he is left for dead. So this is actually, he was enlisted. This is Acts 14, 19 and 20. Acts chapter 14 was 19 and 20. Can somebody read that for us please? Acts 14, 19 and 20. Then Jews from Antioch and...  Thank you. Then Jews from Antioch and Iconium came there and having persuaded the multitudes, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him to be dead. Verse 20. However, when the disciples gathered around him, he rose up and went into the city and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derby. Okay, think about this. So they were in the city of Lister and there were Jews who came from another city, two other cities, Manchioch and Iconium. They were not too far from Lister. They came, they caught Paul, they dragged him out of the city and they stoned him. Stoned him means they didn't throw one small stone. They stoned him means there must have been, at least 25 people throwing stones at Paul. They stoned him. That's how they killed people. Remember they stoned Stephen. So they stoned Paul and they left him as dead. That's verse 19. It says there in verse 20, the disciples gathered around him and it says he rose up. Now imagine a man stoned standing up and not only that, it says, and went into the city. He doesn't say they carried his body into the city. It says he stood up and he went into the city. It says the next day, not next year, next day, he went with Barnabas and they went on their missionary journey. They went to Derby inside, they preached over there. Now, humanly speaking, this is not possible. Here was a man who was stoned, left for dead. How is he even going to stand up?  He must have been bleeding all over. He was scaring about in the body, the dying of the Lord Jesus. He was delivered to death for Jesus' sake. But something happened. The life of Jesus is manifested in our body. The life of Jesus is manifested in a model flesh. He stood up and he walked back into the same city where the people who stoned him, he didn't walk the opposite direction, he walked back to the same direction, not afraid. And the next day, he continues on his journey. In the natural, if somebody has been stoned, they will take about six months to recover. They will have to be bandaged, carried to the hospital. They would have to be treated there. Stoned and left for dead means it's not small cuts here and there. It will take at least six months to get back.  So the point is this, Paul when he says, the spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is giving life to your mortal body. God is giving life to your mortal body. The life of Jesus is made manifest. He's talking about something supernatural. He's talking about the Holy Spirit imparting healing, wholeness to our bodies. So the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made us free from the law of sin and death. What is death? Anything that is working destruction in our body, the Holy Spirit sets us free. So I want you to understand this. Take it to heart that the Holy Spirit in you not only sets us free from the law of sin, but also from death that works in our bodies. We will take our break, come back, and we will dwell on this a little further, and we will take up any of these questions as well. Think about what we just read and heard, and we come back after the break, and we'll take up questions and go forward. Okay? Thank you. We're back in 10 minutes. Thank you. Thank you.


All right, I think we'll go ahead and get started. We're very prompt. Thanks everybody for joining us. So we're the Bryans. I'm Brian Friedman. Got Brian McLean with me. We're going to talk about Knative and serverless today. So just to give you a sense of where we're headed today, first we'll talk a little bit about what Knative is. Rather than sort of doing a whole bunch of hello world demos of each component of Knative, we're going to take a real example application, look at how it's architected, and make a few changes to it, and sort of walk through Knative as we do that demo. And then we'll wrap up with a few thoughts about Project RIF as well, which is a function as a service platform built on Knative from Pivotal. So this is the attempt to define Knative. We've got a lot of buzzwords in there, platform, serverless, Kubernetes. But really, it's designed to make Kubernetes more of a better developer experience and really focus on some of the key serverless tenants, which we'll talk a little bit about what that means. What is serverless? So there's three key components to Knative. Maybe you're familiar with these if you've seen other Knative talks or information. But it's important that we understand each of the three components on what they do. So the first, perhaps the most important one, is serving. This is how our code receives requests, how it does the scaling. So if you attended Dr. Nick and Dr. Max's talk yesterday, they showed a lot of sort of Cloud Foundry-like capabilities within Knative. A lot of that comes from this serving component here. It's dealing with all the HTTP request-driven compute. It's doing all the scaling, so the scale to zero, scale out based on demand. It handles the deployment of a container. So you pass a container image in a registry, and it will deploy it to the Kubernetes cluster. It's doing that revisions. So again, if you saw that, the demo, we'll see an example of it today as well. When you deploy a new version, it keeps revision so you can do easy rollback and roll forward, blue-green deployments, that type of thing. And it also handles all the routing for you. So the route to the app just like Cloud Foundry does, it's handled by Knative. You don't have to create that kind of stuff like you would with just Kubernetes by itself. So that's what serving takes care of for us. Then there's the build component. And this is what's handling. I talked about