There's Never A Good Time to Have Kids. Have them Anyway. with Griffin Gooch | Episode 288

Hello, and welcome to Church and Main, a podcast for people interested in the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. The goal for a lot of people in life is rather simple. Get married and have children. And yet, there are more and more younger people these days who seem to be afraid of doing either option, especially the having kids part. They will say it's not a good time to have kids. And a quick look at the news these days might give you the impression that, yeah, now is a terrible time to have children. Griffin Goosh, a Gen Z theologian and expectant father, looks at the same news and says, There is never a good time to have children, and you should have children anyway. He explained his position this way in a recent essay. Quote, The authors of Scripture wrote about children as if they were a blessing, an inherent good. So, even if this world is marred and drenched in a horrible amount of bad, bringing something good into the world isn't going to increase its bad. It can't. Unquote. So, for this episode, I chat with Griffin Goosh about why Gen Z and everyone else should have kids. A little bit about Griffin. He is a theologian, a writer, and also a professor at a college in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He also happens to be a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary and is currently getting his Ph.D. At the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He's written widely, beyond his sub-stack also for Christianity Today, Mirror Orthodoxy, Inkwell, Christ in Pop Culture, Front Porch Republic, and many more. So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Griffin Goosh. Well, Griffin, thanks for being on the podcast. I wanted to start things out by just getting to know a little bit about you, kind of your faith background and what you do and all of that. Yeah, so I am currently an almost fully trained theologian, so I have about a year left on my dissertation at University of Aberdeen. So, as soon as that's done, which should be done, And I think next May, I will be an official, I'll officially be a theologian. But yeah, I've been following Jesus for 10 years now. I started following Jesus like right as I started college, actually. I was studying philosophy at a secular university. And I became a Christian in that environment, which was just kind of interesting to think about. And uh yeah ever since then i just wanted to like do something honorable um, toward god with whatever giftings that i had and so at first i tried to be a worship leader but then i strained my vocal cords beyond repair while i was working at a church out in los angeles and then uh i decided to uh, switch switch gears and then become a theologian which is what i've been doing for the past um i think five years now, all in all and so yeah that brings me to where i am today um i'm I'm still in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and, yeah, heavily involved in the local church and just trying to surf God through writing and teaching and yeah, things along those lines. So, I'm kind of assuming, like, growing up, your parents and things didn't have a church background? There's the term that everybody uses where it's, like, Christmas Easter. Christmas Easter, yep. Priesters. Yes. That's kind of what it was like. I remember there were a few seasons here and there where we were, like, trying to go more consistently. But, no, it didn't really start kicking in until I was in college. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Oh, cool. You know, I think the reason I wanted to, I've been trying to find a way to get you on the podcast for a while now, but I think you wrote a really kind of cool article maybe just about a week ago, basically on the recent news that you're going to be a dad later this year. That's with the title, having kids when there's never a good time to have kids. And it kind of talks about and we hear this a lot in the news these days that there seem to be especially among younger people, this fear of having kids but, that you know why do i want to bring a kid into this world is kind of the the thing that seems to come to fore and so you kind of spend a lot of that essay talking about that um, maybe the the first way i want to start is what led you to write the article, besides knowing that you're going to be a dad. Okay, well, starting to write it was kind of interesting because over the past, I don't know, probably my wife and I have been married for like five years, and we've always been kind of clear about our intentions, like, hey, we want to have kids one day. But we noticed that sometimes, you know, we would have some friends, usually people who are outside of the church, to kind of give these reactions like, are you sure you want to do that? Is this something that's actually going to be good for you or good for your future? Is it, you know, sort of even just like implying that the idea of having kids is somehow selfish for the reason that's the general reason. There are some other reasons out there that I've heard, but the general reason is that the world is on a steep decline. And that if you do have kids within a generation, there's not going to be a world left for them to grow up into. And there's like various reasons for it. Lots of people cite climate change. That's probably the biggest one. I think there was a survey that asked for people's different opinions for not having kids. And I believe climate change was the biggest tangible concern. And then beyond that, it was like politics, economic concerns, threats of war, things along those lines. And so just noticing constantly that so few people were excited