September 14, 2025 • 30 mins
Pastor and author Phill Tague joins Bleeding Daylight to share his powerful journey from legalistic Christianity through rebellion and crisis to authentic covenant faith. After growing up in a loving but rule-focused Christian home, Phill experienced a profound spiritual awakening that transformed his understanding of what it means to truly know Jesus. His story includes a life-threatening climbing accident that crystallized his surrender to God's purposes and led to planting Ransom Church.
In this vulnerable conversation, Phill challenges listeners to move beyond what he calls "spiritual pornography" - the airbrushed version of Christianity that promises intimacy without cost. Using his 24-year marriage as an analogy, he explores how genuine love for God naturally leads to obedience, not as rule-following but as a response to relationship. His book "Jesus Be the Centerfold: Choosing Covenant Faith Over Airbrush Christianity" offers a provocative look at authentic faith that will challenge both longtime believers and those disillusioned with church culture.
WEBLINKS Phill Tague’s Website Jesus Be the Centerfold on Amazon Ransom Church
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thank you so much for listening to Bleeding Daylight today.
You can explore more inspiring episodes at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:29):
And I'd be so grateful if you'd help spread these stories of hope by sharing Bleeding Daylight with others.
No one wants to settle for a fake or forgery, yet my guest today believes that many of us have signed up for a counterfeit faith.
Could we be missing a depth and authenticity by following the Jesus we think we know?
(00:53):
Let's explore that question together.
There's something really powerful about meeting someone who's walked through the fire and come out with a story that can light the way for others.
My guest today, Phill Tague, has one of those stories.
(01:13):
From growing up in a well-meaning but legalistic Christian home through a season of rebellion and questioning, to a life-changing climbing accident that crystallized his understanding of surrender and covenant with God.
As a pastor, husband of 24 years, father of three, and church planter, Phill has wrestled deeply with what it means to move beyond what he calls spiritual pornography, that airbrushed version of Christianity that promises intimacy without cost, towards something real, raw, and transformative.
(01:46):
His book challenges Christians to discover what true covenant relationship with Jesus actually looks like.
Phill, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
It's such a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Let's jump back quite a few years.
Tell me about the early years for you.
What did faith look like for you growing up?
So I am one of four kids in a family, all adopted.
(02:08):
My dad was a Navy guy.
My adopted mom was Japanese.
We were raised in the church, and I would describe my parents as incredibly loving, incredibly well-meaning, incredibly well-purposed, and my dad in particular, incredibly legalistic.
And by that, I mean, do as I say, not as I do.
(02:29):
He had a real desire to see us know Jesus, live out our faith, but it was just so lost in an expectation that he had on us, but not backed up with his action.
That really described my home growing up.
We're always dealing with what we know to that point.
And in that case, your dad was dealing with what he knew of the faith and dealing with it the best that he could.
(02:50):
As you say, it was a loving home, so you didn't miss out there.
But it does always taint our idea of faith.
So maybe you can fast forward us and tell me what it was that started to change your idea of faith.
Did you embrace faith initially and move away from it, or how did that journey go for you?
I always embraced the idea of faith.
(03:12):
There was something intriguing about faith, about Jesus.
Even as a child, I wanted to want him more.
I wanted to know him more.
So I had this internal wrestling match between this Jesus I was hearing taught about and preached, and then what I was trying to live out in a legalistic way in my home, what I was trying to follow my dad's leading, my dad's rules.
(03:35):
And so I had sort of an internal struggle going on pretty much through my entire childhood, growing up years, that really culminated in me with a call to ministry.
I didn't know what to do with a call to ministry that, on the one hand, was something I so desired and was so intrigued to follow God more deeply.
But on the other hand, I had all these pictures in my head of what a pastor was, and I didn't want to be that.
(03:59):
I didn't own an Argyle sweater.
I didn't own penny loafers.
I wasn't married to the church organist.
And so I just found myself going, what does it mean to even be called?
And that really, really culminated in my freshman year of college where I went to college to study for ministry and at the same time was sort of collecting a list of information of why every Christian I knew was a hypocrite.
(04:21):
And I was simultaneously chasing my call and running from my call all at the same time.
That led to a real crisis of faith at the end of that year where I just decided I was done and I was walking away.
I ran pretty hard for a while until I actually had an encounter with the Holy Spirit that transformed my life and moved me from a faith I could manage, a list I could follow, to actually starting a relationship with this God-man Jesus and discovering Him for who I now know Him to be.
(04:53):
And that was a pretty powerful journey in my life.
Following lists can obviously be a whole lot easier at times because we just say, okay, this is how I behave and we just follow along.
And yet we all know that we never quite live up to that list anyway.
But tell me about that encounter that disrupted that list keeping, that encounter with the Holy Spirit.
(05:16):
What actually happened?
I suppose I just ran to all the things that I had been told were not on the list.
They were the things that good Christians don't do.
My dad used to say, we don't smoke, we don't chew, and we don't run with girls who do.
So I had this picture in my head of what are the things I was told not to do, and I'm going to look for myself there.
I lost my virginity.
(05:36):
I got involved in drugs and just experimenting with a lot of things.
And I spent that summer sort of searching for answers.
I remember one night in particular coming home from a party.
I don't remember how I got home.
I woke up the next morning and I'm in my parents' home.
I'm in my room and there's all these people asleep all over my room and I don't remember half of them.
(05:59):
The whole thing was just bizarre.
And I remember feeling very, very empty.
And knowing in that moment that what I was looking for wasn't found in the journey that I was on.
There are a few times in my life where I can say I felt like the Holy Spirit spoke to me, just spoke a sentence to me and said, you think the answer to hypocrisy is hypocrisy?
(06:24):
That's interesting.
And that was it.
I laid there and I realized I had used my list to point the finger at everyone else.
I had used my list.
I measured myself against other people, but I'd never really held myself up to Jesus.
And when we do that, we fall woefully short and all we can do is fall in the grace of Almighty God.
(06:48):
And I just felt this sense of what would my faith look like if instead of trying to earn it, instead of trying to follow a list of rules, I just actually got to know this man, Jesus.
What would my faith look like if I just actually went all in with heart, soul, mind on who he was?
And that moment transformed my life.
(07:09):
That's the moment I can look back to and say, I got back on track with my call.
I got back on track with my faith.
