The Little Red Book of Wisdom with Mark DeMoss

If wisdom is so important in the life of a Christian, why is it that so many of us fail to develop disciplines that will lead us to lives of wisdom? 

Hank Hanegraaff has been friends with Mark DeMoss for over 40 years and on this episode, Mark joins the Hank to discuss a passion that they both share in common--wisdom literature. Mark DeMoss is so passionate about the subject that he wrote The Little Red Book of Wisdom to pass on what he has learned throughout his life about the importance of the pursuit of wisdom. No matter where we are in our walk with Christ, we can always develop a greater understanding of the wisdom of the Lord—we hope this conversation--and Mark's book--will help you develop a deeper well of wisdom. "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

Topics discussed include: Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom—Psalm 90:12 (5:15)

What Mark’s cancer diagnosis taught him about gratitude (10:30)

A conversation Hank and Mark shared before both were unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer (16:00)

What is the key to finishing life well? Living well today (18:45)

What is focus? (29:20)

Work less, think more—thinking is the hardest work there is (37:15)

Buy Some Stamps—the lost art of letter writing (42:10)

A wise perspective on possessions—what Mark learned when his home burned down (50:00)

How much should we give? Think about a turtle on a fence post (55:10)

The wisdom of firsts (1:03:00)

There are no degrees of integrity—you have it or you don’t (1:07:45)

Read a chapter of Proverbs every day (1:10:45)

Seek out older people—the wisdom of age (1:18:30)

Read, Read, Read—The importance of books (1:23:15)

Anticipating deathbed regrets—if you died today what regrets would you have? (1:29:00)
Christians should be known as people of gratitude (1:34:15)


For more information on The Little Red Book of Wisdom: Updated and Expanded Edition by Mark DeMoss please click here.  https://www.equip.org/product/cri-resource-the-little-red-book-of-wisdom-updated-and-expanded-edition/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:23):
And welcome to another edition of the hand Unplugged podcast,
a podcast that is completely devoted to bringing the most interesting,
informative and inspirational people directly to your earbuds. I've been
doing this for a long time and I enjoy the

(00:43):
books I get to read as a result of doing
this podcast. And today, and I've said this many times,
is a very special occasion. I'm doing a podcast with
someone who who has been a friend for many, many years.
And the older I get, the more I cherish longstanding friendships.

(01:08):
My guest today on the handkun plug Podcast is Mark DeMoss.
Mark and I have shared so many incredible experiences, life
experiences together. We both love golf and we've played a
lot of golf together in various places around the country.

(01:30):
But we also both have a real passion for wisdom literature,
and today I want to talk about a book titled
The Little Red Book of Wisdom. This book is now
revised and updated. It is a tremendous little resource. When
I say a little resource, it's actually called the Little

(01:53):
Red Book of Wisdom. It's little in the sense that
you're getting a tremendous amount, but you're you're getting it
in bite sized chunks, so you can not only read,
but you can internalize the message. And there's no more
important message than the message of wisdom literature. I think

(02:16):
of how the Book of Proverbs starts out the proverbs
of Solomon, son of David, King of Israel, to know
wisdom and instruction, to discern the sayings of understanding, to
receive instruction in wise behavior, righteousness, justice, equity, to give
prudence to the naive, to the youth, knowledge and discretion.

(02:40):
A wise man will hear and increase in learning, and
a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel to understand
a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise
and their riddles. And then he says, the fear of
the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom
and instruction. And then I love this next sentence because

(03:02):
it applies to Mark. Listen to your mother and your father.
That's essentially what Proverbs is saying at this point. You
listen to your father's instruction. You do not forsake your
mother's teaching. And if you do that, they're a graceful
wreath around your head and garlands around your neck. And

(03:26):
Mark has done that. His parents. You can tell in
reading this book had a transcendently important place in his life,
and that place is now being transferred from Mark to
his children. So it's going from generation to generation, and
I think that's one of the beauties of not only

(03:47):
Mark's family, but Mark's writing. At any rate. Mark DeMoss
is a public relations practitioner. He's an executive. He's been
a consultant for Christian organizations, organizations of all stripes really
for more than four decades, and nearly three of those
decades was as president of the Demosque Group. I know

(04:10):
so many of the people that have sought counsel from him,
several hundred nonprofit organizations, corporations, leaders. They've listened to him
for advice on communications, on media relations, on branding, on marketing,
nonprofit management, crisis management, and have benefited greatly from his expertise.

(04:35):
If Mark has one enduring quality, he is one of
the best listeners I have ever run across. When you're
talking to him, you know that you have his full attention.
He's absolutely focused on what you have to say, so
he's quick to listen and slow to speak. Mark and
his wife, April, who is definitely his better half, live

(04:57):
in the Atlanta area. They have three grown children and
many grandchildren. And Mark, I am delighted to have you
on the Handgun Bug podcast.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
Thank you, Hank. I've been looking forward to this. This
will be fun.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
Well, you note that a particular little phrase that you
found in your father's night stand had a transcendently important
impact on your life. And I want to start with that.
Your dad said, so teach us a number our days
that we may present to you a heart of wisdom,
of course, that comes directly from Psalm ninety. Give us

(05:32):
a little background on how your dad died at a
very early age, and how that note impacted your life,
not only in the past, but even in the present.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
So, my father was a businessman, a lay person, but
a real Christian leader and a big heart for ministry,
a big heart for evangelism and really my hero in
my young life at that point point. And I was
one of seven children. In nineteen seventy nine, just days

(06:06):
before I would start my senior year of high school,
my father died of a heart attack while playing tennis
at our home in Philadelphia, and he was fifty three.
I was seventeen, and when we got home from the hospital,
which was just ten minutes down the road from our

(06:28):
home where he had been pronounced dead pretty immediately. This
was not a long drawn out situation, but I remember
sometime after we got back home, my mother found My
mother was just forty, by the way, so widowed at forty,
with seven children ages like eight to twenty one. She

(06:51):
found this handwritten note on my father's bedstand, and that's
all it had with hankrid from some ninety verse twelve,
So teach us to number our days, that we may
present to you a heart of wisdom. What's not interesting
about that note is my father was a notorious note taker.

(07:12):
He was never without a pad and a pen in
any setting, so he would write things down so he
wouldn't forget them. He would write down things he wanted
to do or people he wanted to reach out to,
so the fact that there was a handwritten note around
from him would not be unusual. But what was interesting

(07:32):
to all of us, including my mother, is none of
us knows when he wrote that note. We don't know
if he read that that morning in his devotions and
wrote it hours before he died, or if he had
written it the day before or a week before, or

(07:53):
it had been there for a month. I don't know,
but what we do know is for some period of time,
whether it was hours or days, that verse was on
his heart and mind. And now he was in heaven,
and it was a really sobering reminder about what's important,
how fleeting life is, and he was claiming a scripture

(08:19):
from the Psalms, and so that was impressed on me
at a very young age, and certainly that rocked our world.
No seventeen year old has any thought of their father
having a heart attack, and so that was life altering, certainly.
But he was a man of the word of the

(08:41):
Scripture and faithfully read ten chapters a day of Scripture,
two in the Old Testament, two in the New Testament,
one chapter of Proverbs, and five Psalms, and that was
something he passed on to us. I don't know which
of my siblings apply that same practice, but I think

(09:03):
most of us do in some variation of it. I
do it with one palm instead of five. But yeah,
Psalm ninety, verse twelve was etched in my brain, in
heart at seventeen hours after my father went to heaven.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
Yeah, and it wasn't just your father dying. I mean,
seven years later, your brother David dies and that really
puts you in touch with your own mortality as well.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, David, my kid brother, age twenty two, had one
year left of college and he dies in a car accident.
And so now in a span of seven years, I
lost my father and my brother. My mother lost her
husband and her son. And I didn't come to fully

(09:57):
appreciate that distinction, Hank, until I was married and had
children of my own. Did I fully appreciate the difference
between losing a sibling and a parent for me and
losing a spouse and a child for my mother. And
I fully appreciate that now as a husband and a father.

