From a homeless alcoholic to a steward of hope
Jordan Raynor sits down with Edward Grinnan, Editor-in-Chief of Guideposts Publications, to talk about how Edward went from an alcoholic living on the streets to miraculously landing a job at Guideposts, what he learned about God dangling out the window of a hotel, and how Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) can help you think bigger and more long term.
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[00:00:05] JR: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week, I host a conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world-class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the Gospel of Jesus Christ influences their work.
Today's guest is Edward Grinnan, editor-in-chief of Guideposts Magazine. Yes, that Guideposts that's been producing faith-based content for 75 years. They have 4.5 million readers globally. But Edward, in addition to being a great journalist, and writer is just an exceptional leader, leading this organization through some crazy times over the last 20, 25 years or so.
So, Edward and I recently sat down. We talked about how he went from being an alcoholic, living literally on the streets, to miraculously landing a job a Guideposts. We talked about what he learned about God when he was dangling out of the window of a hotel 42 stories above ground. And we talked about how big hairy audacious goals or BHAGs can help you and or your teams think, bigger and more long-term about the work God has put you on this earth to do. Without further ado, please enjoy this episode with Edward Grinnan.
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:01:44] JR: Hey, Edward, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
[00:01:48] EG: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here today. I've really been thinking a lot about this interview and what we might talk about, and I'm very excited at the prospect of talking to your audience. It sounds like you have great people on your podcast.
[00:02:01] JR: Yeah, we've had some amazing, amazing guests and you're just strengthening the lineup here.
[00:02:07] EG: Well, you flatter me.
[00:02:09] JR: Before we get into the substance, let's just make sure our audience understands, what is Guideposts for those who aren't familiar with the brand. What is this organization?
[00:02:20] EG: Guideposts turned 75 years old last year. We are an inspirational media company. We were founded by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and his wife, Ruth, in 1945, right after World War Two. A lot of you will recognize Dr. Peale’s name. He was the famous author of the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. But he actually founded Guideposts, about seven years before he wrote that landmark book. What he wanted to do, and Dr. Peale was a visionary - what he wanted to do was have a medium where people, ordinary people could tell their stories of faith and action, of how they used their faith in their daily lives.
He envisioned it as sort of a Kiplinger report for the spiritually and religiously inclined. As you know, Dr. Peale was a minister of the gospel, but he was also a great, great public speaker. He knew a lot of people in the media business. He himself had a radio show at the time. And they all thought he was a little crazy to think that there would be an audience of people who wanted to hear from people like themselves.
But he used to get these tremendous letters from people who read his books and heard his radio program. Their stories were so powerful that he thought that he really wanted to share them with the world. When he was really - he kind of invented user-generated content, which was a term that wouldn't come into vogue for another 50 years. But Dr. Peale thought that he wanted to give voice to the ordinary people who could tell stories of how faith made a difference in their day-to-day living.
We still do that. We tell tremendous inspirational stories about people who have overcome challenges large and small by using their faith. In many cases, their relationships with Christ were very broad-based in terms of where we want to meet people on their spiritual journeys. But the organization itself is rooted in Judeo Christian biblical principles.
[00:04:23] JR: Yeah, interesting. So, the story of how you wound up at Guideposts is a pretty wild one. So, I want to invite you to take as much time as you'd like, start as far back as you would like, and just share your story with our listeners, if you don't mind.
[00:04:39] EG: Well, all right. It's a story that it seems sometimes like it's almost a different part of my life or a different life altogether. I have to say, when I came to Guideposts, I had never really heard of Guideposts. I assumed it was a travel magazine, and I thought, “Oh, great. I'm in desperate need of a job, a travel magazine. Maybe I'll get some trips out of this.” If you were to exchange the word journey for travel, I think that would be far more accurate.
But I'll tell you a little bit about myself at the time, I'll be open about this. I was an alcoholic. I had gone to college and gone to graduate school. And after graduate school, my life fell apart. I was living on the streets. I was panhandling change in lower Manhattan. I would pick up cigarette butts off the street, to smoke what was left to the tobacco that was in them because I didn't have any money for cigarettes. I only had money to drink.
I ended up eventually in a rehab. After going through a number of detoxes, and emergency rooms and everything else, and sleeping outdoors, and sleeping in flophouses, I ended up in a rehab. My real resistance in sobriety was a resistance to God. I remember once when I was trying to stop drinking on my own, I remember calling up AA Intergroup and asking them, “Can you find me a meeting where they don't talk about God, and they put me on hold, and they never came back. Because I don't think they could find such a meeting.