I began to pursue Jesus for who he was and to understand that if this thing was going to work, it was going to be me adjusting to him and not the other way around.
It wasn't going to be any version of Jesus I wanted to worship.
It was going to be a refining of my life.
(07:31):
From there, I took a few months, got myself back together, went back, studied for ministry.
And the rest of my life story, some of what you share in the introduction, is a result of that moment, that kind of watershed moment in my life.
There is that constant paradox, that balance that we walk, of wanting to press into relationship.
And often people will say, oh, Christianity is not a religion.
(07:53):
It's a relationship.
And we know that to be true, that it is that relationship with Jesus.
But we also know that that results in different behavior.
But just following the rules for behavior are never going to get us there.
So talk us through a bit of that balance of how do we actually press into Jesus and see the behavior, so to speak, springing out of that, knowing that Christianity is not a behavioral modification program.
(08:23):
It is actually that relationship.
But it should be changing our heart, shouldn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
Probably the best analogy I think scripture gives us, and certainly the best analogy in my own life is just my marriage to my wife Stephanie of 24 years.
I can say without a doubt when I fell in love with her, I fell with my whole heart.
I can say that when I was dating her, I loved her with my whole heart.
(08:46):
I can say when I married her, the day I married her, I loved her with my whole heart.
And now almost 25 years in, I love her with my whole heart.
But that statement doesn't mean the same thing.
Because when I married her, I loved her with my whole heart, but my heart for her wasn't very big.
It was growing, but there was still a lot of me.
There was still a lot of selfishness.
And 24 years of commitment has been a refiner's fire.
(09:08):
I loved her with my whole heart, but man, this thing's annoying.
Or I loved her with my whole heart, but I don't like her expectation about that.
24 years in, my natural instinct is what's going to serve her, what's going to please her, how would she feel about this?
And she does the same thing for me.
Loving her with my whole heart means so much more.
And now 24 years in, it means, I got to tell you, a whole lot of rule following.
(09:31):
And not rules that she made for me, but standards I said, she deserves this.
I want to do these things because they honor her, they please her.
When I discovered my relationship with Jesus was that, that's what was so transformative.
All he's ever asked is that I love him with heart, soul, mind, strength.
That's all he's ever asked.
(09:53):
And that because I do that, I love others with that same type of love.
I've tried to do that.
I've strived to do that since that moment when he got ahold of me.
But how I do that now means so much more than it did then.
And there are so many things I do to follow Jesus because I'm like, man, I love him so much.
I just want to do everything I know honors him.
(10:13):
I don't want to break his heart.
When I mess up, I am cut to the heart because I love him.
And so everything I do is a response of a deep love relationship that I developed by getting into scripture, by getting to know him more, by prayer and time alone with him to a point where obedience is a huge part of this relationship, but it's all a reaction to a relationship that I have and not a way to earn that relationship.
(10:39):
And that has been transformative.
Obviously no analogy is perfect, but let's run that parallel a little further.
And we hear of people in marriage, for instance, who say, well, we just grew apart and we can see that same thing happening with a relationship with God.
And we're not asking people to stay in abusive relationships or anything like that.
(10:59):
But just generally when people say I grew apart means I stopped actually taking the time to see what my partner wanted.
Do you think that there's a parallel there to the way that some people, they talk about deconstructing faith or leaving the faith or walking away.
Is there a similarity there of people saying my needs weren't being met?
(11:22):
So I walked away.
Oh, absolutely.
In my book, I talk about so much of that weaves in this marriage idea.
And I really talk about the value of understanding what a covenant relationship with God means and how different faith is when we look at it as not a covenant, but as a contractual obligation.
(11:45):
So when people enter marriage as a contract, what they're saying is as long as you keep up your end of the deal, I'll keep up my end of the deal and this thing's going to work out.
And when we start to drift apart, we navigate that relationship as, okay, as long as you're doing the right thing, then I'll offer that back to you.
But if we don't go first and if we don't understand that what we're doing in marriage is covenanting not with our spouse, but with God on behalf of our spouse, God, I will not forsake this person.
(12:12):
And so we make these marriage vows for better or worse.
And every couple that I've ever done a wedding for, man, they love each other.
I see it in their eyes and they say, yes, for better or worse.
And they're thinking about better.
And then life offers them worse sometimes and that thing is tested, but they didn't get into a covenant.
They got into a contractual obligation.
(12:34):
And I think that we do that in our faith all the time.
Like one of the ways you know that is when you're not walking with God every day, hand in hand, but you call yourself faithful and then life happens and God, where were you?
God, why didn't you answer that prayer?
And we don't have a relationship to understand why he would or would not say yes or no to something.
We just have an expectation that if I'm in this relationship with you, you owe me this and that just doesn't work.
(13:01):
But that's where faith usually breaks down.
Faith is always found in desperation and it's always broken in hard times.
Those hard times should test our faith, should strengthen our faith, should cause us to lean in.
But if you haven't understood the relationship you're getting in, you'll lean out.
We see that in marriage and we see that reflected in this faith thing from beginning to end.
(13:21):
God describes himself as the groom and us as the bride.
And you can't read the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament without seeing a marriage relationship between God and his people and the covenant that they make and a covenant that they break and break and break.
And we continue to break and break and break because we aren't understanding the relationship we're being invited into.
(13:41):
You mentioned there hard times and I know that there was a particular hard time for you in a climbing accident.
Tell me a little about that.
Yes, that was another time where the Holy Spirit decided to speak to me and just give me a great sentence.
So I was a youth pastor.
We were working on a campground.
We were getting certified on the rock climbing wall and ropes course and all of that.
(14:02):
And we had finished our certification and there was a pulley broken on a 60 foot climbing wall.
So I climbed up to the top, I was roped in, I fixed the pulley and I went to rappel down on the front of the wall.
And I had one of those one in a million equipment failures and I fell 57 feet.
I broke my pelvis front and back, fractured the left side of my pelvis five times.
(14:26):
I should not have survived that accident.
But when I was falling, I only had two thoughts.
And I don't know how I even had two thoughts because it happened so fast.
But the first thought was, I'm glad I have life insurance.
I was thinking about my wife and my two kids at home and I was like, I'm dead.
So I'm glad they're taken care of.
The second thought, I felt like the Holy Spirit said, turn to the left and relax.