in serving how you're deploying a container. But if we're talking about serverless, we don't want to have to think about containers. So that's where build comes in. And this is what takes our source code and turns it into a container image. The nice thing is that it's pluggable. So there's templates available. The one we'll be showing today, since we're at Cloud Foundry Summit, is build packs. But there's a lot of other options available depending on what your preferences are. And this allows us to take our code, build it into a container, push it to a registry, and then the serving component can grab that and deploy to our cluster. So we'll see how that works as well. And then finally, we can't talk about serverless unless we're talking about eventing. And this is kind of one of the most unique and interesting pieces of Knative. We're gonna get a lot more into how this works and why it's important. But this is really where you can take care of triggering code based on some event that runs. And there's a number of events that Knative sort of ships with and then you can also write your own. So you can take in events and we're gonna see exactly how that works. So that's the overview, quick plug. We're gonna be using some examples that we also go into much greater detail to in a book that we just published with O'Reilly thanks to Pivotal. And if you get a chance to stop by the Pivotal booth, you can pick one up hard copy or download it at the Pivotal website. So the examples that we're showing today, much more detail in here. We're cramming probably about an hour's worth of content into 30 minutes. So there's a lot more detail in the book if you're interested. So now I'm gonna have Brian kind of give us a walkthrough of what the example app that we're gonna show is and then we'll sort of step by step go through and make some modifications to it. Sorry, I'm shorter.  Yeah, so we were trying to figure out a really good application that could show off some of these different pieces of Knative. And we were looking through different data sets, maybe do some sort of visualization. And we found that the US Geological Survey, they put out a whole bunch of data sets for pretty much everything. One of those being pretty much real-time earthquake data. So if there's any seismic activity throughout the US, no matter how big or how small, you can hit this endpoint totally free, return just big JSON array of like 8,000 objects. And you can parse it and use it however you want. So we decided to build something to visualize that. But we did run into a couple of things which we'll work through for a little bit. But this is how our application ended up being architected. It's pretty straightforward. If we look through, I like to kind of follow how the data flows through this. So we have our API endpoint on the bottom left here from the USGS. And then we have something that's just sitting there pulling that data. It is just an endpoint you can hit, return some data. So we do have to unfortunately constantly pull that. And then we send it to what we call our geocoder function. So this was the first issue we hit. We wanna show kind of an address, a general location of where this activity happens. But the USGS only provides coordinates. So I don't know about you, I'm really bad at telling the coordinates from California to New York. So we actually do this by emitting an event. Again, we're not really diving too deep into the technology here. But you can imagine this could be like a message broker, something like Kafka or RabbitMQ. That geocoder function watches for those events. Does that translation from coordinates to address. And then stores it to a database, which our front-end will hit. So what we're gonna be doing today is going from something like this to this. We're gonna add in a new event source. We're gonna look at flood data. And we're gonna run it through the same geocoder function. We don't have to change our function at all. We're gonna emit these events in the same way. And then expose that to our front-end, which I know this looks very similar, but we're gonna add like a dropdown up top. So if we want to just show flood data, it's kind of hard to see, but unsurprisingly, a lot more floods on the east side, a lot more earthquakes on the west side. I thought that was kind of a cool officialization there. But with that, I think we can actually start jumping into Knative. Cool, thanks. The height adjustment here, all right. So we talked about serving. We're gonna, as you saw from the diagram, we're gonna have, we have to deploy a new front-end, right? Because we have to handle the new flood data that's gonna be coming in from our other event. So we're gonna use the serving aspect of the serving component of Knative to do that. Remember, this is a reminder of all the things that it does. We're gonna see a specific example of deploying a container. We're also gonna see an example of the sort of new revision. We're not gonna have time to scale up and scale down, but just trust me, it scales up and scales down. And that would allow us to do, the snapshots allow us to do the blue-green type deployments, that kind of thing. So this is a visualization of what we're doing. We're grabbing our image from a repository, in our case, Docker Hub. We're shipping it off to Knative, and it's creating a new revision and setting up a URL for us there at earthquake demo. We're also actually gonna be covering build at the same time, because we wanna take our code and turn it into container first. So we're gonna, like I said, be using build packs. The cool thing about the build component in Knative is it runs the build completely on cluster, so it's not local. And if you attended, again, Dr. Nick's talk yesterday, he made a great point, which is that it's not even building code from