David:          Hopefully, Karen, the Tokyo Olympics for schedule for 2020 will be able to be held this year.

Karen:          Oh, the Summer Olympic Games. They’re one of our favorite sporting events.

David:          For you, Karen, and for those listening to us, there are So, many events held during the Olympics. What would you say is one of your favorites?

Karen:          You mean between the races and the pole vaulting and the wrestling and the…

David:          Oh, weightlifting.

Karen:          Weightlifting…

David:          You didn’t name it. Yeah, what’s one of your favorites?

Karen:          You know, David, I don’t really have a favorite sport because we sort of turn it on the television when we can watch it. What I love is the gathering of all those athletes from all over the world. And I know how hard they’ve all worked and what kind of sacrifices they’ve made to become excellent in their field. But I just love the conglomeration of nations.

David:          Nobody would answer the way you answer it.

Karen:          It’s such a beautiful thing to see. And there is this… It’s great when the U.S. gets a medal, but we’re So, privileged, you know, when some small country, some of their athletes take a medal of any kind. It means So, much to me for them. I love that whole thing.

David:          Okay, I’ll ask myself the same question.

Karen:          I didn’t answer the way you wanted me to, did I?

David:          Well, you kind of came from the left field. If I could only watch one, it would probably be the relay races.

Intro:            Welcome to the Before We Go podcast, featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author, Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

Karen:          Okay, what is it that’s So, exciting to you about the relay races? What do you like about it?

David:          Well, I like all the track events, but some of them are over So, quickly. You know, the 50-yard dash, you kind of watch any blink and you miss it.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          Because they’re so incredibly speedy. Then there are the handoffs in the relay races that I’m tense. I’m wondering whether they’re going to be able to…

Karen:          When they give the baton.

David:          Yeah, is somebody going to drop it?

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          That’s a huge thing. They’re running so fast. And then, Karen, I don’t know if you know this. When runner one passes off to runner two, they have to do it within a certain mark.

Karen:          Oh, I didn’t know that. I mean, there’s a distance in which it has to be.

David:          Yes, if it’s too late, they’re already out of the box. Then that disqualifies the team. And so, it’s coming at such a great speed, and yet they have this little window to be able to pass it off in. So, it’s either dropping it or otherwise going past the boundaries.

Karen:          Oh, I had no idea there was a restriction. And I think it looks easy to pass the baton when you’re running. But if you slow down too much to pass the baton, you lose your advantage as far as speed in the race.

David:          Now, you’ll want to see the relay races. Because you kind of understand…

Karen:          Yeah, I’m going to look at them a little closer.

David:          All that sets up our topic for this visit. We’re in a series we’ve been talking for a good while about aging. This truth today is that baton passing is a skill older generation believers should take seriously. Baton passing is a skill older generation believers should take seriously.

Karen:          This is an interesting topic. And because we are in the older generation, I think it’s something we’re thinking about a lot. Can you give an illustration of this?

David:          Now, we had a couple of baton passing events that took place in our family recently. And we’ll talk about them. Both of them involved, Eliana. She has just turned into her teenager. She’s now 13.

Karen:          And she’s the oldest of three children. We have stair step grandchildren from 26, 27. Write down the latter to the youngest grandchild who’s eight. And this Eliana is the older sister.

David:          She’s third from the bottom.

Karen:          Third from the bottom.

David:          Eliana got interested in Scripture. And her mama said to me, “Eliana’s interested in the Bible. It’s a little bit overwhelming to her. Could you teach her some things about the Bible that would help her to stage in her life?”

Karen:          Really interested in the Bible, you know, So, you look at a 13-year-old and say, “Where did this come from?” This just has to be something that got his food in her heart.

David:          And she was reading on her own.

Karen:          Reading on her own, trying to figure it out.

David:          So, I said, “Okay, I want an hour and a half, Eliana. I need to do some errands. We’ll do it in the car and we’ll just sit and talk.” And that took place within the last couple of weeks. And it was a wonderful time.

Karen:          So, what did you teach her? I can kind of guess. I think you taught her the structure of Scripture because there is a structure.  I’ve heard you do this with all sorts of people. And it makes it very comprehensible. I want to say understand that there is an organization, a very definite organization to the Old and New Testament.