(10:20):
So her loss was far heavier than mine. But still
these are things that, if we're paying attention, shape our
lives in many ways.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
Let me take this just one step forward. Because your
father died at age fifty three. At age fifty four,
so one year older than your dad was. When you died,
you faced your own mortality. You were diagnosed with a
very significant cancer.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yes, well this is interesting too because after my father's
death early death humanly speaking, I, with some help of doctors,
I began to pay particular attention to my heart health,
which included my diet and exercise, because I knew I
had some hereditary strikes against me in terms of my

(11:14):
heart health. But now, in twenty sixteen, I had discovered
a small lump really on my jaw, kind of just
by my jawbone, and I didn't think much of it.
It didn't hurt, but I noticed it shaving one day. Well.
I went to see one doctor who said, it looks

(11:37):
like it's just an infection. They gave me an antibiotic
and said it probably will just disappear on its own
in a week or two, and it didn't. So I
went to my primary doctor at Emory Hospital in Atlanta,
and he actually initially said the same thing, it's probably

(11:57):
just an infection from your mouth or teeth, but to
be safe, he said, I'd like to do a needle biopsy.
So they did a needle biopsy where they kind of
poke it three times with a needle and send those
off to a lab. And I honestly didn't think much

(12:18):
of it even then, And then a few days later
I got a call from that doctor at about seven
thirty in the morning with the news that I had lymphoma,
and so here I'd been paying attention to my heart

(12:39):
health and now I'm being told I have cancer, which
didn't really run in my family. So anyhow, that started
a quick rash of tests and appointments and scheduling and
surgery to remove that lump, and consultations with an oncologist

(13:04):
in Atlanta, and I set out on a journey of
four months of chemotherapy in twenty seventeen, and I'm very
thankful to say I'm now eight years past that chemotherapy
and I'm doing great on that front. My oncologist said

(13:26):
she doesn't need to see me even annually. I don't
get labs or blood work done. I'm not taking any pills,
so I you know, thus far, I've been wonderfully healed
of lymphoma and almost no residual effects of that. A
little bit maybe from chemotherapy, but yes, so I went

(13:49):
from I lost my father early, I lost my brother early,
and then fairly early I guess I was about fifty five.
I have cancer. But all of these life events, Hank,
you know, create a tapestry for me, at least of

(14:10):
sobering reality check on life and the brevity of life
and how precious a new day is, and how precious
friendships are and family are and relationships are, and you
and I have talked about this a lot on a
golf course, and being grateful for this goes into gratitude

(14:34):
also being grateful for what health we have and for
a new day and a new child or a grandchild,
and that ultimately we're really in very limited control of
our lives. I mean, I'm a big believer in exercise

(14:55):
and you know, eating carefully and diet and all of that.
So I'm not suggesting we put our heads in the
sand and say it's out of our control, but ultimately
it really is out of our control, and we're our
lives are in God's hands. The Psalma says in Psalm

(15:16):
thirty one, my times are in your hand. So I've
you know, from everybody's story is different and life experiences
are different. But for me, I had a lot of help,
a lot of tangible help, grappling with this notion of
life and death. And I open this book that way

(15:39):
about a matter of death and life, and to me,
that set the tone for everything else I would write
about and stories I would share.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
All of this is really a way of augmenting the
thing that your father wrote, teach us Lord to number
our days. Our lives are like a vapor here today
going tomorrow. And I remember you and I playing golf
in Orlando, Florida. We're walking down the twelfth hole and
we shared some comments about the brevity of life. And
this was even prior to the time that you were

(16:11):
diagnosed with cancer. And then a year later I was
diagnosed with cancer.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
I remember that walk like it was yesterday. You and
I were attending a largely pastor's retreat, pastors and some
other ministry folks, and we were enjoying a beautiful day,
playing a game that we both love. And this was
right after Thanksgiving, and you said to me, you said, Mark,

(16:41):
look at this. We're walking down the twelfth hole at
bay Hill. It's a beautiful sunny day, We're playing a
game that we love. We're enjoying great fellowship. And the
older I get, you said, the more precious each day becomes,
and each round of golf becomes, because we don't know

(17:03):
how long we'll be able to play this game. And
you're a few years older than me. But literally about
ten days later, I would receive the phone call that
I had lymphoma. And would begin chemotherapy. And then months later,

(17:27):
I was just about to finish my chemotherapy regimen in
April of twenty seventeen, and you called me. This is
just now five months after that conversation on the golf course,
and you told me that you thought you had cancer.
You're pretty sure you had cancer. And so here we

(17:48):
were both healthy, avid golfers talking about not knowing how
long we could play this game, and within six months
we would both be cancer patients. And so yet again
a reminder of who's ultimately in charge of all things,

(18:12):
who's in charge of our lives, our existence, our ability
to do anything that we do. And so that's this
conversation I will long remember, Hank. I remember that conversation.
I wouldn't say every single time I play golf, but

(18:34):
an awful large number of the times I play golf.
I recount that day at Bay Hill in Orlando and
that conversation we had.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
I want to kind of get to the very back
of your book, although I want to ultimately give people
a sense of what you've written in the Little Red
Book of Wisdom manuscript. I mean, it's just a fantastic resource.
And by the way, it is available for anyone who
stands shoulder with us in the battle for life and truth.
All you have to do is contact us on their

(19:04):
web at equipped dot org or write me at Post
Office Box eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina, zip code
two eight two seven one. I think by the time
we're done talking about this book, you'll want to get
a copy of this book. And by the way, I've
read this book several times, and the last time I
read it at toal Mark. We have to do a
podcast on this book, but I want to go to

(19:25):
the back of this book because you actually added a
couple of chapters recently to this book, and one of
those chapters I think really fits in to the conversation
that we're having right now. It's a chapter that's titled
finishing Well. And you have been with some of the
most significant leaders in Christian ministry over the last fifty

(19:49):
sixty years. I mean, you know them well. Even when
you're a child, you are like a fly on the
wall listening to conversations in your parents' home with Christian leaders.
But not all Christian leaders finish well. And what could
be said about Christian leaders is true about people in general,
not everyone finishes well. You think that when you come

(20:10):
towards the end of your life, you would have all
your reduction in a row, you'd prepare for eternity. But
so often even Christian leaders slip and fall. So I
want you to talk a little bit about the significance
of finishing well.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
Yeah. So this is a real passion of mine for
a lot of reasons, not the least of which is
that I want to finish well. So this book that
we're talking about today is actually a third edition of
a book I wrote nearly twenty years ago, and we've
updated it on two occasions. But this edition was not

(20:49):
just updated, it was expanded. Then I wrote two new chapters,
this being one of them. Well, what precipitated this chapter
on finishing well, Hank, was when I was working on
this with the publisher to expand the book and update it.
I was about four years removed from closing my public

(21:12):
relations firm after twenty eight years, and I had been
giving a lot of thought to one particular area of
work that we did that I was involved in professionally,
and that was coming alongside ministries and churches whose leader,

(21:35):
senior pastor or president of the organization or founder had
collapsed morally or otherwise. And some of these were very
high profile that if I mentioned names, most of your
listeners would be familiar with. Some of them less high profile,

(21:56):
but nonetheless they were leaders. And that really weighed on me,
you know, for several reasons. One was I was just
sobered and struck by the idea that a Christian leader
in particular, who in most cases knew God's word, taught
God's word, believed God's word could fall so catastrophically. And

(22:23):
the other thing that struck me was, you know, if
I was ever prideful or arrogant about this subject, I
could be a casualty too, and I don't want to
be a casualty in this respect. But then a thought
really jumped out at me, and that was this, when

(22:45):
we talk about finishing well, anytime you hear those two
words finishing well, our minds instinctively go to people in
their seventy or eighties, well down the road in terms
of life expectancy. And so my concern was that, well,

(23:10):
anybody who's younger than seventy or eighty may not pay
attention to this topic because they think they have time
to think about pat as they get older. And then
it occurred to me, well, wait a second. My father
died at fifty three. His finish line was fifty three.