your local directory, it's grabbing it specifically from GitHub and taking a specific tag that you want, grab that, turn it into a container, push it off to an image. So here's the visualization of that. Code from GitHub, turn it into Docker Hub repository. So let's actually do this. So first, let's take a look at what we're doing. So if you saw the Knative demo from Dr. Nick yesterday, they were using a Knative sort of CLI that was developed KNCTL. We're gonna do everything with YAML, because we think YAML's super fun. And that's sort of the native way to do it within Kubernetes. All these Knative components are just custom resource definitions within Kubernetes, so you can just manipulate them with YAML. But under the covers, obviously, the CLI is doing the same thing by manipulating the API. But this is a pretty good way to kind of see how things work. So all we're gonna be doing, well, so first of all, just to show you, we've already got our service running. So if we do get KNative services, we can see we have our earthquake demo up here already going. We can see that we have some pods around it as well. Don't need to see all the extra pods, so we'll just scrap that. So you can see we have a pod here that's completed. That was actually the pod that was used to do the build. And then we have the actual earthquake demo itself running here, and you can see this 0001, that's revision one. So that's already running, but we need to make a change to it. So if we look at our friend and service, we've got a revision in GitHub called Floods. That's gonna add the addition of the UI. So we're giving it, this YAML is basically specifying, this is the service, this is the name of the service, the namespace we're deploying it to. We're defining both our build and our deployment within the same YAML file. We could do this separately, but we're doing it all at the same time here. The build, there's a service account. This is just a standard Kubernetes service account object that allows us to authenticate against Docker Hub. So that we can push our image up to there. In the build, we define the source repository. Like I said, we've got this Flutter vision. We tell it which template we wanna use. We're gonna do build packs because we love build packs. And then we tell it where to actually push the image to. So this is the Docker Hub URL, and we're gonna tag it as Floods so we know the difference between the new and old version. So that's the build definition, and then down here we've got what we're deploying, which is, so there's a little annotation here. We're gonna prevent it from scaling all the way down to zero. Since it's a UI front end, we don't wanna wait for that extra time to wait for the pod to spin up. So if we didn't specify that it would scale down to zero, this is gonna only scale down to one, and then we've got the image that we're pulling from. So here's the image we're pushing to, the image we're pulling from is exactly the same in this case. And then we've got any environment variables that we need. So this is, oh, sorry, we don't need to look at your calendar, Brian. Yeah, okay, so now we're gonna do, all you have to do is apply this template front end service.yaml, and what we should see here down below is some pods spinning up.  If I do this quickly enough, if I can remember the command here, build, step, build, we can actually watch this build except I need to do a Chef. So now it's running through, this is just the build pack, right? It's running through the build pack. It's a Ruby application, so it's figured that out and it's finished that step. And you can actually see it's running through for the four build pack steps here. It's on the third one right here. And in just a moment it will complete, which it does and then we've got our new pod spinning up. And you can see there's three containers within that pod. One of them is our application. The other two are containers that Knative uses to handle the scaling and do some other additional cool things. But one of those containers is actually our application. All right, so now it's up and running. So if we go back to our earthquake app, so this is the old version. Can do a quick refresh on this. And now it's as natural disasters. We've got a dropdown. And the map is taking a moment actually because the Geocoder is also running on Knative. And so it's still, it had scaled down to zero. And now you can see here Geocoder is spinning up because the app itself is requesting is requesting that Geocoder pod. So that's spun up. So now the map should be there and it is. Problem is we have no flood data at this point. So even if we go look at, hey, show me all the floods. Right now there's nothing there because we don't have a flood event source. So we need to go add that, which Brian's gonna do for us. Maybe I can stand on my tiptoes. That might be better. So making you listen to that sound. Yeah, so someone messed up and let me talk about eventing in this talk. The good news is we originally thought this was an hour talk and it's only 30 minutes. So you're gonna get out of most of that. I will say though, I do think that eventing is often something that's overlooked, especially in a serverless architecture or serverless platform. Not to say that one demands the other or especially vice versa, but it's a really complementary architecture, right? I mean, you have these real lightweight, single-purpose listeners watching for change of state. They can come up, scale back down when they're not needed, scale out if there's a big kind of concentration of events. And luckily the people that design Knative, the great community around it agreed on that. Specifically, they made it really easy to consume events. So on the back end, there is a message bus like we talked about, but to your application, it just looks