David:          Yeah. How it’s laid out is very helpful. Otherwise, you have this massive book on very thin pages and you just…

Karen:          It’s overwhelming.

David:          Yeah, it’s overwhelming. So, I started out. We were driving and I said, “I have some words and let’s see what you understand about these words. One of them is history. Do you know what history is about?” And she talked about it and she had a good enough understanding to get that. I said, “Okay, let’s talk about another one. Letters.” You don’t write letters anymore, but what is a letter? And we talked through that this another major section in the Bible. I said, “Let’s work on this one.  This one will be harder. Prophecy.” And so, we were walking through the…

Karen:          What that meant.

David:          It was really wonderful. I thought this is the most wonderful thing in the whole world.

Karen:          To share and talk this over with your granddaughter.

David:          And then we had to go into a couple of key dates. Like one of the key dates, because it helps so much in understanding the Bible and how it’s laid out, is the destruction of Jerusalem.

Karen:          In the Old Testament.

David:          This is Old Testament. And when that happened, then you also have what is called the exile.

Karen:          The Israelites were taken out of Israel, out of the land of Jerusalem.

David:          Transported to Babylon. Not all of them, but a large number of them. There were a few kind of stragglers left behind. So, she got that in her head. There was another key word that related to that.  And she got that. And then I said, “Okay, now this is how the structure is set up. This is the Old Testament, the New Testament. Here’s how many books. And watch how these numbers now just fall into line.  And here’s…”

Karen:          Someday, I think you should do that on the podcast because it’s so helpful to people to understand that organization of the Old and the New Testament. It was to me. Every time you do what I’m always grateful to hear it again. So, another day…

David:          Maybe I could pretend that I was doing it with Eliana.

Karen:          Yeah. Or bring her in here and have her be on the other microphone.

David:          Well, it was an absolutely wonderful day. It just makes me… It warms the cockles of my heart. Whatever the cockles are, I don’t know.

Karen:          What are cockles of our heart?

David:          I don’t know. That’s our generation. Warm cockles, anyway.

Karen:          Well, I have a baton passing experience. Sorry, I think I interrupted you.

David:          No, no, you’re fine. It came right on the one I was doing. It was with Eliana.

Karen:          With Eliana again. So, she wanted to have cooking lessons. And we had talked about this before. And so, I said, “Well, let’s learn to make crips.” And I think she had suggested that she wanted to learn to make crips. So, I had bought a pan that is…  It’s like a frying pan that’s crepe size. And so, we went in the kitchen and we started to get the ingredients together. And she said she didn’t know how to crack eggs. Now, her mom cooks a lot. And I’m sure she’s been exposed to some of those things, but maybe never had a chance to crack the eggs. So, she cracked the eggs and we went through the… How you give them a tap and you pulled the shells apart. And it was really sweet. It was very, very fun.

David:          So, neat.

Karen:          But that got me going on the thought, well, I really need to do more with Eliana. Since that’s something that she wanted to do. Our daughter in Senemla gave me a crepe making pan that’s electrifying. You plug it into the wall and you get even heat. And so, I thought, oh, this will be fun. I’ll have Eliana come back. And I have her put all the ingredients together and then mix them up.  And then we’ll do it in the crepe maker. So, it was lovely. It was a lovely moment, but that was the passing of the baton.  

David:          And the crepes were pretty good.

Karen:          They were good. We did good.  So, we’ll do crepes that are thin for sweet crepes and crepes that have a little more substance to them for savory crepes that you put meat, mushrooms, etc. And I’m learning a lot too about it.

David:          Yeah, those are great times. Sometimes they’re just kind of spontaneous that happen. And sometimes you work ahead toward them and plan on them. I remember way back in my ministry, Karen, I was doing a series at the church on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And I had made the statement that all people have been gifted by God to do things on behalf of advancing his kingdom. And Randal was then Randal’s our oldest. We have four children. Randal was probably to the best of my memory, I would say he was in late grade school. So, he’s fifth, sixth grade, something like that. And he’s listening while this is going on. And he wants to know what some of his skills are. And so, I ask him, “What do you think you’re good at ?” And so on. And we decided that he was good at arithmetic.

