Brad Gee: Axis exists to equip and empower parents to have all of the important conversations that they need to have with their teens. What did it look like when Jesus engaged with people in his daily life? How did he ask them questions? How did he engage them in conversation? So much of what Jesus did was inherently relational, and he asked hard questions, and he involved himself in the lives of his followers. What does it actually mean to believe in something? The faith is the movement towards God and the trust that God will meet us as we move towards him.
Eden: Welcome to the Bibles.net podcast, where we have casual conversations with people whose ministries have changed our lives. Each episode, we introduce you to someone you’ll want to meet, whose life and ministry can help you know and love Jesus better. We’ll also answer a relevant question with a biblical answer and share with you some life-changing resources you’ll want on your shelf. I’m your host, Eden, the editor of Bibles.net. who loves Jesus and believes he’s the hope you need today.
I’m excited to introduce to you Brad Gee. Brad is the Donor Relationship Manager at Axis. And Axis is a ministry that equips parents for gospel-centered conversations with their teens about faith and culture. Brad is also a father and a husband and, most importantly, a follower of Jesus. We’re excited for you to meet Brad and for you to experience his infectious and deep joy that flows out of his walk with Jesus. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Well, Brad, I’m really thankful to get to have the chance to talk to you today, and we’re going to get into more about the ministry that you’re involved with. But I usually like to start by getting to know you a little bit. So could you tell me about a couple of things that bring you joy?
Brad Gee: Things that bring me joy? I mean, there’s the obvious, like the wife and kids. I love spending time with my family. We really love going hiking and camping and all that. I’m still an avid runner. I was a hurdler in college, and so that’s something that I still enjoy. Well, I don’t hurdle anymore, but I still enjoy running. I think something that really brings me joy would be being in new spaces with new people. I remember one time I was at a church-planting boot camp before I participated in a church plant with some friends of mine, and my friend Stephen was like, “Brad, I feel like you’re coming to life. Like you are a different person at a conference than you are elsewhere.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I just get to see different people and make connections and network and do things like that.” So those are some things that bring me joy. Overall, I just want to experience cool stuff with my friends and family. I don’t really care what it is. I just want to do fun things with fun people.
Eden: I love that. You love doing fun things with fun people. I think that’s awesome. And the best experiences in life, they are a little bit less fun if they’re not shared. Yeah, I love that. And I love that you know that about yourself that being with new people and new spaces lights your fire. I think for everybody, God’s wired us all differently, given us different things that will really get us going or make us light up. And that’s really dear. And it seems like if the Lord has you in areas of ministry, it’s wonderful that you love to meet new people in new places.
Brad Gee: Yeah, it’s helpful.
Eden: Yeah. Well, Brad, are there any places in Scripture that are especially precious to you as you’ve walked with Jesus? We like to point the people that come to our website to how different parts of the Word have impacted us. So, is there a part of God’s Word that’s especially precious to you?
Brad Gee: There’s all sorts of good answers, but like it’s the Scripture that hits you in your dark times I think that mean the most. For me, the story of the woman caught in adultery at the end of John seven and start of John eight [is precious]. There’s something about the idea that Jesus confronts this whole crowd with their sin. He basically is like, yeah, if you haven’t sinned before, yeah, go ahead and throw a stone. And everybody knows they’re talking about adultery. And like, they all know that he’s taught in the past that if you look at a woman lustfully, that’s adultery. So they know what he did. And when they were faced with their sin—the woman who was brought by the crowds and all of the people that were ready to stone her, by Jesus—the woman stays and looks at Jesus, and everybody else walks away from Jesus. And that’s something that’s always stuck with me. Like, what do we do when we’re confronted with our sin? That’s one that sticks out to me.
Ezekiel 47, just the idea that we are a temple, and God’s life flows out from us, has always been really meaningful.
The third one that I was thinking about was from Psalm 73, that the whole psalm is like, God, why is evil winning? Like, why do people who are mean and cruel and terrible human beings, why do they succeed? And they’re fat and their eyes are fat? And the metaphors from ancient Hebrew are funny. And at the end of it all, he’s like, look you set them up in slippery places, and you’re the only thing that I can rely on. Like, whom have I in heaven but you (vs. 25)? You’re the only thing that gives me strength and sees me through. And as somebody who often looks at the world around me and goes, man, why does the world suck? Oh, it’s so hard out there. Psalm 73 is very comforting to me.