like an HTTP request. So no matter if you're responding to a browser request or some API call or responding to an event, you're just handling HTTP requests. So there's no special code written specifically for that. That messaging alert is abstracted also in the platform level as well. So if you have specific needs or you're already very proficient with something like Rabbit or with Kafka, you can choose whichever one fits your needs the best. We'll look at this a little bit deeper, but it also introduces this concept of channels and subscriptions. Again, if you worked with messaging systems that's something that's probably pretty familiar to you. And then what I get excited about, and it's like this for build templates and builds as well, is that event sources are pluggable. They can be brought in ad hoc as you need and it's really, really easy to build your own event source. Little disclaimer, there is a few ways to do it. I do it this way because it's the easiest and why wouldn't you use the easiest? But it's actually pretty straightforward. You can say, here's a container image. Doesn't matter what's running in it, what language you wrote your code in, what framework you use. And Knade will just give you an extra command line flag. And that flag will include a URL. You can go through, determine what it even means to be an event in your context, and then you just do an HTTP post to that URL. So, as you can probably guess where I'm going with it, that's how we introduce this flood data. So we build a container, it's another Ruby script because Ruby. And it's gonna sit there and watch that flood data just like I watch the earthquake data and then do a post to wherever Knade tells us to send it to. This is what the events look like that we're emitting. Super exciting, I know. And we're just sending it straight to our geocoder function. That's a very valid use case. It's a demo, so we wanted to have as little things to break as possible. But more realistically, you're gonna be looking at something like this. I have an event source and I have a lot of things that are interested in what it has to say. So with Knade, instead of sending those events straight to an application or straight to a service, you can say, I'm gonna make a channel. Again, backed by your message broker of choice. I'm gonna send my events to that channel and then my applications will subscribe to it. So, again, introducing this loose coupling between event producer and event consumers, letting us add this extra functionality with pretty little work. I mean, we're already completely re-leveraging that reverse geocoding. We're just kind of bringing it in with a couple UI changes. So, let's try it. Let's see what breaks. So if we look at the YAML again, my legs are getting tired by being on my tiptoes. I apologize. It's actually pretty straightforward. Like I said, we're gonna give it a path to a Docker image, which is unsurprisingly called flood source. We can give it some arguments specific to our deployment. You can see here, I don't know why I'm pointing at the screen, I can highlight. I can say, check every 10 seconds. And this is actually where Knative is going to add that additional command line flag of where to send my events. And then down here on the bottom is where I define where I wanna send those events to. Again, we're sending them straight to a service, but this could be a channel in case we wanted to propagate these out to multiple event consumers. So let's see what happens if we do that. So you can see here on the bottom, we got a new container coming up. If I can find my mouse, there we go. It errors because I'm really good at coding, and then it comes up. And we see immediately our geocoder functions coming up. And that's because this flood event source is already sending out events that it found. And since the geocoder is responding to that, it's gonna scale up and start handling those. If we look at the logs, you can see these events starting to come through. And that's actually the URL that Knative provided to our event source to tell it where to send those events. And again, just doing HTTP posts. Nothing specific to any sort of messaging system, no client libraries, no configuration. It's all brought through all automatically. If you wanna talk about the architecture. So actually we can show the UI real quick, right? Oh yeah, that's important isn't it? Yeah, why don't we look at now that we have data and see these events are starting to come through. Something's going on in Minnesota right now, that's not great. But yeah, so you can see we added a new event source, we updated our UI to handle that new sort of data. But that loose coupling between producer and consumer allowed us to do this really, really easily. And now I think we can talk about the architecture. Cool, so just to review a little bit lower level what we did, we took a look at the sort of high level architecture before, but now that we know what all the Knative components are and how they work, we can sort of double click on that a little bit. So we still have the Knative cluster of course itself, we have a Postgres SQL, which is just also actually running as a container on the Kubernetes cluster, but could be anywhere. When we initially created, you know, set this whole application up, we took essentially two code bases, front end and geocoder, and we pushed them to Knative. Through the build and serving components, push them to, well first we push them to the Docker hub, right, and then we from there deployed them both to Knative, one is running as a front end, one is running as a function doing the geocoder, and then we can actually hit our application via ingress on the Knative cluster. We did the earthquake event feed, we're showing it as a channel here, although as Brian said, we cheated a