(23:35):
My brother's finish line was at twenty two. So it
would be pretty foolish to think that finishing well is
a topic for people nearing death. And I came up
with a definition for finishing well that I think captures

(23:56):
this age question, and that's this. I defined finishing well
as living well until you're finished living. And that really
brings this home to anybody at any age, because since
you don't know when you will be finished living, the key,

(24:19):
in my judgment, to finishing well is today. The key
to finishing well is living well today. And so I
tried to capture in a brief way, it's not a
long chapter. I tried to capture common characteristics that I

(24:39):
had observed of leaders who did not finish well so
we could learn from them, and common characteristics of leaders
who had finished well so we could apply some of
those things. And so this is a topic I've spoken
a lot about after I wrote this chapter, and I

(25:01):
just think it's an important subject because you know, it's
tempting Hank when you read about you know, you open
your newsfeed or your newspaper and you read about a
prominent pastor or leader who failed morally, and it's very
easy to say, well, but for the grace of God,

(25:24):
there go I. That's a true statement. We need the
grace of God. But to say that only suggests that
I don't have any agency. I can't control what I
put in my mind or what I read or what
I watch, or where I go or how much I drink,

(25:49):
or whether I drink and drive, or whether I put
myself in compromising positions. And so I think we should
be careful of about sort of tossing our hands up
and saying, well, there's another casually, I hate that, but
for the grace of God, there go I. And so

(26:10):
I'm a big believer in guardrails. Virtually all of these
examples of prominent leaders who did not finish well did
not have guardrails, or did not have strong guardrails, and
didn't have people in their lives and inner circle who

(26:35):
could talk honestly to them and candidly to them. And so,
you know, I wrote this chapter very carefully. It's not judgmental.
There's no pride or arrogance on my part, but it's
a sobering consideration of some very tragic car wrecks a

(26:59):
long way journey, all of which were entirely preventable. So
my encouragement to anybody listening would be to start thinking
about it's not too early to think about finishing well,
because your finish line could be tomorrow, like my brother's
in a car accident. And so I'll say one other thought,

(27:23):
and that is for most people, thinking about finishing well,
particularly if you're not older, can be a daunting task.
You know, if you're in your thirties and you think, boy,
I'd love to read my Bible every day, but I
don't know if I can commit to do that the

(27:45):
rest of my life. Maybe not, But I bet you
could do it today, and then tomorrow you could do
it again. You know, I hope I can be faithful.
I've been married thirty seven years. I hope I can
be faithful to for the rest of my life. But
I know I can be faithful to her today. And

(28:05):
so if we think about finishing well in terms of
living well today, suddenly it's very manageable. It doesn't feel
like a steep climb. You know, I don't know if
I can control my tongue the rest of my life,
but I can control it today. I don't know if
I can be a good bother the rest of my life,

(28:26):
but I can be a good father today. And so
if we start to think about this stretch of life
in terms of today, suddenly it feels much more manageable
and less daunting. But that's what that chapter is about.
And I think it's been helpful to a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
It was definitely helpful to me. Mark. I think the
two takeaways. Just as you say, you can't figure what
you're going to do ten or twenty years from now,
you have to set small, attainable goals, and so being
faithful on a daily basis cascades ultimately and being faithful
for the rest of your life. And I like the
other thing that you said, which is pure wisdom, and

(29:09):
that is setting guardrails around your life. And so many
Christian leaders don't do it. They think they're invincible and
they don't put those guardrails around their life, and as
a result of that, they end up in shipwreck. I
want to go to the beginning of your book again.
We're talking about wisdom, literature, the things that we can
do to be wise as we run the race, as

(29:29):
we finish the race, as we attain the prize. In
your first chapter, you talk about getting and keeping focus
in your life. I want you to talk a little
bit about what focus is and how organizations that are focused,
just as individuals are focused, are much more productive in life.

(29:53):
You use the example the Salvation Army for example, an
organization that maintained a particular focus and as a result
of not wavering in that focus, have had a transcendently
important impact for many, many years. They knew what their
mission is. They had a vision and a mission that

(30:14):
never really changed.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
Yeah. So I have a nearly lifelong friend. I think
I met John when I was in ninth grade, and
at the time John was a missionary in Hong Kong,
and he was the first missionary i'd ever heard speak
or met who made missionary work sound exciting and adventurous

(30:37):
and not boring. And so John and I became lifelong friends.
John is still living. He's in his eighties, but he
told me a story. He was because of his work
at the time in Hong Kong with a major denomination,
people sought him out because he was very well connected

(31:00):
in Asia, and business people would come seek him out
and try to lure him out of his work into
the business sector because they knew he could be helpful
making connections in Hong Kong and China. And he told
me the story about a business executive taking him to

(31:23):
dinner one night and said to him, I don't know
what you're making here as your work, but we'll pay
you two hundred thousand dollars a year, give you a
car and a driver if you'll come work for us.
And this would have been in the seventies, So two
hundred thousand dollars to a missionary in the seventies would

(31:43):
have been a pretty enticing offer. And John told me
I'll never forget this. He said, I told the guy
he could have saved the time and the money he
spent on this expensive restaurant, because my answer was no,
he didn't even entertain it. And then he said this
to me, He said, Mark, if you get out from

(32:05):
under the umbrella, you get wet. And for John, the
umbrella was what his calling and mission in life were,
which was to be a missionary. And so in his conviction,
had he stepped out from under that umbrella to accept

(32:27):
this business offer. Yeah, he would have made a lot
of money, but he would have gotten wet, he would
have been in the wrong place, and he would not
have been fulfilled. And that made a big impression on
me about focus and understanding your calling and your mission
and your place and your role. And then I just

(32:50):
expanded from there as I worked with hundreds of organizations.
You know, I believe as individuals we have individual missions
and individual callings and individual focus, and I think organizations
do too. An organization has a purpose for existence and

(33:10):
a mission statement usually, and it was interesting to me
professionally to watch an organization who claimed in their materials
or on their website, claimed in a mission statement that
their mission was X. But in practice, if you looked

(33:32):
at how they spent their time, or how the leader
spent his or her time, or what they spoke out about,
or what they did on their social media, if you
looked beneath the surface, you could find that, well, really
their mission was you know, XYZABC. They were doing all

(33:56):
sorts of things and the effect of that. And by
the way, all those things might be good things individually
and in and of themselves, but I believe that a
result of that is a delusion of your core mission.
So if I say my mission is X, you know,

(34:18):
let's say just for well, I don't even want to
give an example. But if I say my mission is
X as a company or ministry or a church, and
I'm doing fifteen things, some of which relate to X
and some of which don't, I'm minimizing the impact of X,

(34:40):
which I said was my mission. And I'm probably not
doing any of fifteen things really well. I'm doing them all,
maybe partially well. And so this is a conviction of mine.
And it's not just about branding, although I'm into that.
I think it's about effectiveness. You know, you're street Hank

(35:01):
has been very specifically focused for as long as I've
known you thirty plus years. And that means, by the way,
maintaining focus means you say no to a lot of things.
Somebody might invite you to come speak at some event

(35:22):
that's off mission or out from under your umbrella, and
that makes it easier to say no, to turn things down,
to maintain focus. So I think, to me, it's not
just a cliche about staying focused, it's also about it's
really about effectiveness, and you're effective at what you do

(35:47):
because you do what you do every day and you
don't wade into twenty other causes or crusades or enterprises
or projects ornatives, and so that makes you more effective
at helping people understand God's word and how to read

(36:10):
God's word for all it was intended to be, and
how to understand God's word, and how to have discernment
about whether things line up with God's word or don't
line up with God's word. So, in fact, I've never
told you this, but we've had lots of conversations where
I would ask you. I might ask you about some

(36:33):
political issue of the day or some cause, and you're
very quick to say when it applies, Mark, I don't
really know about that, or I haven't studied that, or
I don't really have an opinion on that. And to me,
that's a reminder that you thank have stayed under your

(36:57):
umbrella and stayed focused, and that's led to great effectiveness.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
In my view, Mark, there's something you write about in
chapter four that I think could be very helpful to
people listening in from the perspective of having wisdom, and
that is to work less and think more. Now that
almost seems counterintuitive. You know, we think so much about
the puritan work ethic and working hard, but you're saying

(37:27):
most people would benefit greatly if they learned to think.
And learning to think has all kinds of implications, particularly
in the age in which we live, because there's so
many distractions that keep us from thinking deeply, from pondering
those things that really matter. Can you elaborate on that

(37:48):
for us, so people get a little glimpse of what
you've said in your book with respect to thinking more
and working less. I mean, it's not that you don't
work hard, it's just that you put a priority on thinking.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Yes, So we have in our office, our company office,
it spanned the entire length of our big conference room
in Atlanta, in brass letters. I had a quote from
Henry Ford which said thinking is the hardest work there is,
which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

(38:26):
And I wanted our company, our teammates to be known
for our thinking. And I believe that our culture, particularly
in America, it favors doing overthinking. We're so driven by activity, production, performance,

(38:52):
delivery schedules, deadlines, production, printing, publishing, all these things are
action their activities, And I believed for a long time
that so much of the work that's been produced in

(39:15):
our country is being produced absent good thinking. And so
I really tried to make this a core value of
our public relations firm is that our activity should be
guided by sound thinking. The challenge here you touched on it.