Eden: Awesome. Yes, I love that psalm. That’s one that the Lord has brought me to again and again. And it in the end, it says, even my own flesh and heart might fail, but God’s the strength of my heart (vs. 26), and it’s just such a powerful punch-ending to a song that feels really real along the way. Like, God, why is everything I’m doing for you not working out, you know? So that’s a wonderful place to go.
Brad Gee: Yeah, it feels like something we really need in our Christian American society that is like, no, things aren’t going to work out great all the time. And we need to learn how to wrestle with that, wrestle with God and come to that conclusion of like, yeah, like you are my strength. But we can’t just say that; we have to experience that.
Eden: Well, Brad, I’d love to hear about Axis. So, tell me about the ministry that you work for and what its mission is and what your goal is as a ministry. I’d love to hear about that.
Brad Gee: Yeah. So Axis exists to equip and empower parents to have all of the important conversations that they need to have with their teens. We like to call it the one conversation. My wife and I just had our third child. So, uh, with our third kid, hopefully, if we’re alive till we’re 80 something, and we had them when I was about 34, that means we have, let’s just say, 50 years, right? In those 50 years, I only want to have one conversation with my daughter Lucy. I want it to be one conversation that stretches through a lifetime, that imparts on her the beauty of Christ and the difficulty and struggle of being a human. And I want to walk with her through all the different things she faces at each and every age. And so, [at] Axis, we want to equip parents with resources to reach their teen children. We are focused on that 13- to 20-year-old age range. It’s half-equip, half-empower. It’s, hey, do you understand what happened at the Super Bowl halftime show? Probably not. So let’s just give you a primer on it, so that you can feel like you can start the conversation with your teenager, who probably does know what’s going on there.
And then the other half is empowerment, to remind people that parents are the superheroes. They are the ones who rescue their teenagers, who care for their teenagers as they are navigating a wild landscape of things that are vying for our attention. And so, it’s a really awesome ministry, and we get to see a lot of parents in really hard places who are asking really big questions. How do I help my kids navigate sexuality and gender? How do I help them navigate the current political climate that is so omnipresent online? How do I help them pick out their first dress for homecoming and deal with the fact that their best friend is making fun of them for what they wore and now they’re a little bit depressed about it? How do we navigate these things that are so incredibly real and important for our teenagers?
I don’t know about you, Eden. I’m sure your teenage years were super easy breezy; high school was great. But it’s hard being a teenager, and we just want to give parents the resources they need.
Eden: Yeah! And you know—you said when I was a teenager—I was just talking to a friend the other night about how when I was a teenager, only half of my basketball team had iPhones. And social media was only Facebook, and it was brand new. And so, the world that teenagers are living in is wildly different than the one that you and I grew up in as teenagers. And so, yeah, as the world changes, we need wisdom. And the wisdom of God’s Word applies to every generation, but we need to be able to share that with others in helpful ways. So yeah, I see the need there.
And at Bibles.net, we’re all about getting people to open the Bible for the first time, whether that’s the teen or the parent. And so, tell me about how the Bible informs your own ministry. So obviously, you want to equip parents to have these good conversations with teens and point them to Jesus. How does Scripture factor into that process for you guys?
Brad Gee: I mean, in the resource creation process, it’s pretty much what we draw everything from. Sometimes I feel like we keep a hand on current cultural understandings of psychology and how we connect as human beings. But the underpinning for all of it is Scriptural.
What did it look like when Jesus engaged with people in his daily life? How did he ask them questions? How did he engage them in conversation? And those principles are the ones that formulate for us what it looks like and how we advise our parents to talk to their teenagers, because so much of what Jesus did was inherently relational. And he asked hard questions. And he involved himself in the lives of his followers. And so, that’s it right there. How do we empower our parents to take that first step to say, “Son, Daughter follow me as I follow Christ”? And the biblical part of that is key.