little bit and went direct, but it could easily be a channel, and then all we did today is we added the flood event source in the same vein as the earthquake, and then we updated our front end code so that it actually showed the new data as well. So this is a little bit lower level than our initial architecture diagram that we showed, because we wanted to sort of see all of the specific components within Knative that we're using, which is all of them, incidentally. So now that's sort of the Knative view of the world, and now Brian's going to talk a little bit about how this relates with Project Riff. All right, I know we've got what, eight more minutes, I won't make this too long, but we did want to talk about Project Riff a little bit. If you've heard about Project Riff before, it looks a little bit different than it did a year ago. If you haven't heard about it, it's this really awesome open source project being worked on inside of Pivotal that is really focusing on the developer experience of Knative. So we've worked with a lot of YAML, we've worked with kind of these low level custom resource definitions in Kubernetes. And what Riff is looking to do is make both the operations and the development on top of Knative really, really nice. There's a lot of things that go into that, of course. There's two I want to highlight today. First, it ships with this really nice CLI. So if you're used to that CF push, you know, that, I mean, that's our haiku, right? Here's my code, push it up, I don't care how. That's what we're famed to do with their CLI. And additionally, on the development side, they ship with something called invokers, which are kind of what they sound like. They invoke our functions. So we didn't look at a whole lot of code that backs what we built today, but if we dove into it, we would see something that looks like this. I hope you can read that, but basically it's opening up a port, it's setting up our web server, configuring it, setting up our handlers, and then we're doing exactly one thing, which is concatenating two strings. And this isn't the most complicated code, but it's about a dozen lines of code or so to basically add two strings together. So what invokers do is they take all that boilerplate code, they're opening the port, configuring the web server, and they wrap your logic around it. So we can go from something like this to one line of code. It's literally just that exact same function that we were looking to do. And if we push that up, again, I don't know how that looks on the, with the contrast here, but we can basically say, here's my code, here's where to send my container image, go ahead and push it up and get it running. I was trying to decide if we had time to do a demo, but I think it might be better to leave time for Q and A on that, but it's a really awesome project. Make sure you check that out. And it's, of course, if you ask anyone, it's RIF with a lowercase r, they get really mad if you capitalize it. So before we turn over Q and A, once again, I know we only had 30 minutes today, so we went through this pretty quick. That book that Brian mentioned is actually free on the Pivotal website as well. So we're not trying to sell anything, we don't get paid for it. We should have broke her to better deal, but you can check that out at Pivotal.io slash eBooks. If you're interested in the code, I'll just leave this up here while we do any questions. We tried to document this as well as we could. There's a couple of things we still wanna document a little bit better, but if you wanna look at the code, you can find it up there on GitHub. Questions? No questions? You guys understand everything about Knative already? I could have done my demo. That's true. I would say it doesn't right now. There's talk about, maybe you've heard of the Tecton, I guess it's a, yeah, the Tecton project. They were looking at sort of expanding the build component of Knative into more of like a pipelines, build pipelines thing, in which case you would be able to handle exactly what you're talking about. I'm not sure exactly where that's gonna land, if it's gonna, right now what they've done is they've sort of spun that off into a different project called Tecton, how much of that's gonna land back in Knative or integrate, I think is still sort of up in the air, but that's where that would get handled. Really the original focus of the build component within Knative was just around like, how do we go from source to image? So it doesn't really handle the test case stuff. It's not like a build in the traditional sense, you'd still probably want some sort of, you know, CICD process on the code itself, but that's where that Tecton project comes into play. The other thing we didn't really dive into is, so that's some of that sort of in-flight right now, still kind of being developed and looked into. Even as of today, what we didn't dive into is build templates, which are basically just a list of things to do whenever I say build. So for the, like there's a Conoco build template, where it just invokes the Conoco container images to build your code. You could imagine there's a, we build a go build template, which just runs go build. So you can imagine a build template that would go through and run your tests and go through that as well. But I think that's sort of what Tecton's trying to address in a more formal way. Yeah, I mean, and you don't need a build template either. You could literally just give the build YAML like steps to run if you wanted to, but the build templates makes it, make it obviously a lot easier. Yeah, so the question is around, why is there so much YAML? Is there anything that we can do about that? And I think if, so the reason that is, is the way that Knative is implemented is as custom resource definitions within Kubernetes. And so