Karen:          Well, he was always categorizing stuff. He would collect stamps, for instance, and then categorize them. So, there was that quality in him and not just being good at math, but organizing minute sort of details. And he still is very much that way.

David:          He was talking, you know, I still hear him in his boyhood voice, saying, “I think I could help count the offering.” So, I thought, you know what, rather than me interfere and talk to the guys who count the offering, I’ll just let him go and say, my dad’s in this series on finding out what you do well, your gifts. And I decided that one of my gifts is being able to organize and count. And so, I would like to volunteer to help count the offerings. And he did, he went in there and he talked to the guys and they kind of were not ready. I should have prepped them. And they said, “Well, that’ll be great when you get older.”

Karen:          It sort of defeated the whole sermon purpose, was find your gifts that God has given you.

David:          And he couldn’t bust through the defense of the guys who come to you.

Karen:          Yeah, I think a little prep work by his dad would have been helpful.

David:          I should have, I should have. But in that funny, I still remember that. But instead of those guys saying…

Karen:          Yeah, come give us a hand.

David:          Come on. Yeah, isn’t that neat? Thank you. For Randall, it was a put down. They didn’t mean it that way. Oh, I’m sure. But sometimes when we say, okay, I’m going to pass on my gifts, the people we pass them on to don’t appreciate them, or maybe other people say, don’t do that. That person isn’t interested in what you as a granny are going to say.

Karen:          So, it behooves us, for those of us who have batons that we’re wanting to pass on to a younger generation, to also be aware of the fact that there are other people who have gifts to give to the younger generation. And maybe we need to encourage that process and see if we can be sort of advocates for the passing of the baton rule.

David:          It’s not an easy thing to say, you know, I think I’m good at this. I would like to be able to share this with, in fact, even with the grandchildren. I was thinking the other day. So, I’m talking now maybe two months ago when this started in my head. I’ve learned a lot in terms of the area of prayer. And it would be really neat because the older grandchildren are in their late 20s. They’re young adults married. If we could pray, we could set up zoom calls. And I could just say this, what I’m learning, what are you learning? It’s very hard to get them all together at the same time. But one couple has kind of latched onto that. And…

Karen:          …it’s our oldest grandchild.

David:          Yeah. And I say, you know, I don’t know if this is helpful to you, but here’s one hint as far as my daily prayer. And it’s amazing to me how responsive they have been. For example, Karen, I’ve said to them, it’s part of my routine is that when I pray in the morning, I say, these are the priorities. As far as I can tell that you would give me today, Lord. I think about yesterday, I had three priorities. At the end of the day, I got two of them done. I didn’t get the third one done, but I didn’t say, oh man, I didn’t get all three of those done. I said, the two biggest ones I got done. And I didn’t have time left for the third one, but I feel very good about it. Just setting up and saying, “Lord, here’s the day ahead of me. These are what I feel are the priorities as far as your interests are concerned. And I’m going to do my best to nail those number one or two. And if I get three, I’d have to. put it off the next day fine.” But that’s a huge lesson I’ve learned over time and it’s made me a very productive Christian person.

Karen:          The other thing that I think that you have to teach to grandchildren is the fact that you pray with a pencil and that’s keeping a record at least an immediate record of the prayers and what God is whispered to your heart to pray for and you keep a record of it.  Now, I keep prayer journals. I’m just starting to go through what looks like 40 years of prayer journals almost an everyday process and I’m going to ditch a lot of it, as far as I don’t think my kids need to be going through all of that. But it is reminding me of certain areas of intense spiritual growth in my life and how God answered prayers as faithfulness through years. So, one of the the batons we can pass to the grandchildren that we have is this method of praying with a pencil. And there’s something about that David. I think that encourages some kind of brain neurological function when we write our prayers down in a record like praying with a pencil keeping it a journal.

David:          I think sometimes the Lord says to me and nudges through the Holy Spirit put the pencil aside.

Karen:          Okay. Let’s just be together.

David:          Yeah. I think God sometimes says I’m tired of trying to read your writing.

Karen:          I’m tired of trying to read your writing.

David:          I answered the prayer but I couldn’t read what you…

Karen:          That’s cute. But that tool of praying with your pencil I would nudge you to maybe take a sheet or two, copy it off and send it to all of our grandchildren and say just want to give you a sample of what praying with a pencil is like and we’ll talk about this in our next Zoom call.