We’re actually coming out with a new resource soon, specifically on the Sermon [on] the Mount, to get parents and teens to walk through the sermon on the Mount together—take a deep dive—and come away from it with an answer to the question, “How does this specific pericope inform how we ought to live in our day-to-day-life in 2025/2026? And so that’s a resource I’m particularly excited about, because it is a deep dive in on one of Jesus’ most important teachings. And it’s going to be built to be a, “Hey parents, take your teenagers through this with you. Ask questions, have conversations, and find a way to serve and to love people in your current context.” So I’m pumped about that one.
Eden: Yeah, that sounds like an excellent resource. And so if I’m a parent of a teen, and I’m interested in Axis. I want to start having good conversations with my teen. I don’t feel like we have a great relationship. And maybe we don’t really talk about spiritual things. What are some principles that Axis puts forth and really believes in that would start to get me oriented towards how to begin relating to my teen?
Brad Gee: Yeah. I mean, the first thing is, and this is what everybody says, awareness of the problem is the first step. And man, when you get your energy directed towards fixing the relationship, that is one of the most important steps. Inertia is hard; it’s brutal.
I would say one of the key elements [in deepening relationship] is curiosity. Like the absolute underlying principle of any good relationship, and this is free for any relationship, but it’s especially important with our kids, is “Why am I not curious?” When I hear my kid listening to music that I think is bad, why is my response to just stop them from listening to it, rather than being curious why they want to listen to it and being curious about the music itself?
One of the things we talk about in cultural translation is good, bad, Bible. So every single thing that human creates is suffused with the original reality that God created us to create, right? Like humans are innately image of God bearing. We just want to go out and do crazy things and create new stuff: relationships and buildings and music and art and sports and all these things. And so, in everyone, whatever we create, there’s something in there that reflects who God was. So find the good in it. What is good about this?
We’re all so broken, right? We are made in the image of God, and we fell in sin and all that, right? So what’s bad about it? What’s something that does not reflect who God is? If Satan exists to destroy God’s creation, he can’t do it by creating; he can only twist what God has created. So how has he twisted this individual cultural artifact?
And then finally Bible. What would the Bible say about this? And maybe the Bible doesn’t have a lot to say specifically about Taylor Swift, but it has a lot to say about how humans enjoy the world, how we participate in the world. And so, what does the Bible say about whatever is going on in Taylor Swift’s life at this current moment? So those are some of the key principles that we would use.
Be curious, and be curious about yourself. Why am I responding to my kid in this way? Why do I want to yell at them when they talk back to me? What’s going on inside for me? That could be a lifetime journey all on its own. And then be curious about them. Ask them questions. Be curious about their life, and then be curious about their stuff, and then good, bad, Bible. It’s a helpful way to start to layer out the nuance of cultural artifacts, like the Super Bowl halftime show or Cardi B music, or skibidi toilet. There’s so many wild things that you throw up your hands and you’re like, I don’t know. I’m just going to be curious about it, I guess.
Eden: Yes, yes. Well, I love that you’re teaching parents how to foster good relationships with their children. And I love the aspect of curiosity, because I think that’s how we love anybody in our lives: We stay curious. And I think staying curious is kind of a fancy, trendy term for just love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31). If I’m going to be curious about what’s going on in my child’s life or in my friend’s life, I have to be willing to get outside my world and want to know about their world and their processing in their heart. And so, I love that you’re encouraging parents to do that. And I would love to hear how you got involved in Axis. So what got you excited about working in this specific kind of ministry to parents?
Brad Gee: I have been around Axis from the start. Earlier we were talking about teen culture. And you said that growing up, nobody in half your basketball team had an iPhone. Axis was started in 2007, which is the same year the iPhone was released. So we feel like we were birthed alongside this world-altering device that has changed everything. I, from a distance, was all about Axis. I was in college at the time, and my cousin, her husband, David, is the CEO of Axis. And he tried to get me to work for him a few different times, and I was always on the edge but not quite able to make the commitment. It’s all the way out in Colorado, and I live in Ohio, which is the most beautiful state in the world. And I was like, why would I want to go to Colorado? Mountains? No, I’m good.
And eventually I hit a point in my career where they were looking for somebody to do fundraising. It’s something that I am passionate about, and it just worked out that it was the right timing for everybody. I’m able to work from home, because, once again, Ohio’s just the greatest place in the world. And it’s been a really good fit, partially because I do fundraising, but I really build relationships and talk to people and get to know people. Yeah, it’s been great.