to have kids. And then. The weird aspect of seeing so many people being skeptical about it was actually like, you know, I do a lot of research in the social sciences and I have a book about happiness coming out. And so I did like a bunch of research on the psychology of happiness and like what actually leads to a good life. And one of the first ones is, you'll just see this in every single book about happiness because it really is one of the things that, makes you so happy is find a family, find friends, find close connections, and then just stay in that community for as long as you possibly can. I mean, there was this Harvard study of adult development, which, I mean, it lasted, well, it's still going on. It's been going on for 87 years straight. So they started this study with people who are attending Harvard and inner city kids at the same time and going on, I think 87, 88 years now at this point. And they were basically just trying to figure out like, what makes for a good life? What makes people happy? How do you actually, you know, build a flourishing lifestyle? And the answer that they came into, it's so funny, but it's just get married, have kids, do things. Things along those lines and so it's there's this weird dichotomy between um, what our culture believes will make us happy which is this sense of like security of like get a good job you know get social status get enough money get like enough popularity or just resources and just have as much of that as you possibly can and also don't live. Don't um give yourself any constraints Like live as free from constraints as you possibly can. And it's just so interesting how different the cultural definition of like happiness and living a good life is actually different from social science and then obviously from, you know, biblical theology and along those lines. And so all those things kind of came together and that's sort of what got me thinking about the article. Why do you think that there is, I mean, it seems like, and I don't know, but it feels like there is almost a generational, push against having kids and sometimes going even farther against getting married or to things to that extent. And the reason I say it appears that way, because maybe that's something that has always been there, but I don't know. I mean, growing up, and I'm an elder Gen Xer, no one was talking like that. And my generation was the one, we were fearful of nuclear war. And I don't think people were running around saying we weren't going to have kids. But it seems like that is more of a thing now. Yeah. Why do you think that is? That's such a good question. Well, so in the article, I was talking about these books that I was reading, and these novels from like 18th century, 19th century. So you had like one from Dostoyevsky, one from Steinbeck. And then I was just reading, Ernest Hemingway had this one, it was about like the Spanish Civil War, which was like a horrible time to be alive, in a sense of like, oh, wow, there's so much war going on. You're living in this place where there's just bombs going off everywhere. People are you're living in constant threat of disaster but um there's this part where this woman is just asking him like are you worried that you know uh your your wife will get pregnant or something like that and he's basically just like not not really it's not like my biggest concern which is so enormously different from how we would be thinking about that nowadays we would just immediately say like oh everything that you can do to possibly avoid having kids right now is what you should do but um and then also even just um if you go back like even 30 years, like 80s or 90s movies and stuff. I can't think of a single reference in any of these movies. I'm sure you could find one, but anytime that there's a baby or a pregnancy, it's never like, oh my gosh, what are you going to do? Or your life is going to be over. It's almost unanimously considered a blessing, something that's good, something that you should actually be proud of or happy of. And so that's really weird to think about the fact that it was so normal and so, just generally considered good i mean just 20 30 years ago but now it's just completely shifted and i'm guessing the. The other big shifts that happened in this time frame you know so we had a rapid advancement of informational technology so obviously like when the iphone came out in 2007 that was like the, biggest step forward in information traveling since the gutenberg press in the 15th century right 16th century one of those can't remember off the top planet um and so when that happens um you start hearing all of the world's news all at once it's in your pocket it's inescapable and so when you do hear the world's news what it tends to sift to the top is the negative news just because uh you know it's part of like cognitive bias that human beings have is like you know we pay attention to negative news much more profoundly and strongly than positive news it's just how we think for whatever reason and so, when you have all these things kind of coalescing like this rise of informational technology all the world's bad news in your pocket all at once it starts giving you like a rapid rapid sense of things are doomed things are going things are not going, in a good direction along those lines so that's probably one pillar of it and then also the other pillar i would say is like um, whereas you know my dad's generation they thought of um constraints as kind of a good thing like you know you would view things marriage as like, oh. This is just a good thing to do. It's the right thing to do, in a sense. There was almost this moral duty about it. But nowadays, marriage, and it's been reimagined in these past, I mean, again, like 