(39:37):
The challenge here is that our culture, our work environment,
our pace of life doesn't really create room and opportunity
for thinking because thinking requires a couple of things. It
requires time, it requires quite and lack of distraction. And

(40:03):
so I think most people show up at work and
you can stay very busy at most jobs for eight
or nine hours with very little thinking. You can answer emails,
and by the time you answer those, you have a
new batch of emails that came in while you were
answering yesterday's emails. And this is what we get wrapped

(40:26):
up in. We get wrapped up in doing. And my
view is whatever I'm doing will probably be better if
I spend a little time thinking before I started doing.
And it's amazing to me how sometimes just one question,

(40:50):
one thoughtful question, in a meeting can change the whole direction,
the whole trajectory of a meeting and of whatever we
were about to do because somebody was thinking and posed
a question that got everybody else thinking. And so again
when I write about in that chapter, it's definitely counterintuitive.

(41:14):
It goes against the grain of a culture that's cracking
the whip, always saying we got to produce more, we
gotta bill more, we got to sell more. We have
to knock on more doors, we have to you know,
get on more stations, we have to get our magazine
out to more people. And sometimes we're doing those things

(41:38):
without ever asking, well, do we know people are reading
this magazine or do we know people are opening this email?
And so yeah, I love that chapter. I love kind
of challenging conventional wisdom that says go go, go, do,
do do and turn it on its head sometimes and say, well,

(42:01):
hang on, we're actually going to slow down rather than
speed up, because we're going to invest some time and
thinking on the front end.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
I want to ask you about another chapter that I
think is very very important in your book. In fact,
you say this chapter receives more responses than perhaps any
other chapter in the book, and that is reclaiming the
lost art of letter writing. Now, when I read that chapter,
I said, that is near and dear to my heart

(42:33):
because I'm always writing handwritten notes to people. My presupposition
was that people would read those. Whereas many people will
not pay much attention to an email, they get a
letter in the mail with a stamp, it means something
because it really tells the story that you sat down

(42:53):
and thought deeply about the person with whom you're communicating.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
I love this after so much. By the way, this book,
Hank is divided into wisdom for your personal life and
wisdom for your professional life. And some chapters you know,
aren't particularly spiritual, they're just practical, and some are more so.
But this chapter that you referred to on letter writing,

(43:22):
which I call buy some stamps, is special to me
for a lot of reasons, probably because my father was
a letter writer. I've been a letter writer always, and
it is a dying practice. I don't know that it's
an art, but it's a dying practice for sure. And
that's documented by the US Postal Service with data on

(43:46):
you know, the decline in personal mail that they delivered today,
and so most of the mail today and anybody that
goes to their mailbox tonight is very unlikely to find
a personal letter. They're going to find and Bill's magazines, advertisements,
direct mail marketing from companies. They're most likely not going

(44:08):
to find a personal letter from anybody. And I think
I've been on a little bit of a one man
mission to try to change that a little bit wherever
I have influence, and I have so many precious stories
about this, and I really have a conviction that the

(44:30):
impact of a letter, a personal letter, is always greater
than the effort it took to write it, Meaning this,
I can spend three minutes writing a handwritten note, addressing
an envelope, putting a stamp on it. I could spend

(44:51):
three to five minutes on that note, and the recipient
might have their day altered the day they open it
and read it, or they're week, or it might make
their month, or I share the story of the book.
But I had a friend that i'd become friends with

(45:12):
through a project I was working on, and he and
I were politically, we were sort of opposites, our faiths
were different. He's the Jewish man, I'm an Evangelical Christian.
But we struck up a friendship and I've written him
a letter and I'd never met him, but I wrote
him a letter to encourage him I'd seen him on

(45:33):
TV quite a bit in a political context, and I
wrote him a letter to thank him for his civility
and how he approached his adversaries, and I just thought
it was a refreshing thing to see.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
Well.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
I subsequently, sometime later reached out to him by email
to tell him I was working on a civility project
to promote civility, and I said, I'd written you a
letter commending you for your civility and I'd love to
come talk to you about it. The next morning, at
four point thirty in the morning, I had received an

(46:10):
email from Lannie and this is what his email said.
This is Gee, almost twenty years ago. I'll never forget it.
His email said, your letter sits in a frame in
my office. Call my assistant Maddie and set it up.

(46:32):
I'd love to meet. So I go to Washington, d C.
To meet this guy for the first time, and I
go into his office and there on the walls of
his office are pictures of him with presidents, Secretaries of State,
on flying on Air Force, one picture of him in

(46:53):
the Oval office, and there on a shelf is my
letter sitting in a frame. He greeted me in his
office and he pointed to that letter and he said, Mark,
that's the nicest letter I've ever received. Well, who nobody's
reacting that way to an email you sent them or
a text message. It was a letter, an actual letter

(47:17):
on stationary in an envelope that I had to lick
and put a stamp on it. And I've just seen
over and over again the impact that letters have. And
I think, when we know they have that impact, I
don't understand why we don't write more letters. Our oldest daughter,
who's now in her mid thirties, has three children. When

(47:39):
she was in high school, I went in her room
one night to tell her good night, and she was
sitting on her bed with a box, flipping through envelopes
and I said, what's that. She said, that's my letter box.
I didn't know she had a letter box. She kept

(48:00):
to every letter she'd ever received, and she would go
look in there when she needed some encouragement or needed
her spirit lifted. She'd read a letter from her mother,
or from me, or from her grandfather, or from a
friend at school, or from a teacher. And so yeah,
I encourage people to go get some note cards, some stationary,

(48:25):
buy some stamps. They make a lot of stamps where
you can express yourself different ways and go back to
writing thoughtful notes to people. You and I were together,
Hank six weeks ago for a couple of days at
my house, and a few days later I got a

(48:45):
note in the mail from hind Cantagraph with your looks
like you use a fountain pen. But I could tell it.
You know, you took some time to and write, and
it didn't take you long to write it, but it
had ant and I appreciated it, and people will appreciate it.
And so yeah, I would urge people. I mean, you

(49:06):
can write one note to day in five minutes and
touched three hundred people this year with very little effort.
And I hear from people now who will remind me
of a letter that I wrote them, or a note
that I don't even remember writing, but they remembered it.

(49:28):
And I'm going to write letters as long as my
fingers work. I'm going to be a letter writer.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
Yeah, And I hope a lot of people take the
wisdom of that to heart, because letters do present a history.
As your daughter demonstrated, She showed that the history of
those letters had a significant impact in the present. I
want you to talk about something else that you talk
about when it comes to wisdom, and that is a

(49:59):
wise perspe inspective on the things that you have, a
wise perspective on money and resources and possessions. I think
this is so important. You learned this lesson in a
lot of different ways, but I think once again, your
father had the greatest impact in this area, and that

(50:22):
impact now you're passing on to your children the fact
that God owns everything. We are stewards, we're not owners.
You can say someone owns a big house and a
big car and all kinds of possessions, but the moment
that they die, they don't own anything.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
Yes, And you captured it there in four words, God
owns it all, which is really the guiding principle of
that chapter. But this was driven home to me in
a personal and impactful way when I was just ten
years old. So I was seventeen when my father died,
but when I was ten, our home in Philadelphia burned

(51:06):
virtually to the ground one night in the middle of
the night, with seven children and two parents and a
few guests in our home. And suddenly I'm standing on
our front lawn, having slept walked out of my house
in a lot of commotion and wrapped in a blanket,

(51:30):
watching everything our family owned go up and smoke. Literally,
there was nothing salvaged from that home except what we
carried out on our backs in the middle of the night.
So here I was getting another life lesson at an
early age. And I mean, if there's ever a reminder

(51:52):
of how God owns it all, not us, you only
need to look at a fire or an earthquake or
flooding like we saw in Texas recently. God can remind
us very quickly that He owns it all. And oh,
by the way, he owns more than our physical possessions.