(14:50):
And I thought that seems weird but I mentally in my head did that.
And the guys there said it looked like I was falling and then someone just grabbed me and turned me over and I landed at an angle that broke me but allowed me to live.
There's no way I should have lived.
In fact, they came out of the ambulance with a body bag.
And when they found out I was alive, they kind of freaked out because they were like, we thought he was dead.
(15:12):
They weren't hurrying.
They weren't doing anything.
They got me to the hospital and I was laying there in and out of consciousness and I was praying, God, why would this happen?
It's funny that we asked that question because he never promised things would be perfect.
But why would this happen to me if you're a good guy?
And give me something to comfort me and praying for a scripture.
And the story that came to my mind was from, I believe, Luke chapter nine where the people ask, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?
(15:39):
And Jesus' answer was, no one sinned.
This happened that I might be glorified.
And that's another moment the Holy Spirit whispered to me and said, if I broke you and it's not about you, are you okay with that?
And that was when I realized that what Paul meant when he said, for me to live is Christ and to die is gain.
If I'm here breathing air on this planet, I'm here for his purposes.
(16:04):
If I die, I get to be with him.
And that's what this is all about.
The glory is all about here.
Part of the problem I think we run into is that we read those promises about eternity, but we claim them like earthly promises because we want God to turn earth into heaven.
And that's not what he promised.
He said, here on this world, you will have trouble.
Take heart, I've overcome the world.
(16:25):
And he just said to me in that moment, if I broke you and it's not about you, if I use this, are you okay with that?
And I had to say, yeah, my life is yours.
Every part of it, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, I'm yours.
And I'm telling you, he has used that so many times in my life, starting with a nurse in the hospital room that I got to share my faith with and ending with the church that I now pastor that would not exist had I not gone on that journey.
(16:50):
I can look back now with some perspective and go, had I not fallen that day, I never would have planted Ransom Church.
I wouldn't have been the right person.
I wouldn't have been refined the right way.
I wouldn't have had the right conversations.
And so I can look back in perspective and go, yeah, God, you can break me.
When we look at the sort of gospels that are preached, we hear about the prosperity gospel.
(17:14):
And there seems to be two sorts of that.
There is the one that most of us would just immediately deny, which is that God wants us to be filthy rich and have every physical blessing, all the stuff.
And we immediately say, no, no, that's not what God is promising.
But there's another, I guess, a sneakier prosperity gospel, and that's what you're hinting at there, that we get this idea that if we follow the rules, if we follow God's rules, then he's going to give us a sweet ride for the rest of our lives, that there's not going to be any trouble.
(17:45):
And so when things like this happen, we start to question our faith.
But it was never a faith that was promised.
How do we walk that balance?
How do we start to notice those things within ourselves that are a false gospel that we've actually told ourselves and sometimes even other people have told us?
I think the primary thing, the primary factor is we have to get into God's Word.
(18:09):
When you read God's Word, it does not back up those promises.
When you read God's Word and you don't edit it for content, so to speak, when you just read it, sure, you're going to read, I will never leave you.
I will never forsake you.
You're going to read scriptures like that, but you're also going to read, whoever wants me needs to deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.
(18:32):
And you'll read both of those things and realize it's part of your story.
You're going to read Jeremiah 29 11, for I know the plans I have for you, but you're going to read it within the context of Jeremiah 29, which is some pretty tragic stuff.
And God's saying, hey, settle down and you're going to be in exile for 70 years, buddy.
But even in exile, I have plans for you.
(18:54):
And the problem is we just proof texts and we take things out that we want to hear.
And we create this airbrushed version of faith and of Jesus and of Christianity that works for me.
And then we're surprised when a God that doesn't exist disappoints us.
If we would just learn to know the God who does exist, we could choose him.
(19:17):
You could choose or reject him, but at least we'd be choosing or rejecting him for who scripture says he actually is.
I think number one is getting into scripture and not making excuses.
Like if you don't understand something, find someone who knows more than you and talk to them about it.
Get into Bible study, find a local church, plug into a community.
Those things are so important because of what they do in the formation of our faith, in the formation of our understanding of who God is.
(19:44):
And so we see political versions of this where it's like, you know, if God was good, why is my political party, you know, we got to get this political party back in and then that'll solve the faith thing.
We see death.
Everybody struggles with death.
But as far as I can tell, everybody dies, like everybody.
And we know it happens and we know it's coming.
And yet when it happens, why did it happen to me?
(20:06):
Because my version of God would never allow for this.
And if you want that version of God tested, all you have to do is read the scriptures.
So there is this version of God that we're happy to put on these beautiful posters that you can find in your Christian bookstore with all the mountains in the background and those beautiful promises.
But obviously what you're saying is we need to dig deeper to get the whole picture.
(20:26):
And that's really the spark for your book, isn't it?
Absolutely.
I never set out to write a book, but when I wrestled with that and when I felt like this is what the Holy Spirit's telling me to do, there was no question what the book was going to be about.
In fact, I would say I didn't as much write it as the Holy Spirit wrote it through me and it kind of wrote itself because this has sort of been not a soapbox, but kind of a platform issue for me for a long time of we have to, and churches are so guilty of presenting a palatable version of Jesus.
(20:59):
But if we call people into a faith in a God that doesn't exist and then he fails them, why are we surprised when they fall away?
That became a catalyst for when I knew the Holy Spirit was wanting me to write a book, why I wrote the book that I did and why I even titled it the way I titled it and approached it the way I did.
I wrote my book with two target audiences.
(21:21):
One of them was Christians who go to church, but they've experienced real life and they found themselves going, there's got to be more.
I can't reconcile what I'm seeing in church and especially the American church with what's happening in my life and with the Jesus of scriptures.
The second audience was for all those non-Christians who might read the book and go, that's exactly been my problem with the church, but you're telling me Jesus isn't like that?
(21:45):
I want to know that Jesus.
So it was my opportunity to try to introduce the world to Jesus as he really is and let them choose for themselves.
You've chosen a fairly provocative title.
Maybe you can give us the full version of the title of the book.
The original working title was Spiritual Pornography, which you mentioned earlier.
The title we landed on is Jesus Be the Centerfold.
(22:09):
If you were looking at an image of the cover, you'd see that the last four letters are crossed out, so it says Jesus Be the Center.