everything is YAML in Kubernetes. I think the solution is really around the tool set. So again, if you saw Dr. Nick's talk yesterday, they showed sort of KNCTL, which is a CLI. Brian was sort of showing off RIF and how it can do it. So I think the answer is to, rather than interacting with the Kubernetes and Knative API through YAML and Kube CTL apply, it would be interacting with that through CLI and other tool sets. So it's just, right now the community, I don't think has agreed on a CLI specifically. That's a working group that I think they're working on, but today the YAML just allows us to, show exactly how it works specifically with Kubernetes. But it's a good point. I don't think we expect developers to be doing it this way, ultimately. So if you actually want to see that demo, I didn't plan on doing this, but like you mentioned, RIF is one of the things that's trying to solve that. So if I have this example function here, which literally just gets the time, formats, and sends it back, I can say, it says command here, that's already typed in, RIF function create. I give it a path to that get repo, tell it where to upload it, like I mentioned. And then that's all I had to do. I didn't have to write the YAML, I didn't have to configure the YAML or pre-build that Docker image. It's gonna go through and do all that for me. And we're gonna let this run while we answer another question, but you can see it'll go through that same build process and then give me a running function. But notice the command line arguments that we passed are basically the arguments that we define in the YAML, right? So it's sort of making it a little easier to interact with. And this build, this invoke, I mean, the invokers are effectively like a build template that it's using. And you can see there's eight steps that it's going through, right? Dynamically done live demos. All right, yeah, another question? Yeah, good question. So the question was around, what are the available event sources? Is there good coverage? I think I'm gonna let Brian answer that one. Yeah, so that's definitely something that's growing. I mean, Knative is still kind of in a place where it's maturing very fast, but it is still fairly early days. I wish I knew exactly where the documentation is. I know we're already at time, so I'm not gonna sit here and make you guys watch me look through GitHub. But there is a list of maybe a dozen or so event sources for things like GCP services, AWS services, I know TriggerMesh did a bunch of work to bring in a bunch of event sources for AWS. But I think that's why I got so excited about how event sources are implemented today is that it's pretty easy to write your own, too. Like I hate that answer when I hear that conference, I know. But we've seen that already with companies like TriggerMesh where they're like, all right, well, there's no event source for this AWS service. Let's build it and make it available. And then it's one command and bring it into your environment. Yeah, I mean, like Brian said, it's early days, but the nice thing is that rather than being a centric or public cloud centric, like AWS only, Google only, like he said, you can do GCP PubSub or you can do AWS Kinesis, like take your pick, right? So there's different event sources that are out there, but it is still early, so I expect there to be a whole lot more as the community grows. And I think that's, we're actually over time, but we'll be around. We'll stick around. Awesome questions. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you.


Good evening. I'm Tobin Anderson, and I want to welcome you all to what promises to be a very special event the first preview performances of Eric Nielsen's new chamber opera Alice Thymers with the libretto by Dana Walrath This evening has been three years in the making and you'll be getting just a taste tonight What your appetite for the full production which will be coming down the line? Tonight on one piano Allison Saruti will give us an accompaniment that will eventually be scored for an entire ensemble The extraordinary Mary Bonhag as Alice our Protagonist who lived with dementia for close to two decades will tell us her story as you probably know Producing a full-length opera is a very expensive undertaking So I want to draw your attention to the baskets in the rear of the sanctuary If you like what you see this evening and want to support the opera going forward Please consider making a tax-deductible donation through the opera's fiscal sponsor, which is the Monteverdi music school Everyone involved in the production. Thanks you and finally We hope you will all stick around after the performance for a panel discussion with the performers Dana and Eric will be happy to answer any questions you may have and then the traditional Invocations of any event like this Take out your cell phone take a good look at it. Will it remain quiet through the whole performance? The there are two exits the one you came in Emergency exit back here Please keep your mask on for the entire performance and forth Dana and Erica fast asked me to read this a statement about The Abenaki land that we all are on which is becoming I think more and more a standard practice in Vermont venues We want to honor the legacy of Vermont's indigenous people The Abenaki people of the dawn who have cared for this land for generations and continue to do so We recognize the colonialism and the oppression of native peoples are a current and ongoing process And we commit to building our awareness of our present participation We pay our respects to the elders past and present We honor with deep gratitude this land and all it gives us and now Please enjoy this preview of Alice I'mers a chamber opera as the curtain rises on broccoli Good evening. I'm Eric Nielsen and before I say anything else. I