Eden: Yeah. Awesome. I was chuckling about Ohio and Colorado. That’s so fun. Okay. So that’s how you came to Axis. And how did you come to your own faith in Jesus? What’s your journey of actually getting to know Jesus for the first time and obviously wanting to share him with others?
Brad Gee: Yeah. Man, you buried the lead. This is the big question, isn’t it? I grew up in the faith. I grew up in a Pentecostal Assemblies of God church. And when I was five years old, one day I randomly was like, “Hey, Mom, can I come to big church with you?” And my mom’s like, “yeah, sure.” And at the end of the service, Doctor Dwayne Umble was giving his horrible fire and brimstone altar call. “And if you died on the way home tonight in your car, would you know where you would end up for all of eternity?” And his voice is shaking and his jowls are going crazy. And little five-year-old Brad, for some reason, was like, I need to go pray and accept Jesus into my heart. And I walked my little legs down. And this auditorium had been built in the 70s, and everything was shag orange carpet, orange like padding on the pews, giant orange velvet curtains. It was hideous, Eden. Oh, it was so ugly. I walked myself down, and Kevin Bianchi prayed with me. And I accepted Jesus. And a few years later I got baptized in their baptismal.
By the time I was 30, I was kind of burnt out. And I still love Jesus. I’d gotten a Bible degree and a master of Divinity degree, and I had done all the Christian things. And as I got into my thirties, I realized that I’d been running away from myself, running away from Jesus. I feel like we get caught up in this idea of salvation, right? I’ve been saved the whole time. I’m not worried about that. Jesus has reassured me of that. I didn’t know how to spend time with Jesus. I didn’t know how to connect with him on an intimate level. And in a dark time of my life, I was introduced to a really beautiful ministry called Healing Care Ministries. My wife and I both did a week-long retreat there, and I met Jesus in a way that made sense of what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. You just meet those Christians that you’re like, you get it. You understand the faith in a way that most people who are in the church, I don’t get the same sense from. I met Jesus in such a way that I was never going to be the same. And so, for me, it’s been a lifelong journey. And it started before I was born, right? But it started when I was five and it continued on.
Oh my gosh, teenage years were hard. Twenties were hard. You’re trying to figure out who you are, and you got crazy hormones. You like a girl, and you break up. I was engaged when I was in college and broke that off. And there’s just so much that is really, really hard. And our church doesn’t always do a great job of teaching us how to experience the God of the Bible in a meaningful way. And once I started to experience him in a meaningful way, it has clicked. And my thirties, I’m like, man, I love being in my thirties compared to my teens or twenties.
Eden: Yeah. Wow! Brad, that’s such a wonderful testimony of Jesus’ faithfulness to you. And I love what you said about experiencing Jesus. And I think one way that I have processed that, I don’t know what you’d call it, [but] that phenomena that happens where you can have people that have read the Bible their whole life but don’t seem to know what it means to connect with Jesus. And sometimes, and we believe this at Bibles.net, sometimes I think the reason for that is actually the way that we view the Bible, meaning that we view the Bible as an end in itself and as a store of information and knowledge instead of the revelation of a person. We have the written Word and the living Word, and the written word is the means to knowing the living Word. And I know that in my twenties, just even in working for Bibles.net and soaking up a lot of content, I started learning a similar thing. The Bible is not an end in and of itself. It is a means to relationship with a person.
And you could know the Bible backwards and forwards. You could study theology all of your life and not really know the person that you’re studying. And so, that relationship aspect of our walk with God is so essential. I think of John 17:3 [that] says, this is eternal life: that you know the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent. And just that idea that the life God calls us to, like salvation, what he’s bringing us into, is a relationship. It’s not into a set of doctrines that we write our name by. It’s not into a package of an ideal future later on. It’s that all of those things are infused by this relationship with a person. It’s that someone rescued me, that someone’s taking me to be home with him forever. And that is so, so important. And I’m really glad that you have shared that with our listeners, so that if there’s someone else who’s in the same spot, they can have hope that there’s so much more.
Brad Gee: Yeah, there really is, and we could talk for four hours on this. I feel so passionate around this idea that it is the living Christ who lives in us. Right? Galatians 2:20, I’ve been crucified in Christ. It is no longer I who live. It’s Christ who lives in me. So this life that I live in the body now, I live it in faith that the Son of God wants to be in relationship with me. And man, we need to draw near to Jesus in a way that is real.