(52:15):
He owns our stock investments and our financial portfolios, because
a crash of a market can make those disappear in
an instant. And so it's a sobering way to live
this perspective, which hopefully helps guard against greed and a

(52:38):
lot of other things that are unhealthy. And my wife
and I have just built a new home after being
in our previous home for nearly twenty five years, and
Hank's been at this home and we've been blessed and
it's a lovely place that we don't deserve. But my

(53:00):
wife probably says once a day in one context or another,
usually in the context of some frustration with something that
wasn't working quite right, because we're still working out some
kinks in a new construction project. But she probably says
once a day, it's just stuff, Mark, and it's going

(53:24):
to burn up one day. And we really, I can
honestly say, we hold our stuff very loosely. We spent
a couple of years planning this house and building it
and decorating it and landscaping it, but it is just stuff,

(53:50):
and we don't own it. We're guardians of it and
stewards of it, and we try to use it to
bless others and invite people here who might need a
few days of encouragement or distressing. But the Lord could

(54:10):
take it tomorrow and we would thank him for the
weeks or months that we enjoyed it, and we'd go
do something else. So it's a healthy way to live.
And anyone, I would say this, anyone who's not living
with that mindset is a candidate for real upheaval and

(54:35):
stress and strife and turmoil. The day that a tragedy
might strike and they find out they've lost their home
or they've lost their investments, and so yeah, I think
the better part of wisdom here is to understand now

(54:56):
that God owns it all, he controls it, he gives it,
you can take it. Job is a great example of
that in the Old Testament, and we really should hold
onto our stuff with open hands, with not clenched fists.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
Yeah. And something that you say in the book that
really caught my attention again, this is the DNA of
the Demos family, DNA left by your father and your mother,
And that is the question how much should I give?
Being trumped by the question how much should I keep?

(55:32):
I just think that's a delicious piece of wisdom that
if that became inculcated in our lives, we would live
completely differently.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
Yeah. That's very sobering too. That twist. I was going
to say that little twist, but it's a big twist
on perspective because certainly most Christians wrestle with how much
should I give? Is the biblical concept of the tithe
is that applied today the ten percent Should it be

(56:03):
ten percent free tax or after tax? Should it be
more than a tithe? Should it be a tithe plus
an offering? And you know, Hank, the data on giving
is really and there's a lot of data available. The
data on giving how much Christians give of their income

(56:23):
to any causes, by the way, not just to the
church or to Christian causes. The data on giving is
really abysmal. And so I would say, first of all,
while a lot of people are debating how much should
they give, that's a moot point. It's a moot starting
point when most people are giving nothing. So let's start

(56:46):
with that that we ought to be giving something. Let's
be generous people. And look, there are opinions and stories
all over the spectrum on this question. So and I'm
not highlighting one or the other. I mean, there are
amazing stories of people who give virtually everything away. They

(57:07):
give their businesses away, they give their income away, they
live on you know, there are a lot of people
that have chosen to live on a tithe rather than
to give a tithe. That would be a one end
of the spectrum. The other end would be, you know,
anything stingier that that. But conceptually, I think, you know,

(57:28):
we ought to start with the recognition that God owns it.
To begin with, God gave it to us. That's another thing.
That drives me crazy when we hear about somebody was
a self made millionaire or a self made billionaire, that's nonsense.
We're not self anything. The person that thinks they're a
self made millionaire or a self made billionaire, where did

(57:52):
they get the health that enabled them to work? Where
did they get the intellect to come up with a
great invention or a great idea or a great concept.
Where did they get the blessing that their portfolio multiplied?

(58:12):
Or where do they get the ability to be a
good student in college when so many people struggle. These
are all things we got from God. And so, yeah,
I'm not a self made anything. I'm not even a
self starter because I woke up this morning. God got

(58:33):
me started because he had breath in my lungs. So
once we realize that, it's a little easier to understand
this principle of ownership, and then generosity flows from that.
I think that's.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
What you call a turtle on a fence post. I
love that chapter title because it really sums up what
you just said. I mean, the turtle doesn't get on
that fence post by someone helped the turtle get there.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
Yeah, I saw that. I sort of stole that idea
from a book by that title that a Christian businessman
wrote years ago. But I love it because we are all,
if we're honest, we are all products of some combination
of other people. Parents that nurtured us, a teacher or

(59:28):
a coach who cultivated a passion in us and encouraged
us and taught us things, and a colleague that came
along at the right time. And I give some examples
in that chapter of A Turtle on a Fence post
of Carlos Alcarez, the great Spanish tennis player today, who

(59:53):
has won Wimbledon twice now I think, and just lost
in the finals a week or two ago. We tend
to look at tennis as an individual sport, and largely
it is relative to team sports like basketball and football.
But as I read a little bit more about Carlos Alcaraz,

(01:00:14):
that guy is surrounded by a team of about seven
or eight or ten people, starting with the coach that
discovered him when he was a scrawny little teenager who
this coach said that he could barely hit the ball
to the other baseline, but he saw potential and talent

(01:00:34):
in him and began to pour into his life and
so now Carlos Alcaraz at the young age of early twenties,
I think, is the world's number one or two tennis player.
But he's a turtle on a fence post. He got
there and he's staying up there with the help of

(01:00:55):
a team people that help him with his practice routine
and his physical conditioning routine, and his diet, and his
psychology and mental coaching, and an agent that finds opportunities
for him and so on. But all of us have
a similar story if we're honest, that we've been aided

(01:01:19):
by people, starting with the Lord who gave us life
to begin with. So I think, too, hank inherent in
this notion of a turtle on a fence post is humility.
We recognize that we're not so great because we're dependent
on a lot of help, and so it should make

(01:01:41):
us more humble, less boastful about anything that we accomplish,
because we're really you know, I get a lot of
credit for having built the successful public relations firm, but
everybody that ever worked for me, about one hundred people

(01:02:01):
over the years, would tell you that I was quick
to talk about the team and the support we had
in our team, and I recognized and told my team
all the time. Without them, I didn't have a public

(01:02:21):
relations firm. I'm just a consultant. And so the difference
between a consultant and a firm is people. And so
I was a turtle on a fence post, even though
my name was on the front door. I was on
that fence post because a lot of people said, yeah,

(01:02:41):
I'd like to be part of that firm and that vision,
and they made me better. I made them better. It's
a great way to look at whatever we're doing in life.

Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
One of the best chapters in your book is chapter twelve.
I think that if people would apply the wisdom in
that chapter, it would revolutionize their lives. This is the
wisdom of first delineate that for us. What do you
mean when you talk about the wisdom of Firse?