30 years now, but nowadays marriage has been like, uh, sort of idealized as like a place for where you can just fulfill your pleasures or your desires. And even the way that Christians kind of talk about marriage sometimes too, in the church, it's more like, oh, you get married and that's something that you can sort of just channel your sexual energy into or something along those lines. Like, it's not like hallowed as if it's like this beautiful, amazing mystery, like which is what Paul calls it. Um, it's more of just seen as like, oh, this is just this thing that you do to like fulfill your desires essentially so it sort of instrumentalizes marriage, and turns it into something slightly more profane than it actually should be considered and so, both both of those things together probably informational technology rising and then just a total redefinition of ethics towards whatever fulfills yourself and whatever fulfills your pleasure. Something in the essay and maybe it was it was in relation to some a quote you had from Dostoevsky about people wanting a frictionless life. And when I thought about that, I read a lot of stuff by Andy Root, and then he also reads things that are related to Harmat Rosa and all that stuff. And that got me thinking about all of that, that there is that desire for that having a child or getting married are things that are, Let me say, being married is not frictionless. You're dealing with another person, and that person is, you know, and let's just say my husband can kind of tell me I'm not the nicest, you know, I can also be a, he loves me greatly, but also can think, who are you? You're bugging me. And so there's always that kind of sense of friction that is a part of life that I feel it sounds like, and what you're saying in the essay especially, is that people. Want to have this or maybe are afraid of it because it's not frictionless. And so they kind of have this illusion that they can have a life that's frictionless. But it seems like if you have that, you're not going to have life. Yeah exactly yeah it just it's one of those things that is really hard for us to discern because um i mean again we've read, i'm sorry i have happiness just so much on my brain because i've just been studying it for years now but we have this idea that like living a good life or, finding happiness or true joy or something like that is not going to involve, grief or negative emotions essentially it's just going to be this non-stop rush of positive emotions but uh, And this is really interesting because this just came out in like 2026. It's like one of the most recent studies on happiness. They did this meta-analysis on different forms of happiness and different paradigms of happiness. And they found that people who define happiness as maximized pleasure and minimized pain, which is the Freudian pleasure principle, people who define happiness that way, which is hedonic happiness, they tend to be much more unhappy than people. Who can have a vision of happiness that allows them to be sad within it. Which is kind of so which i mean it just goes so against like logic you know you would think that you would just want more pleasurable emotions that you would just want to feel ecstatic all the time but in reality you need those negative emotions because they give your positive emotions something to compare themselves to and so in the in a counterintuitive way things like grief things like sadness things like you know even just having a moment to like cry or something like that those things actually do lead to a better life than anything else. And so in the sense that, tying it back to the article, we have this fear of, oh, if we bring a child into the world, they're going to face so many horrible things. They're going to have a really hard life. Things are just going to not go well for them in general. And because of that rationale, we tend to say, oh, let's just not do that because they're going to have such a hard life. But in reality, the hardships that they will face, that all of us face, are actually going to lead us closer to a good life. If you lived a frictionless life, if you never suffered, you would never realize your need for God. You never really realized your need for transcendence. You would never realize that there's something else beyond this temporal, imminent frame. You would be kind of just stuck in your own devices, essentially, and then that would not lead to a flourishing life. Jesus was talking about, and he talks about this in Luke 6, Matthew 23, but just saying, like, woe to you who have everything you need, okay? Woe to you who... Your stomach is full constantly. Woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are very obsessed with status building with other people. Because the more that you do those things, the more that you're actually distracting yourself from the reality that you need something beyond yourself, essentially. And so, yeah, in a roundabout way, we rationalize this idea of I'm not going to bring a child in the world because something bad could happen to them. When in reality, it is that friction that they face it is that resistance that they face that does actually lead to a better life. Even though it's hard and even though we it's not like, just to clarify it's not like a stoic kind of oh yeah just suffer and get used to it or like oh yeah just deal with this bad thing and then just you know suck it up or something like that it's like suffer and feel it all the way you know like jesus and, garden of gethsemane right he was lamenting crying right all of those things he felt everything so like again like christian life isn't just like oh yeah get really used to the suffering and then move on you know it's it's metabolizing the suffering with god. You know part of this is also because i think we we see this especially in some surveys that especially among gen z that it's a generation that is, far less religious really than past generations, that not having that kind of religious background allows you to think, why would you have a child or why would you get married? And not understand the religious background of those two experiences. Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that's a huge factor. I know that there's, it's a little bit old now, so I'm not sure if the numbers need to be redone or anything like that. But I remember about six years ago, there was this big study about projections for, you know, who's going to have the most kids. And then by the year 2050, it was found that atheists were going to be in the vast minority by 2050, because so few of them were either having kids or planning on having kids. Whereas it looked like christians and muslims were going to be leading the charge and having kids so like by the year 2050 they were basically saying in kind of a dark way it was like okay well it looks like atheists are going to kind of become slowly extinct because they're not procreating they're not reproducing whereas christians and muslims seem to be doing that in insane numbers. And so i do think there's a huge religious gap in this scenario for sure and i mean part of part of the Christian faith, you know, one of the things that I do talk about a lot in my personal work, because it's just a view that I really just dislike, but we, lots of Christians do have kind of a doomerist mentality of like things are going to go to hell in a handbasket and things along those lines, you know, being very pessimistic about the state of the world. And there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about the state of the world. There are plenty of horrible, horrible things happening constantly. But at the same time, embedded within our faith is a hermeneutic of hope, you know, just realizing that we can interpret everything around us as if we, have hope, even if there's not even a logical reason to feel hopeful. You know, we have an actual logical substantiation, a theological imperative to hope even in times of dire circumstances. And so that's one of the things that religion, I think in general, should help us prepare for is just this idea that we need to hope even in face of adversity, suffering and perceived hopelessness. Therefore, having kids is not as scary as it might be for some other worldviews. What do you think is the Christian understanding, especially of having children? You touch on that a little bit in talking about some of the history, especially in the Hebrew Scripture of people who are barren and how that was considered such a shame. And then going through that, what has been, at least in your understanding and possibly in your study, of what was kind of the biblical understanding of having children? So, in biblical theology, I mean, it was, I mean, building right off of Genesis, right? So, in Genesis, God says, be fruitful and multiply. So, for most of history, Christians have really taken that command very seriously and literally, you know, and then talking about, you know, how God will bless the offspring of Abraham and things along those lines, especially for the Jewish people in the Old Testament, you know, the idea that if you did have offspring, it would naturally be blessed because Yahweh, the God of Israel, said that he would bless that offspring. There is just a reality where they perceived, you know, procreation, having children as just a natural blessing. And so to be deprived of that, to become barren or to be unmarried or widowed or something without the chance of having a child was such a horrible detriment that it was on par with the greatest injustice that could happen to a woman. And it was one of the reasons, I mean, procreation was so important in Old Testament theology. And. I probably don't have time to talk about it, but in the New Testament, because of certain translations of Ephesians 5, people started kind of getting away from the idea of marriage as being like this holy mystery and started trying to like hallow singleness, essentially. And so because of that, the whole beauty of procreation, the theological imperative of procreation kind of got lost a little bit in translation. But anyways, back in the Old Testament, you know, it was such an important thing to have a child that there was a law, essentially, where if a woman was married to a man and, the man dies before they were able to procreate, the woman was supposed to marry that man's brother and on and on down the line until she was able to procreate. And this was just a, it sounds so strange to our culture now, like just obviously, and it would be weird if we just tried to start that up again, right? But at the same time, there is something about that attests to like the deep, intrinsic beauty of having a child, of just making a baby. There's something so beautiful in it that God just blessed it throughout creation. He just wove it into the natural law of reality. Yeah, and I think I remember, was it in the Old Testament, what they call the sin of Onanism, the Onan spilling the seed? Yeah, in Genesis 38. Yeah, and that was considered a grave error to do. Yeah, oh, absolutely, yeah, that's a great connection. So, one of the things I'm trying to figure out is how do then do you, try to instill in people, especially in your generation, the importance of having children, the importance of being married? How do you get to that point in a society where there does seem to be a lot of doomerism. And just people not seeing a sense of hope? Yeah. I mean, that's a tough question. It's