David:          Yeah. There are times when you attempt to give a skill to somebody else and they don’t want it. Or they’re very nice but you can tell they’re saying uh-huh and their mind is somewhere else.

Karen:          And that’s fine. I mean I think that passing the baton is sometime having the instinct or the intuition and often that’s you know designed by the Holy Spirit being attentive to those who want or interested in the gifts that we have to give.

David:          We have to talk about this because I’m sure there are people who have said I tried that.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          And it was a classic failure.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          And both of us, I think, would do well to talk about an area where we have been… I think failure is too strong a word but we have not been successful. I’ll talk about one and then I’ll have you talk about…

Karen:          Oh, I have so many. Okay.

David:          Well it’s funny. Yeah you do have a lot. I would say one, as you know Karen, every time I try to communicate with people. I say “Okay let’s reduce this to a sentence and the sentence has a subject and a response.”  So, this is the subject. We’ll let’s go to the one that I’m talking about today. Today we’re talking about baton passing. Now that’s you have to define what that means but everybody understands what we’re talking about. I think a skill older generation believers should take seriously. The subject is baton passing and the response I want is to have older generation believers take seriously. This is what we’re talking about. Well, I do that and I say to ministers, “If you could at the start of your preparing a sermon say what is the subject you may take it out of scripture or it may come out of your experience then you go to scripture and say how does this relate to the scriptures but write down the subject because if you don’t know what your subject is it’s for sure the people listening to you aren’t going to know what your subject is. That’s very simple. Then what is the response that you want after you get the response? You say do people know how to do this response and if not I have to say to them this is how you do it otherwise you’re just setting them up for failure.” And so on… so on.  Well, anyway I have tried to find someone who has said I really like that and I’m going to do that. You know I’m a total failure in that. In fact Karen I wrote a book.

Karen:          It’s called the sermon sucking black hole. You’ve done a lot of study with parishioner listeners. I mean you’ve questioned hundreds of them.

David:          What do they remember?

Karen:          They don’t…

David:          …the illustration.

Karen:          The illustration or funny story.

David:          Yeah.

Karen:          They might remember the scripture but they don’t remember what the pastor was preaching or wanted them to do and very often they don’t remember on Monday morning. You’ve tried to correct that by helping pastors really understand how they communicate.

David:          I thought, Karen, it would be overwhelmingly receptive to this and say that is really very, very good. I find that they don’t want to hear it.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          You know now there are probably exceptions to it but most of the time after just a few minutes with ministers talking you can hear they’re going la la la la la la la la la la la la. You know have no interest whatsoever. So, I have to figure out how to change the subject and get it back to something they want to talk about you. So, that hasn’t been successful. In fact I have a stack of those sermon sucking black hole books in the garage. They’re almost as many as when we first had them printed. It’s painful for me to admit that because I feel so strongly about it.  I would like for you now to be in an area where you feel you haven’t been as successful at least as successful as you would like to have been in passing the baton.

Karen:          Well, the whole concept of hospitality and local churches raising up people who have a passion for it putting them together in a team that then teaches the entire church the meaning of scriptural hospitality. I mean we are told in scripture, I can quote verse after verse, but we are to be given to hospitality. It doesn’t say the women are supposed to be given and the men don’t have to be.

David:          Well it says even the elders.

Karen:          The elders who are chosen to be the elders of the church must be given to hospitality. This is just not ever emphasized.

David:          And you have this passion that if it were it could change the…

Karen:          It would change local churches. You’d send your people out with the gifts of hospitality having been developed. They would begin to include their neighbors. I mean we have a society that is desperately lonely. I mean the statistics on loneliness are just off the charts. There’s a huge percentage of people. I don’t have my stats in front of me right now who don’t talk to anyone in a whole month. What a ministry for the church at this point in time to begin to invite to welcome to include to learn how to call those neighbors and say how you doing today. You know where you know even with the COVID-19 restrictions I’m thinking come spring we’re going to do driveway dinners.

So, the gift of hospitality that is a passion the Lord will not let me get away from. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking how do we inspire churches to inspire the people.

David:          And you wake me up in the middle.

