Rearview Mirror
In this episode
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Show open: Spotify finally got me
Ben opens from the Pathway Studios and confesses he did something he said he'd never do: he changed the show's opening song after more than 600 episodes, because Spotify kept yanking episodes over the unlicensed tune and he got tired of fighting it. Mike teases him about selling out his principles for roughly 28 Spotify listeners, and Ben asks for feedback on this week's replacement tune.
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This week's big question: 'Can you think about times where it's been clear that God has been acting in your life?'
- When has God been clearly acting in your life — and looking back, can you see he was preparing you for something?
- Is there a risk in looking back at your life for God’s patterns — might you over-bake what you expect him to do next?
Ben frames the week's question for the room and the listeners: think of times when it was clear God was acting in your life, then look back in retrospect and see whether God was preparing you or setting a trajectory you couldn't see at the time. He also poses the follow-up the show will circle back to — whether looking back for patterns risks over-baking what you expect God to do next.
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Mike's story, part 1: 'joke Baptist' faith and a piano invitation
Mike starts his rearview tour with a poor, unstable childhood where he understood God was real but had no relationship with him — 'joke Baptist' faith, his phrase, complete with a Jesus T-shirt worn for show. He married a non-Christian, and it was his first daughter's birth plus an invitation from Boova to play piano at the church Dan was pastoring that began pulling him toward actual faith.
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Mike's story, part 2: laid off, Hy-Vee gift cards, and a foreclosed house in Pleasantville
After Mike finished his five-year electrical apprenticeship, the economy tanked and he was laid off at exactly the journeyman raise — so expensive he cost the same as a 20-year journeyman. They lost the house, lived with his in-laws, and watched a church family cover them with hundred-dollar Hy-Vee gift cards month after month; then, praying for a house, they stumbled onto a foreclosed wreck in Pleasantville that Mike toured by MacGyvering the realtor's lock open by ear — 'Jack Bauered my way into this thing.'
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Mike's story, part 3: the Pleasantville youth group and Ethiopia
Mike tells how God nudged them from a thriving pole-barn youth group to start a scrappy new one in Pleasantville after his brother called back illegally from a treatment center to say God had confirmed it, and how he saw God's hand — then a crisis of faith — in their international adoption journey: a National Geographic magazine on his boss's desk pointed them at Ethiopia, the money all showed up, they waited five years, and then Ethiopia shut down international adoption. He still doesn't understand that 'Ebenezer,' and he wonders what God is preparing him for next at 43.
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Dan's story, part 1: Mrs. Hugh Berger and the ice cream bar
Dan describes a dysfunctional childhood where his Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Hugh Berger, drew him in — and the day God stopped him cold outside the Red Owl grocery in Clear Lake after he'd stolen an ice cream bar right in front of her. Weeks later a 'fishers of men' VBS lesson settled his call to ministry, though he wanted to preach without being 'the guy'; his first real crisis came when his high school girlfriend headed a different direction and God moved her to the Philippines with the Air Force.
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Dan's story, part 2: 24 years of Pathway and a decade in Africa
At 20, Wilbur asked Dan to preach one Sunday and he never stopped — six years at a little church on Des Moines' east side, then Atlantic, then a year and a half of nightly prayer with his wife before they moved to plant Pathway, which just marked 24 years with the 25th anniversary coming next year. What started as a $100-a-month Africa scholarship became a decade of trips — dozens coming to Christ, a church planted that planted another church — work Dan insists isn't his strength and never would have chosen.
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Ben's story, part 1: the 'inadequate' trajectory
Ben wishes he'd gone first, because his trajectory feels 'inadequate' next to theirs — he never had the dramatic interventions, and he's theologically open to that being either fine or a blindness. He traces his thread: reading straight through the Bible in high school, defending the faith in a mostly non-Christian college English department, telling his future wife on their first date he wouldn't marry a non-Christian, and drifting toward Pathway through Mike's bass invitation — then Dan's executive-pastor offer, which he accepted with no 'call,' just a practical sense that it was right.
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Ben's story, part 2: the Jacksonville dream and the house church
Ben stayed on full-time at Pathway for six months around its 10th anniversary and the building program, then quietly went back to his corporate job when the money ran out — and started noticing his own radical simplicity, which never quite fit normal church machinery. While praying in a Jacksonville hotel about the growing misfit, he had a dream or vision of being sucked up to the third heaven to the roar of many waters and a scrolling marquee reading 'Jesus is Lord' — not instructions, but an affirmation of God's sovereignty — and out of that came the house church. His English degree taught him to read narratives, he says, and his job's stability means the house church needs nothing.
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Roundtable: Simeon, Jeremiah, and Craig in Albia
Mike brings it together with Simeon, the weirdo hanging around the temple, as the picture of un-shiny faithfulness, and admits the other side of his story — feeling drained and half-mad at God while half-hearted believers look happy. Dan answers with Jeremiah's perpetual broken heart, Mike contrasts Moses' waffliness with David's confidence and the Instagram preachers, and Ben presses the Craig thought experiment: the pastor in Albia who never leaves for 50 years might be either faithful or rebellious, and the amount of visible change is no measure of the Holy Spirit's movement.
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'Is there a risk in looking back that way?'
Ben ties off the main discussion by returning to the follow-up question: is there a risk in stitching the past together to predict what God will do next week? He tells of his wife's 'but God brought us here' instinct about their home, and argues both staying and going could be honored by God — so no one's spiritual experience should be a bellwether for anyone else's, and the danger is shutting a door on the kind of thing God does.
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React now: 'I don't want to move to India' and the church-door story
Mike says what people really fear is that trusting God means he'll act like a 'wild man' and send them to India, and argues that when God speaks he means now — Philip got the desert road, not a week to think about it. Dan adds the Great Commission 'as you go' posture: his radar-off night sleeping at the church when the AC died put him and his wife at the door when a desperate mother with a baby rang for prayer. Ben closes the block with the complaint line number and punts the Secular vs. Solomon quiz to next week — time to cram for the proverbs.
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Dear LFTP: the neighbor's granddaughter Sarah
- What do you do when you want to stay friends with a neighbor but her teen won’t stop acting up?
Mike reads a Dear LFTP letter about Dee, whose granddaughter Sarah has turned disrespectful — ringing the doorbell for no reason, teasing the cats, skating back and forth outside the apartment. The guys' verdict: it's a perspective problem more than a behavior problem — be nice, bribe her with candy, invest in her skating — while the read-aloud secular answer holds Dee responsible as the adult in the household and says to call the police if it ever turns criminal.
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Dear LFTP: the mother-in-law moved in
- My mother-in-law moved in seven months ago and it’s been difficult — how can we sort this out?
The last letter comes from a wife whose mother-in-law moved in seven months ago with no boundaries, rising bills, unpaid prescriptions, and open disrespect. Dan thinks she exaggerates the utility bill — which makes him doubt the rest — and Mike's counsel is that a house runs because the homeowner sets the rules: generosity without boundaries just breeds resentment. Ben wonders if Western individualism creates these situations; the secular answer says call a meeting of the three of them — overdue, and still possible.
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Signoff: 'Be faithful in the means. God will handle the ends.'
Ben thanks the listeners, admits to the video audience that he left the room mid-show to pee, and replays the complaint line — sponsored by Bob Eisenlauer, 515-517-0085, call or text — before closing with the standard signoff: 'Be faithful in the means. God will handle the ends.'
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Outro: 'till justice is fair'
The show closes under an outro song about justice — 'Sit on gilded thrones but the Lord sees all... The lion don't whisper. It tears through the air. The Lord won't relent till justice is fair.'