not something that naturally comes very easily because lots of people do struggle with it in many ways. I mean, obviously, it's much easier to kind of give this feel when you're within a church environment where, you know, you have more of like a theological imperative to, you know, pursue procreation, essentially. But especially when it's outside of the church. I mean, for that, I would just probably just draw on, I mean, there's so much just secular research just about how, like, the way that our news media is set up, the way that information is set up. I mean, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but we're so geared towards negativity bias in a sense. So the reason why... Everybody that I know, essentially, I don't know if this was as much for Gen X. I've heard varied things from Gen X. But for me, especially for millennials, we grew up with this natural assumption that the world was getting worse progressively, that everything was on a steep decline, that we weren't actually moving towards something good. That the world was the world had to get progressively worse there was no idea of having hope that if you had hope for the world that you were just genuinely naive essentially um, but social scientists uh i mean you got like people i don't really like these guys necessarily like as people uh but, i respect them but like steven pinker um who we got i'm just looking around the room we got hans rosling um, matt ridley people along these lines they're they they put together like a lot of research on this topic and found that like regardless of your points in history you have this negative bias towards events so that you tend to interpret everything as if it's going negatively you know so this is called the technical term for it is negativity bias but some people call it the rose-colored lens syndrome which i think is, a better it's kind of like a better way to illustrate it but rose-colored lens syndrome is essentially this bias that we have to interpret yesterday as better than today and then way better than tomorrow essentially so when we. It's one of the reasons why regardless of how old you are you tend to interpret the times of your childhood as just better than now like it it's happens to me, it happens to me like constantly i'm not even very old but like you know i just see like oh these kids these days are on tiktok and they're coming up with all this algo speak that i can't understand and so it's like you just naturally interpret like oh things are worse now for this generation it was so much better when i was a kid but in reality that that is just a cognitive bias that human beings have for whatever reason we just tend to interpret things in the past as if they were better than they are right now and are better than and much better than they will be in the future and so we just naturally for whatever reason have a skepticism about the goodness of the future and so due to that we tend to minimize the potential for good even though good things happen to each and every one of us every day we just tend to not actually notice them realize them or even just take a second to you know stop and smell the roses or something like that right and so when i was trying to explain this to somebody who might not have a religious framework is just try to deal with it like that in the sense of just saying hey you know you will live a good life if you get married if you have children you know it's like, one of the one of the most well-proven things in all of social sciences is just this idea that if you get married and have kids you will live a really good life like that's just a. It's essentially like an indisputable fact like some people will have a hard time but the general trend is that if you do those things you will flourish in a sense and And so I would probably just go in that direction, just saying like, hey, like there is so much, tendency to look at things negatively. But if you do step out, choose to have optimism, choose to have hope in this situation, there's a good chance that things will turn out for good. I think you bring up in the essay, especially how hard childbirth was maybe about a century ago. And I think you shared a statistic that in the 19th century, child mortality in the U.S. Was at 463 deaths per 1,000 births. So, we're basically saying about half of the kids, half the people who were born were going to die. And according to most recent data now, it's 5.5 out of 1,000. I mean, that's a huge change. Um and it just it i i just find that interesting because, it was worse you know 100 150 years ago to have children you know most of those kids were not going to live, uh and we're not even talking about whether even the mother was what's going to live or not um you know childbirth was risky i I mean, it still is risky, but it was even very risky back then. Oh, my goodness. And now it's not. I mean, it's not as, you know. Yeah, no fear is risky. Yeah. No, no. And, you know. There are other countries that are even better than the U.S. When it comes to child mortality, but 5.5 is good. But I think we don't see that, or because we kind of live in this kind of the now, we don't understand the whole sweep of history of how rough it could be. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, yeah. Well, I mean, part of it is, you know, none of us were alive back then. Of course. If you're not really studying history, which is one of the things that, I mean, I teach church history, so that's one of the things that's really helped give me some perspective on this is like every day I'm like, oh my gosh, things were so difficult back then. It was just an insane amount of difficulty constantly. And so if you don't have a historical framework and if you're not just like casually looking along some of these, you know, older documents or if you're not just studying statistics, which none of those things are very common pastimes for Gen Z especially. But yeah if you're not doing any of those things you would just interpret like, those 5.5 out of 1 000 you would just say oh that's horrible you know that's just an awful amount of deaths or something like that but when you compare it to something you're like oh obviously 5.5 is horrible it's awful but it's like wow that's statistically so much safer, but it's like you just need those older stats or something to compare the present to. Do you think that having children especially is –, I mean, it does kind of lead to a sense of hope. And what I'm thinking about – and I have this thing, I'm not crazy about reading a lot of apocalyptic literature, but I kind of know about some of these things. So, like I know about the novel Children of Men and the fact that all of a sudden women can't have children. And basically, society just goes to seed, because in some ways, there's this sense that we're dying, and so there's just no hope. And it seems to me that birth has something to say about hope, that even as with all the problems that are in the world, this thing can still happen. And life can still happen, that somehow God can still create this new life. Yeah, no, I think there's something very much to that. I mean, there's definitely like, um, social scientific, social scientific literature that talks about this emotion called awe, which is this, this feeling of your mind trying to accommodate itself to something mysterious or amazing, essentially. And one of the biggest, one of the biggest ways that we experience awe is like witnessing the birth of a child. There's just something about it that's just inexplicably, inexplicably beautiful. And so there's definitely something to that but even just from the theological perspective you know there's something so strange and weird and beautiful about the fact that jesus you know god himself. Chose to actually come into the world through birth essentially there's so many different ways he could have just descended from heaven right they could just like, he could just okay well i'm going to descend and then ascend later so much easier that way so there's something strangely weird and beautiful about the very fact that you know um in genesis 3 when, you know it's talking about the bad things that are going to happen now as the result of the fall um it talks about how like oh this women will now experience suffering and childbirth it's now going to be very painful or you know that's essentially what's there and then, you know that's the the first adam right and then the last adam which is christ chooses to enter the world through same process birth which is amazing like it's, it's it's one of those things where you know uh maximus the confessor the sixth century theologian he was talking about that in one of his books and i was just blown away by that just thinking about how, you know there is something actually theologically beautiful and significant about birth just as it is there's something about it that's just. And also, I just like that also that we don't, I'm trying to articulate how beautiful and amazing it is, but I can't. There's just not enough language to describe the process of it. And it's still like a mystery in a sense. And there's something just beautiful in the sense that it's a mystery. And I just love that about it. How does it feel for you personally, now that you're going through this process, of having a child? And what does that mean for you as a Christian? Well, in one sense, I am still a little bit scared just because I know, like, wow, I'm a bad sleeper in general. I'm chronic insomnia. and uh so i'm like wow it's gonna be pretty tough for, the first like year maybe more than that actually maybe way way longer than just a year so there's like a part of me where i'm like oh this is going to be kind of nerve-wracking but at the same time um i mean, we uh spent this past weekend with um we were watching our nieces and our nephews they're like uh all they're all all under the age of six and um. I mean it's tiring it's crazy but there's something so much, it's so much fun in a sense like you get to see the world through the lens of a child like they're mystified about the tiniest things and they're just blown away because they're experiencing most of the world for the same time and so they're experiencing everything with like the height of emotion right good and bad you know it's one of the, one of the reasons why it's like they can literally be so happy about the smallest things but then the smallest things can also just set them off and you know just they start crying just belligerently right and so um, the idea just that the sense of just i'm so excited to just care for something else you know it's uh it seems like counterintuitive but there's just something that's so life-giving about serving you know, something that really cannot serve you back right it's just it's a very self-sacrificial process they can't really start doing much for you until they're much older right, and um so i, i'm as a christian man i'm very just excited about that just even just thinking about just how it's gonna spiritually form me and um yeah. Well, I think it's interesting how you end the essay, because you talk about, how you're thinking of maybe writing the great American novel. And you talk a little bit about, you know, you're thinking about, you know, would you ever become the Gen Z's Hemingway? And you talk a little bit about your visit. That you and your wife go to the fertility clinic to get an ultrasound, and, you see that and all of that, and you