Karen:          I had this great idea.

David:          But you would say that I don’t think you’re a failure. I think your book has been very helpful.

Karen:          Open heart open home.

David:          …to many people.

Karen:          Yeah.

David:          But at the same time you’re not satisfied.

Karen:          No I’m not. You know that book when it was published it was the only one in the religious marketplace that I knew of on the scriptural gift of hospitality for good 20 years. Maybe 30. And I just did a research project and there are about five or six other books written by Christian writers religious writers in the religious marketplace on hospitality. And what I want to do is set up a virtual  meeting…

David:          Oh… you said with me because you’ve written these are really good.

Karen:          And some of them are just excellent. But it’s not so much that it’s now we have six or seven books in the marketplace that are calling people to exercise the gift of hospitality. So, I want to pull those together in a virtual meeting say what do we do. How do we make an impact with this message that we all feel so strongly about?But now there’s more of us. There’s not just one person.

David:          You know what you’re doing?

Karen:          What?

David:          You’re passing the baton.

Karen:          Passing the baton. Right. So, I want to leave up a national platform on the gift of hospitality that will continue after I had gone. Get it going. Get it started. Put the right people in place who have a passion for it who have better gifts than I do for maintaining it. But that will go on. I don’t need to be there.

David:          Ok. Baton passing. This is a scripture that’s not really dead center as far as target. But it has feelings of what we’re talking about.  Anyway, this is Psalm 78. “What we have heard and known and what our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children. We will tell the next generation.” So, I’m kind of reading into that.

Karen:          I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re reading into it. You know, David, Christ only was here for three years. And a lot of what he did with his disciples who became apostles was pass the baton. I mean, all of his teachings were absolutely stunning. I did a Christmas look at the teachings of Jesus just reading his words. And it was just so deeply, deeply moved by the evidence of in God in his life. But he came to pass that baton along.

David:          And it’s remarkable the influence that the world has received from that single life. Obviously, he was God’s son. He was unique in that sense, but he was setting a pattern. And those he taught specifically the 12 and the 70 and his followers, the impact that they had following.

Karen:          Right.

David:          I mean, it’s absolutely phenomenal.

Karen:          So, what are we saying to people? We’re saying to them, you have a baton that you need to pass on. We all do.

David:          Do you really feel that?

Karen:          I do feel that way and begin to pray about how I pass this baton along. Help me to find the people who are hungry for it and to be open to the millennials. I did a study on millennials for a board I was serving on. And they are hungry for the older generation, partly because we have so many broken families and they need the consistency of people who are really interested in them in an extended family sense. So, this is an opportune time to step into the younger generations life, not to be hesitant about it. You don’t want to be pushy, but you want to be available and open and be sensitive and be instinctive about the fact that these people are looking for someone to pass the baton on to them.

David:          So, apart from those people looking, we’re saying, we’re not going to drop this at the pass-off.

Karen:          No, we’re not going to…

David:          …have a clean pass-off. And I’m going to do it in the time frame that is here, because if I don’t do it within the time frame,

Karen:          I may not have a chance…

David:         I may not have a chance again. So, basically we’re saying to people not to add things to the load they’re already carrying, but to say this is a wonderful area. I go back to our time with Eliana, our granddaughter, Karen. I came away from that day. It was one of the happiest days I’ve had it. I don’t know how long, and I thought, what a tremendous privilege to be able to sit with this 13-year-old.

Karen:          Little hungry Bible, hungry girl. How sweet.

David:          Yeah. We ended the day saying, OK, in all of those, where would you like to start reading now? And we talked about it and we decided we would read a story rather than a letter. And we said, can we get a story about a woman instead of a bottom man? And we locked onto Queen Esther. Tell me about Esther from just what we knew about the Bible and its overview. And we understood that it was after the exile so we could get that in our heads. And So, now I’m waiting for her to finish the book of Esther. It’ll take a little while. But when she comes back, then we’re going to talk about it. I mean, talk about the joy for a grandfather. That’s really something.

Karen:          It’s wonderful, honey.

David:          Yeah. OK, friends, we have passed it on to you for this time. And we’re just wanting you to grab a hold and then run your lap. Ok?

Outro:          You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters, hosts@beforewego.show.   If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2021 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.