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
So this chapter is largely drawn from my father, I think, again,
who I only had seventeen years on earth with. But
in this chapter I talk about giving God the first
hour or part of every day, the first day of
every week, honoring the Sabbath, and the first dime of

(01:03:41):
every dollar, honoring giving back to what He's given to us.
And these were principles that my father taught us. He modeled,
and so all of us children would talk, even now,
forty five years later, of our memory of him, our father,

(01:04:03):
a successful businessman, not reading the newspaper every morning, not
checking the stock exchange numbers, not watching the news. In fact,
this sounds really neanderthal today, but we grew up without
a television. We didn't own a television in our home,

(01:04:25):
and we didn't Back then, people subscribe to a newspaper
and got it delivered to your front doorstep. We didn't
get a newspaper, we didn't have a television. So our
memories of our father before going to work was that
he was reading his Bible, he was on his knees
in prayer. And I think it's not that important whether

(01:04:49):
you're spending an hour doing this or twenty minutes. But
what I do think is important for people that are
you know, physical glee, humanly able to is there's something
valuable about doing this first thing, the first part of
your day, the first watch. And I know some people say, look,

(01:05:12):
I'm not a morning person. I'd rather have my quiet
time with God on my lunch break or before I
go to bed, or after dinner, and that's better practice
than not doing it, for sure, But I think there's
something special about the first part of your day. It's
often for most of us, it's the only part of

(01:05:33):
the day you can control interruptions because you can get
up earlier to do this, but you have less control
over distractions at your lunch break, or after dinner or
before you go to bed at night. So that's what
that first is giving God the first part of every day,

(01:05:56):
then the first day of every week is just honoring
the Sabbath. Always been struck. I'm not a theologian, not
a Bible scholar, but I know how to read, and
I was always struck that the account of the Ten
Commandments in scripture, how most of the commandments were just
a couple of words, you know, thou shall not steal,

(01:06:18):
And then the commandment about honoring the Sabbath is sixty
some words, I think. And why was that, I don't know,
but it certainly suggests an importance to that commandment to
honor the Sabbath, sheerly by the number of words God
devoted to telling us about it. And so I think

(01:06:42):
for me, again, this is people have different views about
what honoring the Sabbath means and I know there are
people that have to work who are first responders, or
work in service agencies or in hospitality, and so I'm
not being dogmatic about this, but for those who can

(01:07:05):
protect the Sabbath, I think there's great reward for it.
And so a pastor friend of mine once said that
he thought the best approach to this was decide what's
work for you and don't do it on Sunday. So
I've tried to make that a practice and to honor that.

(01:07:26):
And then the first was that honor the Lord with
the first part of every dollar. And so I think
these are good centuries old, millennia old practices that come
from scripture that God will honor if we take them seriously.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
Another chapter that just the title itself is so intriguing.
There are no degrees of integrity. You either have it
or you don't elaborate on that.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
So the word integrity literally means whole who l e
And so if that's true, you know something can't be
partially whole. And so we often hear it said of somebody, Oh, Bill,
he's got a lot of integrity. And I think just

(01:08:20):
by definition and grammatically that's incorrect. You either have integrity
or you don't have integrity. And once you know, think
of a fine glass vase or a crystal bowl that
dropped and has a crack in it. That vase or

(01:08:42):
bowl now lacks integrity. It's not whole, it maybe didn't
break in pieces, but structurally it lacks integrity. And I
think the same is true of our lives. We either
have integrity or we don't have it. And I love
this quote from the late US Senator Alan Simpson who said,

(01:09:06):
if you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't
have integrity, nothing else matters. And I want to be
known for integrity. I think we all want to be
known for integrity. But you know, it's amazing you can
spend a lifetime building integrity and you can lose it

(01:09:29):
in a minute. And so that's a sobering reminder to
me too, that it's very easy to lose it and
it's hard to gain it and earn it. And you know, integrity, too,
is who we are when nobody's looking. It's not what
we do when it benefits us or serves us. It

(01:09:51):
might even work against us. And I make the point
that it can be costly. Sometimes you might lose a
business deal because of your integrat But I think it's
always worth it. And I love the book of Job period.
But when Job's life had unraveled, he says in chapter

(01:10:12):
twenty seven, till I die, I will not put away
my integrity from me. And he didn't, and even his
wife encouraged him in the I think in the first chapter,
why don't you just curse God and die? And he
held fast to his integrity. That's a great thing that

(01:10:35):
could be said of any of us at the end
of our life, is yeah, Hank held fast to his integrity,
or Mark held fast to his integrity.

Speaker 1 (01:10:46):
You quote so many wonderful proverbs in your book. I
think because your book is the little read book of wisdom,
and we're talking about wisdom literature when we talk about
the Book of Proverbs, I think you owe the life
listeners something, and that is to intoxicate them with the
practice of reading a chapter of Proverbs a day. I

(01:11:10):
can say that I faithfully do that every day. I
spent a good part of my life memorizing the Book
of Proverbs. So I used to teach a course You're
a memory of the Proverbs Cayse for successful daily living.
So I love the Book of Proverbs as well. When
that becomes part of the warp and woolf of who
you are, and you've been doing this for many, many years,

(01:11:31):
when that becomes part of you, it transforms you.

Speaker 2 (01:11:36):
Yeah. I owe this to my father also, Hank, because
of his systematic approach to reading through the Bible every year,
and so Proverbs became a daily and then a monthly practice.
And think about this for a minute. If you took
a textbook on any subject. You know, I noted that

(01:11:57):
if you took any textbook on any subject and you
read that textbook all the way through every month, twelve
times every year, you'd be pretty expert on whatever the
subject was. The great investor Warren Buffett, he had read

(01:12:18):
every book on investing in the Omaha Public Library by
the age of fifteen or something, and he's now the
greatest investor and one of the wealthiest Americans. But think
if you now, instead of reading a textbook on investing
or sales and marketing or physics, if you took the

(01:12:44):
greatest wisdom textbook of all time and read the entire
book every month, twelve times a year, that's what reading
one chapter of Proverbs is accomplished, and you can read
a chapter of Proverbs in five minutes pretty easily. There

(01:13:07):
are thirty one chapters of Proverbs, so you would read
the corresponding chapter with the day of the week. And
now I would estimate I've read this textbook, you know,
several hundred times, twelve times a year, for about half
my life. And I believe this with great conviction. I

(01:13:31):
believe if you were not a Christian, and you didn't
read any other part of the Bible or believe the Bible,
if you only read Proverbs every day, I believe you
would be a better man or a better woman, a

(01:13:54):
better husband or wife, a better father or mother, a
better son or daughter, a better employee or a better employer.
You would be better at conflict resolution, you would be
better at money management. You would be better at handling stress.
You would be better at avoiding pitfalls and catastrophe. This

(01:14:20):
book is so rich of teaching and common sense and
admonition and correction. And by reading a chapter every day,
you're going to get these admonitions and reminders and illustrations

(01:14:43):
again the next month, and the next month and the
next month. And so I can't stress enough the value
of this little book called Proverbs. So today I read
chapter twenty four. Today's the twenty fourth of the month.
And if somebody wanted to start this practice, whatever day

(01:15:06):
you heard this podcast, don't go to chapter one. Just
start with the day of the calendar, the day of
the month, read that chapter, and then you'll read through
the book every month. I was really sobered by a
personal experience here, Hank, some years ago. So I began
this practice because of my father. And then when my

(01:15:29):
son was graduating from high school. He's now in his thirties,
but when he was graduating from high school, I had
put a note on his bed, a letter the night
before his high school graduation telling him how proud I
was of him and encouraging him about his next chapter
of life as he went to college. The next morning,

(01:15:51):
the morning of his graduation, he'd put a note on
my desk at home thanking me for my letter, and
in his note back to me, he wrote this, PS,
I've been reading a chapter of Proverbs every day since
eighth grade because of you, and I didn't know he
was doing it, Hank. He'd been reading Proverbs every day

(01:16:15):
for five years and I didn't know it well. He
got it from me, who got it from his grandfather,
who he won't meet till he goes to heaven, because
my father died before my son was born. And so
now my son is way ahead of me on this
journey wisdom because he started reading Proverbs much earlier than

(01:16:39):
I did, and so he's still doing it. So in
his thirties, he's read Proverbs several hundred times and will
exchange of verse, you know, periodically texting one another, so
it lets me know he's still doing it. But this
book is amazing, this Book of Proverbs, and I don't

(01:17:01):
know why anybody would want to miss out on it,
especially since you're talking about a five minute habit every day.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
You know, it's amazing, Mark, is that as many times
as you and I have read through the Book of Proverbs,
there's always a new jewel to be found. There's always
something that hits you in a particular way because of
the particular stage of life that you're in, your particular circumstances.

(01:17:31):
So it's a book that never stops giving.