basically say all those fears, because you also had a whole lot of fears that they were evaporated. And you say something that just kind of stuck by me. It's like it's hard to stay cynical when you see a baby's heartbeat yeah could you kind of explain a little bit more about that because i think that was kind of a yeah a center part of that essay. Yeah um well so sadly um this was, our this is our third pregnancy but you know we haven't had any kids yet and so it's been a very hard process of um just trying to essentially get pregnant and then you know try to you know fight for, a lasting and healthy pregnancy and so we've been to the this through this process a lot of times before and so we got to, the clinic and uh, you know it was the it was the the weak mark where we're gonna try to hear the heartbeat which you know we had never heard before and so there's this just. Deep fear and i mean we still have it you know even if we go to the doctor now there's just this kind of like leftover trauma or anxiety from that experience and so, you know we go in there and we you know hear that we're about to start doing this and just the, second of seeing i don't know i there's just, i've never been i've never experienced like any emotion on that caliber before in my life but you know you've seen i feel like in my life you know we had like dogs and cats and stuff around or like animals and you would see like them give birth or something like that, and you know i've had some like friends or brothers and sisters who've, you know had babies but i've never been like close to it or around it or like deeply involved in it but just to be, just to be there and just actually witness it, um it's like all of those anxieties that I might have had about having kids you know the anxiety about like oh if I what if I can't accomplish all the things that I'm supposed to do or like what if I don't have time in my schedule to do the things that I'm supposed to what if I can't like honor the things that God has called me to, all of that all of those worries were just put immediately into perspective and so any sort of cynicism that I might have had about like oh what if things don't go the way that, they're supposed to what if this gets in the way of other more important stuff it's like that just completely evaporated there was just Yeah. It was just none of that anymore. And so, I don't know. I'm still trying to, I tried to talk about it in that essay, but it's just, it's hard to articulate it. But, you know, a lot of my friends who've been through similar experiences, they try to, you know, describe it as well. And they struggle to find words for it either. But it's just something insurmountably beautiful. In that moment, where did you think you saw God? I mean, just like, I mean, you see, we saw the ultrasound. And so I would just say like, you know, you see, it kind of looks like a, you know, if you're at the hospital and you see that like monitor, like the little beep, beep, beep, just that, like the fact that there was motion there, you know, I also teach like philosophy. And so there's like the thing about aristotle where he thought about like god as if he was this unmoved mover you know like he was the first cause of everything, and so thinking about like, that heartbeat just actually not existing you know uh 10 weeks before that and then all of a sudden a cause came into being something caused that right and so that was just yeah that's exactly where i saw it. If you were talking to someone who is not in the church, but is around your age and is not sure about having children or getting married, how would you talk to them about this? Oh, man, I would probably talk to them a little bit along the same lines of what we were talking about a little bit earlier, like just trying to realize that there is a logical rationale to have hope. You know it's not something that's naive it's not something that's dumb it's not something that's stupid and so i would kind of go in that direction a little bit but then even beyond that just you know trying to just appeal to their subjective experience just saying hey like this is something that is actually worthwhile this is something that's beautiful this is something that can actually change your life in the best possible way and you know, you know you you're probably assuming that the good life it can will come in other ways you know and it can like in certain ways like in certain unique circumstances it can come in those kinds of ways but, you know there's something about the simple beauty of just doing something along these lines that can actually really breathe life into your experience. I think one of the things that is always important to remember, and I think when it's either having children or getting married, is the importance of realizing, one, that it's not all about you. But I think, two, is that it's not all on you. And there's something important about knowing that that life, yeah you don't have to go through life all on your own um or or rely all on your own and i i worry i kind of worry sometimes that younger generations feel, that it's all on them and that there is no one there to help them um, and i don't know that's just something i i think about, yeah no i mean i definitely agree with that as well. So where do you think the future will be you know a few years from now for generations do you think that maybe that they will see some reason to have kids or that, it's a good time to have kids even if the times aren't great yeah which i think then means can this generation find a sense of hope because that's kind of what we're talking about, yeah um i very much believe so but i do think it's very contingent upon, religiosity in general i just uh obviously