That idea of centerfold airbrush Jesus, the subtitle is Choosing Covenant Faith Over Airbrush Christianity.
I use a metaphor that's very, very real to me.
I was exposed to pornography at nine years old, and it got its hooks in me, and it got its hooks in me deep.
(22:31):
It will always be something that is a temptation that I battle with, but it owned me for a while, even when I was studying for ministry.
It wasn't until that reckoning moment I had with the Holy Spirit that I went, this might be something I battle, but this is not going to be who I am.
I got to get past this.
What I realized in that journey and what I write about in the book is that I don't think the real issue with pornography is lust.
(22:53):
I think the real issue with pornography is control.
I think that we want intimacy without the cost of intimacy.
We want something that looks like intimacy without the cost of a relationship, of doing the hard thing, of the ugly moments that are part of any real relationship.
(23:13):
We want all the airbrush moments and none of the ugly ones.
We want the Instagram relationship and not the real one.
I thought, what a perfect metaphor for what we have done to Christianity.
We have created a version of Jesus that is a pinup airbrush version that we can swipe right on and say, this is great.
I'll keep walking with that type of Jesus, because we want the intimacy of a covenant, but we don't want to do the work of a covenantal relationship.
(23:39):
That's ultimately what the book is about.
While it uses that analogy, you're not saying that this is an anti-porn book as such, but it's anti-anything that draws us away from Jesus.
You mentioned earlier drugs, and we're after that quick high.
We want the control of that quick high.
There's various things throughout our life that we can use as a substitute for the deeper understanding of who Jesus is.
(24:03):
I imagine there's quite a wide range of people that will gravitate towards this book and discover a Jesus they never knew.
Even people that have perhaps, as you say, been in church for many years, that they will discover a depth to Jesus, a satisfaction in Jesus that they never knew, if they're prepared to do the hard yards of entering that covenant.
(24:25):
Is that right?
Absolutely.
Yeah, you're right.
It's not your typical, I struggled with porn and then I got away.
That's not what it is.
The pornography thing was my metaphor, but it was just some common language that we could use to say, hey, we all compromise on something, and we're all looking for a control that's not ours, and we're all struggling with surrender.
Some of the people who have read it that are friends of mine, I think of one gal, she's probably, I'd say 80.
(24:50):
I've known her for 27 years, and she said, your book messed me up.
And I thought, oh no, I've hurt this old saint of the church.
And she said, no, no, I've been a Christian my whole life.
I'm not doubting that.
I've just settled for so much less than all of him, and I have some real work to do.
I want to know this Jesus in that deeper way.
And that's somebody who's lived her whole life in the church, and she's upset because there was so much more to the relationship, and she had just settled for so much less.
(25:17):
She was heartbroken, and she said, I want to know that Jesus that way.
That's what I want more than anything.
And you're telling me that after all these years, there's more to Jesus, and I didn't even know, and I just can't wait to get to know him.
That's why I wrote the book.
I wish every Christian would read it.
If I could have every Christian read it, I think it would just set them free to be who God made them to be, to know him more intimately than they'd ever known him.
(25:40):
And even if they're already saved, they would go, but I didn't know there was more, and I'm so excited there's so much more.
It's sort of like when people watch The Chosen, and they go, I didn't know Jesus was like that.
That's what this book is.
It's a space for people to go, there's so much more to Jesus, and I can't wait to discover him.
I know that this book is not the gospel of Phill Tague.
It's not something that I need to get this out to people.
(26:03):
People need to know what I believe.
And in fact, there's a great story of how you wrestled with the idea of writing the book, even using a language course, God was tapping you on the shoulder and saying, no, no, you really need to write this.
Maybe you can tell us that story.
Yeah, I'd love to.
I've been pastoring the same church.
I planted the church, my wife and I, in 2009.
(26:24):
After 15 years, 16 years of being somewhere, you have a lot of people who really like how you preach, and they want to be there, and they're really bought in.
And people would say to me, oh man, you should write a book.
And I would say, what would I write a book about?
And I didn't even want to be a pastor who wrote a book.
I'm not into the whole celebrity pastor thing.
I just didn't want any of that.
And so I kind of fought it.
(26:44):
Before long, I realized I wasn't as much fighting the people as I was fighting this whisper of the Holy Spirit that was saying, you should write this book.
You need to write this book.
And that sort of came to a head one day where I'm a kind of stubborn guy, and I was just like, I think you want me to write a book, but no, I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to do it.
And about five minutes later, I got a text from a gal in my church, and she said, I don't usually do this, but I feel like the Holy Spirit was telling me to ask you if you're writing a book.
(27:13):
And I said, Dana, you have no idea how crazy that is.
I told her the story.
Well, as that day went on, three, and then four, and then five, and then six times, different things happened that day that were the Holy Spirit going, you need to write a book.
And I still had the audacity to say, you know, I'm going to sleep on it.
So I slept on it, and I woke up the next day, and every morning for about two years now, maybe over two years, I've been using Duolingo to work on my Spanish because we do missions work in Spanish-speaking countries, and I want to be able to honor people with their home language and things like that.
(27:46):
So I'm working on my Spanish, and I wake up the next morning, and I'm doing my lesson, and the app literally said, translate these sentences.
We should write a book together.
Are we writing a book?
Let's write a book this summer.
And I went, okay, Holy Spirit, you got me.
I'm in.
You're using Duolingo.
I'm in.
And I set aside some time, and the intro in chapter one of this book literally came out as one Holy Spirit thought, and I went, oh, I think I'm writing a book.
(28:13):
And that's how this came about.
I know that we can look to people who have written books or who are preaching who have that sort of platform, and we can imagine a bit like a TV show where everything's neatly wrapped up at the end of the half hour or the hour, and so we can be tempted to believe, hey, Phill now has it all together.
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He has a perfect relationship with Jesus, and life is just going along swimmingly.
That's not what you're offering, is it?
No.
In fact, if you read this book, you're going to read a lot of my story.
Writing this book is one of the most vulnerable things I've ever done.
The number one thing I've been thanked for is the challenge.
The number two thing I've been thanked for is the vulnerability.
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So if you read this book, you're going to go, this guy's kind of a mess, and that continues to be true.
I serve a really gracious God who loves me, a wife that I can be honest with, that I built a relationship I can be honest with.