have a number of thank-yous to me Thanks to Bethany Church for allowing us to hold our event here Thanks to Tobin Anderson for hosting Many thanks to those who donated To make this evening possible Special thanks to Marion Allison for bringing our words and music to life And of course, thank you all for coming Together Dana and I created the opera Alice I'mers based on Dana's graphic memoir of the same name about her life with her mother Alice and dementia After the successful second run of my first opera a fleeting animal in 2015 I knew I wanted to write another work in the genre Something that had social relevance, but was very different from a fleeting animal. I Thought of creating a vehicle for a single singer namely Mary But even after she agreed I couldn't find a suitable subject until my wife Jackie suggested I check into Dana's work Once I saw the description of her memoir Alice I'mers on her website And we went from there Often the arc of an opera is chronological and generally speaking that's also true with Alice I'mers But the first act is anything but that as we follow Alice's present tense from today to her childhood to her dreams to her fantasies To her realization that she can no longer live with her daughter The second act then follows her seven-year journey in care to the end of her life Tonight you'll see about half the work With scenes from Act 1 and Act 2 While there is only piano accompaniment this evening in a full production There will be an ensemble of ten instruments and on stage along with Alice will be a silent actor dancer Who will take on several parts during the course of the opera? We're delighted that Crystal Brown will be taking that role Working with Dana's libretto and Alice's story has been a wonderful challenge for me And I'm so grateful that I can be here tonight To share a first glimpse of the fruits of our labor with all of you Thank you. I hope you enjoy the rest of the evening and here's Dana Mary Thank you and thank all of you for coming out tonight When Eric approached me about the opera I had to say yes Alice loved opera for her opera was a way into the American dream The brown daughter of refugees of the Armenian Genocide young Alice first listened to Saturday afternoons Metropolitan opera radio broadcasts while she was cleaning other people's New York City apartments For the rest of her life. She tuned in each week She and my father Dave had a subscription and when Dave couldn't make it on account of work I was the kid who went in his place Now the opera like the first book which I have the first book and a sequel which is a work in progress Replace and the opera yes Replace the flattened dementia story of loss and fear and stigma and shame With one that restores the humanity of people living with dementia Now what better way to do this than to tell the story let Alice tell the story And this is what Eric envisioned and I just thought wow gotta do this now Together we get to show the magic and the healing and the laughter that's possible in the midst of loss Now before you get too worried about the magic part. Let me tell you what I mean by magic magic is mysterious Naturally occurring phenomena, which so far at any rate has eluded scientific inquiry Love is magic music is magic and so is story and opera has it all Now Alice's story is universal. We're born. We live we die But if we're lucky along the way we also heal so what's healing? Healing is being seen and being heard of being loved and loving others of letting our current collective memories mean It's for giving others and it's for giving ourselves and The story of this opera is Alice's use of dementia to heal Now because tonight we're only presenting selections and the opera of course is a whole story We have to ground you along the way So for the rest of the evening, I'm gonna come in between The different beautiful music and give you excerpts from the book or the sequel or the libretto To fill in gaps and to pull you forward in the story In the next scene mama no Alice works through the shame and the guilt that she felt toward your younger brother on honey Who is named for a general adorned by his big sister Rose and was born with an extra chromosome 21 Now before dementia, I only knew that I had an uncle with Down syndrome. I Didn't even know his name. That's how great Alice's shame was. I Knew that he had died young the third of Papa's son to meet death at a tender age The other two were among the 1.5 million Armenians who perished in the genocide Now Alice said that Papa was never happy with his daughters She said when you said he would be like why are they the ones that were survived instead of the sons But during dementia Alice told me what she really felt she said when mama and Rose Mop the floor. It was my job to mind him on the street corner People stared and called of names like they did on the bus and I was glad when he was gone The young bird Lancaster together on the ship or the island hints of another bird Lancaster beach scene Seemed to linger about her after they let her go famished They're sent filling the air You live here. It's pretty Cows and fresh young cats chopped the green grass down to tusks in fenced fields Hey Alice put her hand on my shoulder Promise me you'll do something else when it gets too hard Wondering how stand in case she was hungry two scenes to close this evening though Not to end the opera which has a few scenes more will run without any narration between them just a musical interlude Together they honor the Extraordinary care work done in this country Primarily by black and brown people many of whom are new Americans from the global south who up in Burlington Greeted Alice like this. Hey mama These two scenes show the love flexibility Generosity and creativity these cares bring daily to their essential work