I remember a class in my grad school around philosophy and belief and faith. This gets really nerdy, but what does it actually mean to believe in something? And we often think of it in terms of an intellectual assent. I say yes to this belief, when in all reality, belief is actually a reflexive thing, like we see a chair and I believe that the chair will hold me. But that’s because I’ve seen and experienced chairs holding me in the past. You know, if I had never seen a chair in my entire life, I don’t know if I would just reflexively believe that it would hold me. I wouldn’t understand what it was. And a chair is such a simple concept compared to the God of the universe. And so, we can’t just intellectually assent our way into a relationship with Jesus, with God the Father, with God the Holy Spirit.
So how can we experience God in such a way that our belief becomes something true about us? And that’s where that faith gap and belief come in, where it’s like we have to move towards that before it will be real. We can’t just sit on our butt and expect all of a sudden it to happen. The faith is the movement towards God and the trust that God will meet us as we move towards him. As he calls Abraham to live in the Promised Land, Abraham’s movement towards the Promised Land also meant that God was moving towards him. And it’s counted to him as faith. So I would just encourage anybody listening, go spend some time in Scripture, go pray as you read Scripture. Go read Psalm 73 and as you read it, think about what you’re feeling and experiencing, and ask yourself in the quiet of your own heart, Jesus, what do you have for me in this passage? What do I need to hear? And slowly begin to hear that voice of Christ as he points out different parts of Scripture and different parts of who he is. Bonhoeffer had this idea that the Psalms were all prayers of Christ. And so, one of the deepest ways we can connect with who Christ is to pray and sing and read the Psalms. So that’s as good a place to start as any, I think.
Eden: Yeah. Oh, I love that explanation, Brad. And along the way, in your journey of experiencing Jesus in powerful ways for the first time, we usually like to ask if there’s a book or resource outside the Bible that has helped someone in their journey with Jesus. So for you, are there any books that were transformational in your walk with Christ? But also, add if there was a conversation or if there was a video or anything else that you felt like God used to make that switch in your life.
Brad Gee: There’s a lot of conversations. I remember one time: I was living in Philadelphia for a year, and my roommate was a guy named Matt. He’s one of the greatest human beings ever to live. And this is one of those stories I love, because it’s just very vivid in my mind. We were a part of this organization called MissionYear. And we lived in inner-city Philly. And we had a job at a nonprofit. And we connected with people in our local area. And there’s a huge Puerto Rican population around us, so I had some of the best food that I’ve ever had in my life. And every Thursday, we would go to the other side of the city for a training where we’d learn about different things going on for people who live in the city. And my roommate Matt and I would ride our bikes there, and the one time it was pouring rain. And so, we just didn’t wear our shoes, because we were like, I don’t want our shoes to be soaked for like five days. So we’re barefoot [in a] July warm summer rain. [We] rode our bike[s] there, and on the way back, it was down-pouring. It was a drizzle on the way there, but it’s pouring down rain. We’re riding, it’s this huge storm, and Matt gets a flat tire.
And so, we’re just walking through the streets of Philly with our bikes. [There was] glass on the streets, rubbish everywhere. It was just this wild scene, and it’s pouring down rain and we’re just talking. And I confessed some sin that was going on in my life, some things that I was struggling with, and just poured it out to him. And it was a moment. And Matt looked at me when I got done, and we had walked for a few minutes in silence, and he just goes, “You know, Brad, I feel like there’s a lot of things I’m like supposed to say, but I think tomorrow you have a great opportunity to wake up, have a cup of coffee and spend some time with Jesus.” And that’s all he said. And he just left it at that. And I don’t know if I have ever experienced grace in such a beautiful, embodied, personal way. He didn’t need to say, oh, I forgive you, and your sins are forgiven. He heard me. He walked with me. He experienced the downpour of my sorrow and anger and frustration with myself. And he pointed me towards Jesus. And he didn’t put it on himself to fix me or help me in any way. He just heard me and he was with me. And man, that was one of the most beautiful experiences of grace I’ve ever had. So be that person for somebody else.