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):
For sure. And you know you mentioned the chapter on
letter writing, and I'm gratified when people tell me I've
started writing letters because of the year chapter. But I'm
more gratified when somebody tells me, hey, I read your
book and I've started reading chapter of Proverbs a day.
That would be the most gratifying, probably because I know

(01:17:56):
the impact that's going to have on somebody's life. And
I would say this, you know, if somebody's not doing
this as a practice, do it for a week. If
you feel after reading seven chapters you can quit, good luck.
But if you keep going, I don't know how you
would stop. I don't know how you would say that

(01:18:17):
was great in July, but I don't think I'm going
to read it in August. I just don't know how.
I think it's addicting. It's so powerful and so easy
to do as a practice because it's not time consuming.
I think once somebody tries it, they'll probably maintain it
as a practice.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
Another chapter in your book, the Wisdom of Age, seek
out older People. I think that's a brilliant chapter as well.
You have learned so much, as it were, by almost
being invisible in particular rooms of your home when your
parents had older people in the hall, they were having conversations,

(01:19:01):
and as a result of that, a lot of what
you now practice a lot of what you've taught your children,
a lot of what you've taught through your agency, A
lot of what you teach when you counsel Christian leaders
really comes from the wisdom that you gained listening to
older people.

Speaker 2 (01:19:23):
Yeah, I think this is a little counterintuitive also, I
think in that we tend I think from an early
age in life, and certainly in the church. The American
Church is sort of pre wired this way. We sort
of self select groups and associations according to age and

(01:19:46):
stage of life. And so you go into a typical
church and they might have a small group or class
for singles, and another one for young marrieds, and another
one for senior adults. And that I understand the rationale
for it, that you know, young marrieds relate to each other,

(01:20:08):
want to be together. But a young married couple isn't
going to learn a whole lot from another young married couple.
They're going to learn from an older married couple. And
I was drawn to this at an early age, and
I don't really know why, except we had a lot

(01:20:30):
of adults coming through our home as well. I was
a kid, and so I remember dinner conversations with guests
and we didn't eat as children eat and excuse ourselves
from the table, we would stay and listen to conversation.
But I remember, as a high school student at a

(01:20:52):
church where we grew up that still this was when
most churches still had what we call Sunday school classes,
you know, separate from the main church service. I remember
as a high school kid, not wanting to go to
the high school Sunday school class. I went to a
men's sunny school class talked by a man who was

(01:21:15):
probably at that time, I don't know. He was probably
in his fifties and I was in high school. He
would have been in his fifties. He was a contemporary
of my father's. I remember going to this man's sunny
school class, an adult sunny school class, where he was
teaching through the Bible in a year, and something in

(01:21:38):
me said, I want to hear from an older band
about this book rather than hanging out with my high
school peers. And so, I don't know you know what
made me that way, but there is wisdom from age,
and I want to get all of that that I can.

(01:22:00):
And also the reverse of that is true. I want
to be in positions to invest in younger people now
since I'm further down the road than they are. I
want to invest in younger people. But I think you
have to, you know, to get wisdom from age, you've

(01:22:20):
got to sort of go get it, because you're not
naturally we don't naturally hang out or congregate with people
much older than us. We just tend to gravitate to
people at the same stage of life. And I remember
my wife and I would often say when our children
were young, we want to get around some parents who've

(01:22:44):
already raised their children and done it well. We want
to learn from them, not from people that are in
the same boat that we're in, you know, fighting to
keep their head above water with three young children in
the house. And so I think you have to this
notion of the wisdom of age, you have to You've
got to seek it out and create ways to get

(01:23:05):
it because you're probably naturally spending most of your time
with people roughly your age.

Speaker 1 (01:23:14):
Yeah. You know, another thing that I noted in your
book is your familiarity with a friend of mine, Charles
Tremendous Jones. You know, I used to go hear him speak,
and I tried to be like invisible because the minute
he saw you, part of his talk, he'd come over
and he'd sort of almost physically accost you, just in fun,

(01:23:38):
and everybody would laugh. But Charles tremendous Jones used to
always talk about books.

Speaker 2 (01:23:44):
You'll be the.

Speaker 1 (01:23:45):
Same person you are today, or you know, five years
from now as you are today, except for the books
you read and the people you meet. And so he
was a big advocate of reading books. And I can
read remember early on in my Christian life having been
impacted by that passion he had for reading books. And

(01:24:07):
if you go to our house today, and this is
less because of me and more because of my wife,
you'll see the DNA of our house is that there
are bookshelves everywhere. And if you pull books off of
those bookshelves, you'll see that they're underlined and highlighted and
dog eared. We love books. You also have a love

(01:24:28):
for books, and this is a bit of wisdom that
youencapsulated in your book as well, saying that this is
so important read read, read as opposed to being entertained
in other ways.

Speaker 2 (01:24:40):
Yeah, I think so. I didn't know until just now
that you knew Charles tremendus Jones. We've never talked about him,
but he's now in heaven, and I'll never forget when
I met him as a youngster. But that phrase captured me,
and I've often thought about it because it seems like
such a bold statement. Your life will be the thing
five years from now as it is today, except for

(01:25:03):
the books you read and the people you meet. And
then I've stopped to really think about it. So look
over my last five years. I could point to books
that I've read and people that I've met that have
made my life different than it was five years ago.
So I don't think it's just some catchy slogan or phrase.

(01:25:25):
But yeah, I think, just like letter writing is a
lost practice and a lost art, I think increasingly the
reading of books is going by the wayside. And I
will admit this is not a love I had earlier
in life. I was not a big reader as a kid.
I didn't like reading for school. I wasn't even a

(01:25:47):
big reader in college. So I came to become a
reader a little bit later. But when you look at
how most Americans are consuming information, it is so dumped
down from the days of reading books. We're now capturing

(01:26:11):
information in little thimbles called social media, Twitter or x
or Instagram or TikTok or you know, some newsfeed you
get on your cell phone and in three minutes you're
reading some story about one of the most complicated conflicts

(01:26:35):
in the world in the Mid East, or with Israel
and Gaza, or Russia and Ukraine. And we think we're
becoming well read on these subjects because we read a
you know, seven hundred word article. I mean, that's absurd.
And so again, our culture has become so fast paced

(01:26:55):
and spitting out so much information that the person that
actually turns off their cell phone, closes their computer and
sits down and opens the pages of a book is
really an exception today. So yeah, I guess that's a
call for actually reading books. And by the way, I

(01:27:17):
think this is important on the subject of books, hank
I didn't address this in that section in the book,
but I'll add it here, and that is, I think
it's important to read outside of your natural inclination ideologically, politically,

(01:27:39):
even theologically. I think we should read things from people
we may disagree more than we agree with, but we
should be well read. And I think part of being
well read is reading two different viewpoints. Reading a conservative
viewpoint on a world shoe and a liberal viewpoint that

(01:28:02):
makes you better informed and more intelligent and stronger hopefully
in your conviction about your view on something. And so
I would encourage people to read from both sides of
the aisle or different vantage points, as opposed to just reading.

(01:28:22):
You know, people you know you're going to agree with
on everything. So to me, being well read doesn't mean
you read a lot of books. It means you read
a wider scope of perspectives and viewpoints and approaches to things. So, yeah,
I've read a lot of books that people in my

(01:28:43):
what would be considered you know, an affinity group would
probably say you read that. Why would you read a
book by that guy? And I would say, because I
want to be better informed. I want to better understand
how he got there or how she got to that position.
And so I would encourage not just reading more, but

(01:29:04):
reading more broadly.

Speaker 1 (01:29:06):
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I want
to end this podcast with something that you wrote about
in chapter twenty, which is essentially anticipating deathbed regrets. Take
steps now now, in the present, right now, take steps
now to avoid regrets. And then you quote Nelson Mendela

(01:29:31):
saying that to be a father of a nation is
a very great honor, but to be the father of
a family is an even greater joy. And then he added,
with regret, it was a joy I had far too
little of. I think this is a great place to

(01:29:52):
end a book on wisdom, even though this is not
the last chapter of the book. I think the last
chapter of our life is the deathbed, and you're now
telling us that we need to prepare today to avoid
a regret on that day, the last day of our life.