I am a much godlier man than I was in my 20s, but I've still got work to do.
I'm still growing, and I'm grateful every day for His grace.
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And so this is 10 easy steps for how you can be holy like me.
If that's what you want, this is not the book for you.
But if you want a book that says, you can be who you are, and God is thrilled with that, He wants to set you free to be who He made you to be, and He wants to invite you into something deeper than you've ever known, that's what this book is about.
It's not a step-by-step guide to a perfect life, but it is an invitation into a deeper walk with Jesus.
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And I think the story of that lady in your congregation probably is one that is helpful for us.
We don't want to get towards the end of our days and say, I wish I'd known earlier that there was more to this relationship, and that I've missed out on it for so many years.
And so I do have a link to the book and to your website in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net.
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But I just want to say, thank you so much for writing this book, for being vulnerable, and thank you for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
It's been an absolute joy to be here.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(30:25):
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thank you so much for listening to Bleeding Daylight today.
You can explore more inspiring episodes at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:29):
And I'd be so grateful if you'd help spread these stories of hope by sharing Bleeding Daylight with others.
No one wants to settle for a fake or forgery, yet my guest today believes that many of us have signed up for a counterfeit faith.
Could we be missing a depth and authenticity by following the Jesus we think we know?
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Let's explore that question together.
There's something really powerful about meeting someone who's walked through the fire and come out with a story that can light the way for others.
My guest today, Phill Tague, has one of those stories.
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From growing up in a well-meaning but legalistic Christian home through a season of rebellion and questioning, to a life-changing climbing accident that crystallized his understanding of surrender and covenant with God.
As a pastor, husband of 24 years, father of three, and church planter, Phill has wrestled deeply with what it means to move beyond what he calls spiritual pornography, that airbrushed version of Christianity that promises intimacy without cost, towards something real, raw, and transformative.
(01:46):
His book challenges Christians to discover what true covenant relationship with Jesus actually looks like.
Phill, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
It's such a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Let's jump back quite a few years.
Tell me about the early years for you.
What did faith look like for you growing up?
So I am one of four kids in a family, all adopted.
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My dad was a Navy guy.
My adopted mom was Japanese.
We were raised in the church, and I would describe my parents as incredibly loving, incredibly well-meaning, incredibly well-purposed, and my dad in particular, incredibly legalistic.
And by that, I mean, do as I say, not as I do.
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He had a real desire to see us know Jesus, live out our faith, but it was just so lost in an expectation that he had on us, but not backed up with his action.
That really described my home growing up.
We're always dealing with what we know to that point.
And in that case, your dad was dealing with what he knew of the faith and dealing with it the best that he could.
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As you say, it was a loving home, so you didn't miss out there.
But it does always taint our idea of faith.
So maybe you can fast forward us and tell me what it was that started to change your idea of faith.
Did you embrace faith initially and move away from it, or how did that journey go for you?
I always embraced the idea of faith.
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There was something intriguing about faith, about Jesus.
Even as a child, I wanted to want him more.
I wanted to know him more.
So I had this internal wrestling match between this Jesus I was hearing taught about and preached, and then what I was trying to live out in a legalistic way in my home, what I was trying to follow my dad's leading, my dad's rules.
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And so I had sort of an internal struggle going on pretty much through my entire childhood, growing up years, that really culminated in me with a call to ministry.
I didn't know what to do with a call to ministry that, on the one hand, was something I so desired and was so intrigued to follow God more deeply.
But on the other hand, I had all these pictures in my head of what a pastor was, and I didn't want to be that.
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I didn't own an Argyle sweater.
I didn't own penny loafers.
I wasn't married to the church organist.
And so I just found myself going, what does it mean to even be called?
And that really, really culminated in my freshman year of college where I went to college to study for ministry and at the same time was sort of collecting a list of information of why every Christian I knew was a hypocrite.
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And I was simultaneously chasing my call and running from my call all at the same time.
That led to a real crisis of faith at the end of that year where I just decided I was done and I was walking away.
I ran pretty hard for a while until I actually had an encounter with the Holy Spirit that transformed my life and moved me from a faith I could manage, a list I could follow, to actually starting a relationship with this God-man Jesus and discovering Him for who I now know Him to be.
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And that was a pretty powerful journey in my life.
Following lists can obviously be a whole lot easier at times because we just say, okay, this is how I behave and we just follow along.
And yet we all know that we never quite live up to that list anyway.
But tell me about that encounter that disrupted that list keeping, that encounter with the Holy Spirit.
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What actually happened?
I suppose I just ran to all the things that I had been told were not on the list.
They were the things that good Christians don't do.
My dad used to say, we don't smoke, we don't chew, and we don't run with girls who do.
So I had this picture in my head of what are the things I was told not to do, and I'm going to look for myself there.
I lost my virginity.
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I got involved in drugs and just experimenting with a lot of things.
And I spent that summer sort of searching for answers.
I remember one night in particular coming home from a party.
I don't remember how I got home.
I woke up the next morning and I'm in my parents' home.
I'm in my room and there's all these people asleep all over my room and I don't remember half of them.
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The whole thing was just bizarre.
And I remember feeling very, very empty.
And knowing in that moment that what I was looking for wasn't found in the journey that I was on.
There are a few times in my life where I can say I felt like the Holy Spirit spoke to me, just spoke a sentence to me and said, you think the answer to hypocrisy is hypocrisy?
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That's interesting.
And that was it.
I laid there and I realized I had used my list to point the finger at everyone else.
I had used my list.
I measured myself against other people, but I'd never really held myself up to Jesus.
And when we do that, we fall woefully short and all we can do is fall in the grace of Almighty God.
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And I just felt this sense of what would my faith look like if instead of trying to earn it, instead of trying to follow a list of rules, I just actually got to know this man, Jesus.
What would my faith look like if I just actually went all in with heart, soul, mind on who he was?
And that moment transformed my life.
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That's the moment I can look back to and say, I got back on track with my call.
I got back on track with my faith.
I began to pursue Jesus for who he was and to understand that if this thing was going to work, it was going to be me adjusting to him and not the other way around.
It wasn't going to be any version of Jesus I wanted to worship.
It was going to be a refining of my life.
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From there, I took a few months, got myself back together, went back, studied for ministry.