Yeah, I have books that I can recommend. Doctor Kurt Thompson, who I actually met: He was our keynote speaker for an Axis event a few months ago. He’s incredible. Meeting him is one of those, like, you’re not supposed to meet your heroes: Don’t meet your heroes. I met my hero, and he’s incredible. Doctor Kurt Thompson wrote a book called The Soul of Shame. All four of his books are incredible, but The Soul of Shame hit me when I was probably deep in the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23). And The Soul of Shame speaks very deeply about the reality of shame as a tool of the enemy and how it so deeply twists and perverts what God has for us. So, The Soul of Shame is a really important one.
I mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer earlier. Life Together was one of the most influential books for me in my young college/graduate years.
If you’re a parent that’s looking to draw closer to your teenager and understand the questions that they’re asking about the world, there’s a Young Life gal named Doctor Tanita Maddox. Dr. Maddox is an incredible author and speaker. She wrote a book called What Gen Z Really Wants to Know About God. And it follows these seven questions that Gen Z, as a culture, is asking about God and the Bible and the church and who they are in light of that. So that was a really helpful read around that.
A lot of people have heard of Jonathan Haidt at this point, and his book The Anxious Generation is phenomenal. It’s so good. But I would actually point to a book he wrote with Greg Lukianoff called The Coddling of the American Mind. It’s really good. And it’s basically talking about, in our pursuit of physical safety and emotional safety, have we neutered our children’s ability to be bold and courageous and go forth into the world? And from a biblical lens, go forth and have dominion over the earth and tame the earth? And there’s something about it that I think we’re missing out on. So I could go on about books for a long time, but those are a few.
Eden: Well, those seem like excellent recommendations, and I’m excited to look into those. I think all of those piqued my curiosity a bit, so thank you. And thanks for sharing about your friend Matt. What a powerful story of our job as believers, [which] is not to save one another; it’s to just point each other to Jesus, because he’s the Savior. He’s the healer. He is what we all need. And that is just such a beautiful reminder. So, thank you for that story.
Brad Gee: Yeah. Well, and in Life Together, Bonhoeffer talks about how, in the act of confession—and he uses gendered language, which is fine—the brother in front of you becomes Christ. And even as a teenager, when I first read that, I was like, I don’t know exactly what that means. Matt became Christ for me in that moment. And for the rest of my life, when I think about Jesus’ grace, I will see Matt’s face, covered in rain, offering me grace in a way that I never expected.
And I think that’s something that, man, if I could encourage our parents: You get to be that voice of grace in the life of your teenager. When they fail at something they really wanted to succeed in, you get to be the one that picks them up out of the mud and the mire and love them well. And when they break your rules and your curfew, and you’re angry and frustrated, and they see it on your face, and they’ve seen you time and time again yell at them or be frustrated or passive aggressive or whatever it is that you struggle with (because I struggle with it as a parent too), you get a chance to reset the script. You get a chance to be Christ to them in that moment. And that’s the beauty of what we do at Axis. [It’s] to empower and equip and give you an opportunity to be the awesome person that Jesus made you to be.
Eden: Yeah, I love that. And that hearkens back to the Scripture that you mentioned, Galatians 2:20, which says, it’s no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And I feel like that’s so empowering to hear, as any follower of Jesus, that we could be that to someone else. We all are, as those who have put their trust in Jesus, indwelled by the Holy Spirit. And God can use us to show Jesus to other people. And that is such an honor to bear and so exciting. It makes you want to love people, in hopes that they’ll see Jesus.
Brad Gee: Yeah, it really does.
Eden: Yeah. Wow. Well, Brad, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for sharing with us in our ministry about Axis. And hopefully people that listen will be compelled to go and look that up and utilize your resources. So we’re really grateful for that and for you sharing your own testimony, too. So, thank you.
Brad Gee: Yeah. If you want to check it out, it’s axis.org. There’s a “Get Started” button at the top. Click on that, and it’ll teach you how to use our resources and how to get engaged.
Eden: Awesome, awesome. Well thank you for your time today. We so appreciate it.
Thank you so much for listening to our podcast today. If you enjoyed our conversation, I would encourage you to like or subscribe to our podcast so that you can hear the next conversation. And if something that you heard today spoke to your heart or got you thinking, I would encourage you to not let the day go by without talking to God about what’s on your mind. We believe that he loves you and that he’s pursuing you today out of that love.