Speaker 2 (01:30:16):
So I think what put this chapter on my heart
was the observation over time that you would hear an
example of somebody's regret, somebody's deathbed regret, and much like
what Nelson Mandela wrote there. And it occurred to me

(01:30:38):
if you asked any living person today, go to any
friend of yours. I don't care what age they are, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty,
seventy eighty. I think if you asked any person the question,
if you died today, what regrets would you have, every

(01:30:59):
person would be able to list some things. They might
say I would regret that I smoked too much, or
I would regret that I didn't exercise and take better
care of my body, or I would regret that I
never reconciled with my sister or my mother. Or I
would regret that I wasn't a better husband, or I

(01:31:23):
would regret that I worked too much and didn't spend
enough time with my children. I think everybody could tell
you what regrets they would have if they knew they
were going to die today. So given that we could
all list some regrets we would have, why wouldn't we

(01:31:49):
now take steps to avoid having that regret? To me,
this is really simple. If I knew if I was
going to die today that I would regret that I
let my health go to pot. If I knew that
was going to be a regret, I could eliminate that

(01:32:11):
regret tomorrow by exercising and eating better. If I knew
I was going to regret that I wasn't more faithful
reading God's word every day, like that would be a
regret because let's say I hadn't been doing that, or
I used to do it, but I don't do it
now I haven't. Let's say I hadn't read my Bible

(01:32:33):
in a year, and I said, yeah, if I was
going to die tonight, I would regret that I can
eliminate that regret starting tomorrow by starting the day reading
God's word. And so I think this chapter was just
a encouragement to people. Don't wait till you're in your

(01:32:54):
seventies or eighties and say, yeah, I regret that I
never really made peace with my son or daughter who
I was estranged from, or my parent who I was
bitter at for some reason. You can go work on
that now, and what a joy that would be on

(01:33:17):
your deathbed to say, yeah, I made peace with my
estranged child or parent. And to me, this doesn't require
any kind of guess work or reading the tea leaves
or making predictions. You know what you would regret if

(01:33:37):
death was certain tonight. So take that list and tackle it,
and hopefully you could die without regrets.

Speaker 1 (01:33:47):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:33:47):
Your regret then might be I regret I didn't do
that sooner, But at least you wouldn't have the regret
that you didn't do it, or you didn't make it right,
or you didn't make peace, or you didn't because I'm
a better husband or a better father, or spend more
time with your children. You can't have back the time
you didn't spend with your children, but you can start

(01:34:09):
spending time with them today and tomorrow.

Speaker 1 (01:34:12):
You know, sometimes when I'm done with a podcast, I
think I have regrets. I regret I didn't ask this question.
So I don't't have that regret, because there's one more
thing that I want you to talk about, and that's
Chapter twenty three. It's the second to the last chapter,
the penultimate chapter. It's titled Practicing Gratitude Happiness Doubled by

(01:34:34):
Wonder this chapter, and it's one of your newest chapters.
This chapter really grabbed me by the throat because it's
a personal story. It's a deeply moving story of your grandsons,
Ret and Foster severely injured in an attack by two rottwellers,

(01:34:56):
and you use that story to all to underscore the
importance of gratitude.

Speaker 2 (01:35:05):
Yeah, it's very emotional for me, even still four years later.
But around the time we were expanding this book, this happened,
and this incident, I will tell you, Hank, this shook
me more than the death of my father, more than

(01:35:28):
having cancer, more than having our house burned down. As
a youngster, watching the result of a six and eight
year old grandson being mauled by two rotweilers about double
their weight and rushing to the hospital. The two boys

(01:35:50):
were riding their bikes in their neighborhood. Didn't know these
two dogs even lived in the neighborhood, and the dogs
had gotten out and chased these boys and just ripped
them apart. And it's a miraculous gift of the Lord
that they are alive, and how two people in particular

(01:36:14):
came on the scene and really saved their lives. But
where tied into gratitude was this, And that's why I
opened the chapter with this story. I will remember the
rest of my life going home. So this was during COVID,
and so we weren't able to stay the night at
the hospital because hospitals had restrictions on how many visitors

(01:36:38):
could be there. So obviously their parents needed to spend
the night with them. But my wife and I went
to the hospital to see the boys before they went
into a very intense surgery, both of them, and then
went back to our home and I laid in bed
that night so full of so many emotions, anger, outrage, anxiety,

(01:37:06):
wonder about the surgery. With the surgery be successful, would
these boys have any lasting repercussions from this attack? I
have all these emotions running through my head, and as
I was laying in bed, there was one emotion that

(01:37:27):
overrode all the other emotions, and that was gratitude. Gratitude
that they were alive, that they weren't killed by these
two dogs. And it just I just had a piece
that in the darkest hour maybe of our life to

(01:37:54):
this point, because you know, cancer was tough. Was probably
tougher for my wife than for me, but it was me.
Now I'm looking at two grandchildren with deep cuts and
incisions on their necks and all up and down their body.

(01:38:14):
These surgeries were three four hour surgeries that night, and
yet I was able to think about gratitude that the
Lord had spared them. And so that's the setup of
this chapter. And I look back over my life, which

(01:38:35):
has not been without I mean, I've been immensely blessed,
but that's part of the point of gratitude. My life
has been marked by some hardships and with health and
death and fire and destruction, and yet I have gratitude

(01:38:56):
that God has been so good, has blessed us in
so many ways, and has you know, I lost a brother,
but he's a friend who sticks closer than a brother.
I lost a father, but he's a father to the fatherless,
and so yeah, I want my life to be marked

(01:39:17):
not just by integrity, but by gratitude. And I think
Christians of all people, should be known for gratitude, for
being people of gratitude, because we really, of all people,
should understand what we've been given, that all things came
from God, and He gives us all things richly to enjoy.

(01:39:40):
The Scripture says, so yeah, we can let a tough
situation like this dog attack make us bitter and angry
and even vindictive, or we can have gratitude for God's
provision in our lives. And look, everybody's story doesn't turn

(01:40:04):
out the same way. Not long after that dog attack,
I read of another dog attack where some children had died.
And I now know this happens quite a bit in
this country, and so you know that's not everybody's story.
I survived cancer. Other people don't survive cancer. But still

(01:40:26):
all of us, if we think about it, have reasons
to be grateful, have things to be grateful for, and
I don't ever want to lose sight of those, despite
what happens or what might happen tomorrow. That I can't
even see today. I hope I'll respond to it in

(01:40:46):
due time, at least with a heart of gratitude.

Speaker 1 (01:40:50):
Well, Mark, there's a lot of things I can say
about you, and one of them I think that's characteristic
from my perspective about your life, is that you're authentic,
and I appreciate the authenticity with which you've written this
little read book of wisdom. It turned out to be
a really good writer, unbelievable little book. It's a book

(01:41:11):
that you can read in a fairly short amount of time,
but you'll greatly benefit from this book. And you can
tell by listening to Mark on the podcast that he's
the thoughtful person who's taken the life lessons he's learned
from his father and from other people that have a
great deal of wisdom, and he's been able to package

(01:41:33):
that in a book, a very readable book that, like
I said, I've read many times now and I just
read the latest version of it in preparation for the podcast.
It is available through the Ministry of the Christian Research Institute.
Check it out on the web at equipped dot org,
or write me at Post Office Box eighty five hundred, Charlotte,
North Carolina, zip code two eight two seven one. Mark

(01:41:57):
is interesting, he's informative, he's inspirational, and he's been a
great friend to me for many, many years. I deeply
appreciated having you on the podcast today. Mark.

Speaker 2 (01:42:07):
Thank you, Hank. You've encouraged me a lot, not just
on this podcast but in our life together. Thank you.
It's a joy to talk about all these things with you.

Speaker 1 (01:42:17):
Thanks and you're entirely welcome. And remember, if you enjoyed
the podcast, subscribe, rate review. It helps a lot. We
do this podcast because we want the wisdom that people
have garnered over the years and so many different disciplines
to be part of your life story as well. The

(01:42:40):
Little Red Book of Wisdom again available through the Mystery
of the Christian Research Institute or the hand Gunplug podcast.
Check it out on the web equip dot org. Get
your copy. It's invaluable. It's something that you want to
pass on to your children and your children's children as well.
Pack full of wisdom, and it is encouraging, it is exhilarating,

(01:43:06):
it is something that will make a difference in your life.
That's what I'm trying to do is bring people to
you that will make a transcendent difference in your life,
for time and for eternity. Thanks again for joining in
on this handk on podcast. We look forward to seeing
you next time with more