And the rest of my life story, some of what you share in the introduction, is a result of that moment, that kind of watershed moment in my life.
There is that constant paradox, that balance that we walk, of wanting to press into relationship.
And often people will say, oh, Christianity is not a religion.
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It's a relationship.
And we know that to be true, that it is that relationship with Jesus.
But we also know that that results in different behavior.
But just following the rules for behavior are never going to get us there.
So talk us through a bit of that balance of how do we actually press into Jesus and see the behavior, so to speak, springing out of that, knowing that Christianity is not a behavioral modification program.
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It is actually that relationship.
But it should be changing our heart, shouldn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
Probably the best analogy I think scripture gives us, and certainly the best analogy in my own life is just my marriage to my wife Stephanie of 24 years.
I can say without a doubt when I fell in love with her, I fell with my whole heart.
I can say that when I was dating her, I loved her with my whole heart.
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I can say when I married her, the day I married her, I loved her with my whole heart.
And now almost 25 years in, I love her with my whole heart.
But that statement doesn't mean the same thing.
Because when I married her, I loved her with my whole heart, but my heart for her wasn't very big.
It was growing, but there was still a lot of me.
There was still a lot of selfishness.
And 24 years of commitment has been a refiner's fire.
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I loved her with my whole heart, but man, this thing's annoying.
Or I loved her with my whole heart, but I don't like her expectation about that.
24 years in, my natural instinct is what's going to serve her, what's going to please her, how would she feel about this?
And she does the same thing for me.
Loving her with my whole heart means so much more.
And now 24 years in, it means, I got to tell you, a whole lot of rule following.
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And not rules that she made for me, but standards I said, she deserves this.
I want to do these things because they honor her, they please her.
When I discovered my relationship with Jesus was that, that's what was so transformative.
All he's ever asked is that I love him with heart, soul, mind, strength.
That's all he's ever asked.
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And that because I do that, I love others with that same type of love.
I've tried to do that.
I've strived to do that since that moment when he got ahold of me.
But how I do that now means so much more than it did then.
And there are so many things I do to follow Jesus because I'm like, man, I love him so much.
I just want to do everything I know honors him.
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I don't want to break his heart.
When I mess up, I am cut to the heart because I love him.
And so everything I do is a response of a deep love relationship that I developed by getting into scripture, by getting to know him more, by prayer and time alone with him to a point where obedience is a huge part of this relationship, but it's all a reaction to a relationship that I have and not a way to earn that relationship.
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And that has been transformative.
Obviously no analogy is perfect, but let's run that parallel a little further.
And we hear of people in marriage, for instance, who say, well, we just grew apart and we can see that same thing happening with a relationship with God.
And we're not asking people to stay in abusive relationships or anything like that.
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But just generally when people say I grew apart means I stopped actually taking the time to see what my partner wanted.
Do you think that there's a parallel there to the way that some people, they talk about deconstructing faith or leaving the faith or walking away.
Is there a similarity there of people saying my needs weren't being met?
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So I walked away.
Oh, absolutely.
In my book, I talk about so much of that weaves in this marriage idea.
And I really talk about the value of understanding what a covenant relationship with God means and how different faith is when we look at it as not a covenant, but as a contractual obligation.
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So when people enter marriage as a contract, what they're saying is as long as you keep up your end of the deal, I'll keep up my end of the deal and this thing's going to work out.
And when we start to drift apart, we navigate that relationship as, okay, as long as you're doing the right thing, then I'll offer that back to you.
But if we don't go first and if we don't understand that what we're doing in marriage is covenanting not with our spouse, but with God on behalf of our spouse, God, I will not forsake this person.
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And so we make these marriage vows for better or worse.
And every couple that I've ever done a wedding for, man, they love each other.
I see it in their eyes and they say, yes, for better or worse.
And they're thinking about better.
And then life offers them worse sometimes and that thing is tested, but they didn't get into a covenant.
They got into a contractual obligation.
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And I think that we do that in our faith all the time.
Like one of the ways you know that is when you're not walking with God every day, hand in hand, but you call yourself faithful and then life happens and God, where were you?
God, why didn't you answer that prayer?
And we don't have a relationship to understand why he would or would not say yes or no to something.
We just have an expectation that if I'm in this relationship with you, you owe me this and that just doesn't work.
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But that's where faith usually breaks down.
Faith is always found in desperation and it's always broken in hard times.
Those hard times should test our faith, should strengthen our faith, should cause us to lean in.
But if you haven't understood the relationship you're getting in, you'll lean out.
We see that in marriage and we see that reflected in this faith thing from beginning to end.
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God describes himself as the groom and us as the bride.
And you can't read the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament without seeing a marriage relationship between God and his people and the covenant that they make and a covenant that they break and break and break.
And we continue to break and break and break because we aren't understanding the relationship we're being invited into.
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You mentioned there hard times and I know that there was a particular hard time for you in a climbing accident.
Tell me a little about that.
Yes, that was another time where the Holy Spirit decided to speak to me and just give me a great sentence.
So I was a youth pastor.
We were working on a campground.
We were getting certified on the rock climbing wall and ropes course and all of that.
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And we had finished our certification and there was a pulley broken on a 60 foot climbing wall.
So I climbed up to the top, I was roped in, I fixed the pulley and I went to rappel down on the front of the wall.
And I had one of those one in a million equipment failures and I fell 57 feet.
I broke my pelvis front and back, fractured the left side of my pelvis five times.
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I should not have survived that accident.
But when I was falling, I only had two thoughts.
And I don't know how I even had two thoughts because it happened so fast.
But the first thought was, I'm glad I have life insurance.
I was thinking about my wife and my two kids at home and I was like, I'm dead.
So I'm glad they're taken care of.
The second thought, I felt like the Holy Spirit said, turn to the left and relax.
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And I thought that seems weird but I mentally in my head did that.
And the guys there said it looked like I was falling and then someone just grabbed me and turned me over and I landed at an angle that broke me but allowed me to live.
There's no way I should have lived.
In fact, they came out of the ambulance with a body bag.
And when they found out I was alive, they kind of freaked out because they were like, we thought he was dead.
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They weren't hurrying.
They weren't doing anything.
They got me to the hospital and I was laying there in and out of consciousness and I was praying, God, why would this happen?
It's funny that we asked that question because he never promised things would be perfect.