you know um, so i mean the the cultural icons and the models that are very praised right now in our culture are usually the people who are like celebrities or influencers on social media or something like that. And so even if you're not a Christian or something like that, you can see an influencer or a celebrity who is having a child and finding fulfillment and joy through that. And you can be inspired towards that. You can say, oh, there is something joyful and beautiful about that. But beyond that, I think it just really will require a return to religiosity in a sense. And I do believe that lots of people do debate these. I mean, if you're on subsec a lot, there's a guy named Ryan Burge who does a lot of the statistics on these things. Yes, I do. Yeah, yeah. So he's generally more pessimistic about any sort of religious revivals or revivals in church attendance where you have other people like Justin Brierley, who's much more optimistic about a surprising rebirth and belief in God. And so there's definitely streams of difference in what we think the future is going to hold. But I'm personally more optimistic about it. And it might not the difference is that it might not look like conventional church attendance did in like the 1960s or something like that it might look just slightly different it might look like small communities popping up here and there things along those lines but i'm generally hoping and believing that there is a returned, uh there is going to be a return to spirituality, and united around some sort of religion ideally christianity um but i do think there is going to be a move in that direction and so any sort of like. Rise in people wanting to have kids i do believe is going because it can be inspired inspired in small ways like i was just saying with influencers so but that, for a big like return to childbearing as like a good joyful happy blessing is going to require just a larger return to religiosity i think. Yeah i was actually talking a while back with a lutheran pastor. Who does believe in some type of revival. But I think one of the things that he says is that it doesn't look like what we would expect a revival to look like. And I think you're basically saying the same thing is that we think of either historically, going back to the Great Awakenings or something to that extent, or what church was like in the 1960s or 70s or something. But what a revival might look like in 2026 may look very different from what it did in 1966. Oh, absolutely. And so, we might be missing what's happening, that it's not happening in the way that, you know, there are these droves of people just all coming to church. But it might be, as you said, in smaller groups that are happening that we are just not picking up yet. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I can definitely see that as well. And that is kind of what I do see, among a lot of people who are around my age is more like less like megachurch focused and more like, hey, can we be attached to this church, but really be focused in this intentional small group, that kind of thing. Mm hmm. Yeah, and I think the religiosity connection does matter because I think it's the sense, as I've said before, of hope. And I think one of the things that religion, especially Christianity, instills is a sense of hope even beyond how things look in the world. That when you don't have that, then you just kind of curve in, as Luther says. So you just curve in on yourself. Yeah oh absolutely so well if people want to know more and and you do have a really cool sub stack where should they go uh well, yeah i'm the main thing that i'm active on is a sub stack you can search griffin goosh or reality theology and you can find that there, i'm also vaguely on instagram here and there uh just you can just search my name and just find me on there but Yeah, that's pretty much the main places to find me. Okay. Well, Griffin, thank you so much for this. This was great. Again, congratulations on the birth announcement and blessings through this whole process. And I think you said it's a due date in November? Yes, sir. Okay, so blessings for that to happen and that happens smoothly. And I hope to have you back on the podcast. Thank you so much. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I would love that, man. Thanks so much for having me. As usual, I will put the link to Griffin's article in the show notes. And I'm always interested in hearing your thoughts about the episode. Feel free to send me an email at churchinmain at subsec.com. If you want to learn more about the podcast, listen to past episodes, or donate, check me out at churchinmain, all one word, dot org. And you can also check churchinmain.substack.com to read related articles. I'm actually working on one right now that will be about, the need for the local church. You can also listen to episodes of Church in Main. I do put some of those episodes on my substack that usually appears about a week after it goes live on the main website. You can also become a paid subscriber of the Substack. I don't put anything behind the paywall, but if you would like to. Support me financially, you can do that. It is five bucks a month or $60 a year on Substack. And again, to do that, go to churchinmain.substack.com. Otherwise, I hope that you will subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app and to leave a rating or review. When you do that, that actually helps others find the podcast. And I also hope that you will consider sharing this podcast with others. That's going to be it for this episode of Church in Maine. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Again, thank you so much for listening. Take care, everyone. Godspeed, and I will see you very soon.