But why would this happen to me if you're a good guy?
And give me something to comfort me and praying for a scripture.
And the story that came to my mind was from, I believe, Luke chapter nine where the people ask, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?
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And Jesus' answer was, no one sinned.
This happened that I might be glorified.
And that's another moment the Holy Spirit whispered to me and said, if I broke you and it's not about you, are you okay with that?
And that was when I realized that what Paul meant when he said, for me to live is Christ and to die is gain.
If I'm here breathing air on this planet, I'm here for his purposes.
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If I die, I get to be with him.
And that's what this is all about.
The glory is all about here.
Part of the problem I think we run into is that we read those promises about eternity, but we claim them like earthly promises because we want God to turn earth into heaven.
And that's not what he promised.
He said, here on this world, you will have trouble.
Take heart, I've overcome the world.
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And he just said to me in that moment, if I broke you and it's not about you, if I use this, are you okay with that?
And I had to say, yeah, my life is yours.
Every part of it, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, I'm yours.
And I'm telling you, he has used that so many times in my life, starting with a nurse in the hospital room that I got to share my faith with and ending with the church that I now pastor that would not exist had I not gone on that journey.
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I can look back now with some perspective and go, had I not fallen that day, I never would have planted Ransom Church.
I wouldn't have been the right person.
I wouldn't have been refined the right way.
I wouldn't have had the right conversations.
And so I can look back in perspective and go, yeah, God, you can break me.
When we look at the sort of gospels that are preached, we hear about the prosperity gospel.
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And there seems to be two sorts of that.
There is the one that most of us would just immediately deny, which is that God wants us to be filthy rich and have every physical blessing, all the stuff.
And we immediately say, no, no, that's not what God is promising.
But there's another, I guess, a sneakier prosperity gospel, and that's what you're hinting at there, that we get this idea that if we follow the rules, if we follow God's rules, then he's going to give us a sweet ride for the rest of our lives, that there's not going to be any trouble.
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And so when things like this happen, we start to question our faith.
But it was never a faith that was promised.
How do we walk that balance?
How do we start to notice those things within ourselves that are a false gospel that we've actually told ourselves and sometimes even other people have told us?
I think the primary thing, the primary factor is we have to get into God's Word.
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When you read God's Word, it does not back up those promises.
When you read God's Word and you don't edit it for content, so to speak, when you just read it, sure, you're going to read, I will never leave you.
I will never forsake you.
You're going to read scriptures like that, but you're also going to read, whoever wants me needs to deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.
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And you'll read both of those things and realize it's part of your story.
You're going to read Jeremiah 29 11, for I know the plans I have for you, but you're going to read it within the context of Jeremiah 29, which is some pretty tragic stuff.
And God's saying, hey, settle down and you're going to be in exile for 70 years, buddy.
But even in exile, I have plans for you.
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And the problem is we just proof texts and we take things out that we want to hear.
And we create this airbrushed version of faith and of Jesus and of Christianity that works for me.
And then we're surprised when a God that doesn't exist disappoints us.
If we would just learn to know the God who does exist, we could choose him.
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You could choose or reject him, but at least we'd be choosing or rejecting him for who scripture says he actually is.
I think number one is getting into scripture and not making excuses.
Like if you don't understand something, find someone who knows more than you and talk to them about it.
Get into Bible study, find a local church, plug into a community.
Those things are so important because of what they do in the formation of our faith, in the formation of our understanding of who God is.
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And so we see political versions of this where it's like, you know, if God was good, why is my political party, you know, we got to get this political party back in and then that'll solve the faith thing.
We see death.
Everybody struggles with death.
But as far as I can tell, everybody dies, like everybody.
And we know it happens and we know it's coming.
And yet when it happens, why did it happen to me?
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Because my version of God would never allow for this.
And if you want that version of God tested, all you have to do is read the scriptures.
So there is this version of God that we're happy to put on these beautiful posters that you can find in your Christian bookstore with all the mountains in the background and those beautiful promises.
But obviously what you're saying is we need to dig deeper to get the whole picture.
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And that's really the spark for your book, isn't it?
Absolutely.
I never set out to write a book, but when I wrestled with that and when I felt like this is what the Holy Spirit's telling me to do, there was no question what the book was going to be about.
In fact, I would say I didn't as much write it as the Holy Spirit wrote it through me and it kind of wrote itself because this has sort of been not a soapbox, but kind of a platform issue for me for a long time of we have to, and churches are so guilty of presenting a palatable version of Jesus.
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But if we call people into a faith in a God that doesn't exist and then he fails them, why are we surprised when they fall away?
That became a catalyst for when I knew the Holy Spirit was wanting me to write a book, why I wrote the book that I did and why I even titled it the way I titled it and approached it the way I did.
I wrote my book with two target audiences.
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One of them was Christians who go to church, but they've experienced real life and they found themselves going, there's got to be more.
I can't reconcile what I'm seeing in church and especially the American church with what's happening in my life and with the Jesus of scriptures.
The second audience was for all those non-Christians who might read the book and go, that's exactly been my problem with the church, but you're telling me Jesus isn't like that?
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I want to know that Jesus.
So it was my opportunity to try to introduce the world to Jesus as he really is and let them choose for themselves.
You've chosen a fairly provocative title.
Maybe you can give us the full version of the title of the book.
The original working title was Spiritual Pornography, which you mentioned earlier.
The title we landed on is Jesus Be the Centerfold.
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If you were looking at an image of the cover, you'd see that the last four letters are crossed out, so it says Jesus Be the Center.
That idea of centerfold airbrush Jesus, the subtitle is Choosing Covenant Faith Over Airbrush Christianity.
I use a metaphor that's very, very real to me.
I was exposed to pornography at nine years old, and it got its hooks in me, and it got its hooks in me deep.
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It will always be something that is a temptation that I battle with, but it owned me for a while, even when I was studying for ministry.
It wasn't until that reckoning moment I had with the Holy Spirit that I went, this might be something I battle, but this is not going to be who I am.
I got to get past this.
What I realized in that journey and what I write about in the book is that I don't think the real issue with pornography is lust.
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I think the real issue with pornography is control.
I think that we want intimacy without the cost of intimacy.
We want something that looks like intimacy without the cost of a relationship, of doing the hard thing, of the ugly moments that are part of any real relationship.
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We want all the airbrush moments and none of the ugly ones.
We want the Instagram relationship and not the real one.
I thought, what a perfect metaphor for what we have done to Christianity.
We have created a version of Jesus that is a pinup airbrush version that we can swipe right on and say, this is great.
I'll keep walking with that type of Jesus, because we want the intimacy of a covenant, but we don't want to do the work of a covenantal relationship.
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That's ultimately what the book is about.
While it uses that analogy, you're not saying that this is an anti-porn book as such, but it's anti-anything that draws us away from Jesus.
You mentioned earlier drugs, and we're after that quick high.
We want the control of that quick high.
There's various things throughout our life that we can use as a substitute for the deeper understanding of who Jesus is.
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I imagine there's quite a wide range of people that will gravitate towards this book and discover a Jesus they never knew.
Even people that have perhaps, as you say, been in church for many years, that they will discover a depth to Jesus, a satisfaction in Jesus that they never knew, if they're prepared to do the hard yards of entering that covenant.
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Is that right?
Absolutely.
Yeah, you're right.
It's not your typical, I struggled with porn and then I got away.
That's not what it is.
The pornography thing was my metaphor, but it was just some common language that we could use to say, hey, we all compromise on something, and we're all looking for a control that's not ours, and we're all struggling with surrender.
Some of the people who have read it that are friends of mine, I think of one gal, she's probably, I'd say 80.
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I've known her for 27 years, and she said, your book messed me up.
And I thought, oh no, I've hurt this old saint of the church.
And she said, no, no, I've been a Christian my whole life.
I'm not doubting that.
I've just settled for so much less than all of him, and I have some real work to do.
I want to know this Jesus in that deeper way.
And that's somebody who's lived her whole life in the church, and she's upset because there was so much more to the relationship, and she had just settled for so much less.
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She was heartbroken, and she said, I want to know that Jesus that way.
That's what I want more than anything.
And you're telling me that after all these years, there's more to Jesus, and I didn't even know, and I just can't wait to get to know him.
That's why I wrote the book.
I wish every Christian would read it.
If I could have every Christian read it, I think it would just set them free to be who God made them to be, to know him more intimately than they'd ever known him.
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And even if they're already saved, they would go, but I didn't know there was more, and I'm so excited there's so much more.
It's sort of like when people watch The Chosen, and they go, I didn't know Jesus was like that.
That's what this book is.
It's a space for people to go, there's so much more to Jesus, and I can't wait to discover him.
I know that this book is not the gospel of Phill Tague.
It's not something that I need to get this out to people.
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People need to know what I believe.
And in fact, there's a great story of how you wrestled with the idea of writing the book, even using a language course, God was tapping you on the shoulder and saying, no, no, you really need to write this.
Maybe you can tell us that story.
Yeah, I'd love to.
I've been pastoring the same church.
I planted the church, my wife and I, in 2009.
(26:24):
After 15 years, 16 years of being somewhere, you have a lot of people who really like how you preach, and they want to be there, and they're really bought in.
And people would say to me, oh man, you should write a book.
And I would say, what would I write a book about?
And I didn't even want to be a pastor who wrote a book.
I'm not into the whole celebrity pastor thing.
I just didn't want any of that.
And so I kind of fought it.
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Before long, I realized I wasn't as much fighting the people as I was fighting this whisper of the Holy Spirit that was saying, you should write this book.
You need to write this book.
And that sort of came to a head one day where I'm a kind of stubborn guy, and I was just like, I think you want me to write a book, but no, I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to do it.
And about five minutes later, I got a text from a gal in my church, and she said, I don't usually do this, but I feel like the Holy Spirit was telling me to ask you if you're writing a book.
(27:13):
And I said, Dana, you have no idea how crazy that is.
I told her the story.
Well, as that day went on, three, and then four, and then five, and then six times, different things happened that day that were the Holy Spirit going, you need to write a book.
And I still had the audacity to say, you know, I'm going to sleep on it.
So I slept on it, and I woke up the next day, and every morning for about two years now, maybe over two years, I've been using Duolingo to work on my Spanish because we do missions work in Spanish-speaking countries, and I want to be able to honor people with their home language and things like that.
(27:46):
So I'm working on my Spanish, and I wake up the next morning, and I'm doing my lesson, and the app literally said, translate these sentences.
We should write a book together.
Are we writing a book?
Let's write a book this summer.
And I went, okay, Holy Spirit, you got me.
I'm in.
You're using Duolingo.
I'm in.
And I set aside some time, and the intro in chapter one of this book literally came out as one Holy Spirit thought, and I went, oh, I think I'm writing a book.
(28:13):
And that's how this came about.
I know that we can look to people who have written books or who are preaching who have that sort of platform, and we can imagine a bit like a TV show where everything's neatly wrapped up at the end of the half hour or the hour, and so we can be tempted to believe, hey, Phill now has it all together.
(28:33):
He has a perfect relationship with Jesus, and life is just going along swimmingly.
That's not what you're offering, is it?
No.
In fact, if you read this book, you're going to read a lot of my story.
Writing this book is one of the most vulnerable things I've ever done.
The number one thing I've been thanked for is the challenge.
The number two thing I've been thanked for is the vulnerability.
(28:54):
So if you read this book, you're going to go, this guy's kind of a mess, and that continues to be true.
I serve a really gracious God who loves me, a wife that I can be honest with, that I built a relationship I can be honest with.
I am a much godlier man than I was in my 20s, but I've still got work to do.
I'm still growing, and I'm grateful every day for His grace.
(29:15):
And so this is 10 easy steps for how you can be holy like me.
If that's what you want, this is not the book for you.
But if you want a book that says, you can be who you are, and God is thrilled with that, He wants to set you free to be who He made you to be, and He wants to invite you into something deeper than you've ever known, that's what this book is about.
It's not a step-by-step guide to a perfect life, but it is an invitation into a deeper walk with Jesus.
(29:42):
And I think the story of that lady in your congregation probably is one that is helpful for us.
We don't want to get towards the end of our days and say, I wish I'd known earlier that there was more to this relationship, and that I've missed out on it for so many years.
And so I do have a link to the book and to your website in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net.
(30:05):
But I just want to say, thank you so much for writing this book, for being vulnerable, and thank you for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
It's been an absolute joy to be here.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(30:25):
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
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