I stumbled and staggered my way through rehabs and all sorts of programs to no avail. But then, you know, I just got it, I got sober. It was the most amazing thing in my life. And I decided to open myself up to at least the concept of a loving God who cared about me. Now, a lot of that was "act as if", that's a phrase that comes that's used a lot in 12-step programs for beginners, like I was, who aren't really – the depth of their spiritual or religious commitment is very tenuous as mine was. But I acted as if, and I got sober. And it was a miracle that someone like me, would fall, as far as I had fallen, was able to dry himself up a bit. I did. I stayed sober for a couple of years, and then I guess I forgot how I was an alcoholic.
I decided, well, maybe I can try to drink normally again. I've got this behind me. I've taken care of this problem. I know how to pray now and ask for help when I needed. I got a job and it was as a writer, and I was over in Europe working on a book for a corporation. I was writing the history of a Danish Corporation. And I took a drink. Now, I know exactly the time of day and where it was, it was in the spring in Copenhagen, down by the docks, if you've been to Copenhagen there. Some beautiful restaurants dockside and I started to drink. I thought I could control it and I couldn’t. My life fell completely apart. I got lost in Europe for about a month, they had Interpol looking for me, I came very, very close to suicide.
I talk about that, in my first book, The Promise of Hope, how I sat on the ledge of the hotel about the 42nd floor. I sat on the windowsill actually, with one foot dangling over the precipice and the other one back inside the room. I was drinking and I thought, “Well, whatever happens, I'm going to fall one way or the other. And it doesn't really matter which way I fall".
It was at that point that I had a lot of alcoholics - and what Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics called, a white light experience, where I felt almost a painful, overwhelming presence overtake me. It was frightening and it was liberating all at the same time. I came back to the United States, somehow sick, penniless, virtually homeless, because the roommate that I was sharing an apartment with back in New York was in the AA program and he was not going to tolerate me drinking.
I started to climb that big uphill slog back to sobriety again, going back to AA, getting a sponsor to really kind of direct me spiritually. In the first few weeks of that period, I got a call from a recruiter who said, “There's an opening in a magazine called Guideposts. Would you be interested in interviewing with them?” Well, I was interested in anything that would give me a paycheck at that point. But as I said, I had never heard of Guideposts.
So, the strange thing is, Jordan, is I had never heard of this recruiter either. I had no idea. She said, “I have your resume in front of me”, and I thought, “I never sent you a resume. I don't know who you are. Is this some sort of scam or a joke?” But my sponsors in the program at the time are telling you to say yes, say yes. Don't say no. Say yes to everything. So, I said yes, I'll go in for this interview. It Guideposts magazine.
And, thinking it was a travel magazine, I got there and I realized, it wasn't a travel magazine. But it was really interesting. The people were interesting. It was a very creative atmosphere. They were working on these great stories of ordinary people. And celebrities, so, Guideposts usually puts a celebrity on the cover. I met the editor-in-chief at the time, Van Varner, and I don't know why he hired me. I wouldn't have hired me. I certainly wouldn't have hired me. I said, “Okay.” My sponsors in the program said, you need to take a job for a year, commit to something for a year while you work on yourself and your relationship with God. So, I said, “Okay, I'm going to stay at Guidepost for a year.” And I'll work on my resume. That's what I'll work on.
And then I'll go out and get a job at Conde Nast or Vanity Fair, maybe the New York Times, be real hot stuff was a year of sobriety under my belt. In my mind, I was thinking it was going to be more like six months, that I would work on my resume and use the postage meter, and see what I can do with my life. That was in 1986. A year went by, and I said, I'll give it a little more time. And then I'll find my big job and publish. But you know something, I was being spiritually nourished by the work I was doing, which is something I never expected, never, ever dreamed that would happen.
[00:11:05] JR: Tell me about that. This is super interesting. What do you mean by that?
[00:11:08] EG: I was talking to people who were making me think about my own faith, more and more every day, I would talk to these people who had incredible stories of how their faith helped them and even save them in life. And again, year after year, every year for a while, I said, “I’m just going to give it another year Guideposts and see what I can do.” And I found myself growing spiritually through my work, something I had never connected. In my head I never connected my work with my faith and that's what Guideposts gave me.
[00:11:45] JR: Go back to the windowsill on the 42nd floor of this hotel in Copenhagen for a minute, that white flash, this moment. What did you learn about God and your relationship to God in that moment?
[00:11:59] EG: So, that's a great question, Jordan. And here's what I learned at that moment, what I finally learned about myself, in my soul, in my alcoholism at the time, that light made me completely aware of my powerlessness. Not just my powerlessness over my alcoholism, which I had never admitted, even in those two years, when I was sober, and I was going to 12-step meetings. I never truly accepted my powerlessness over myself. And it came, that moment of surrender to that sense of powerlessness, that only God, only God could take away my drinking. And only God could direct my life, not me.
I thought I was always in charge and I was always in control, and even when I flirted with the idea of believing in God, at that time, God was just sort of an advisor. He was a consultant was going to use when I needed him. He wasn't the divine force that I would give over my life to. It was at that moment, sitting on that windowsill, not caring if I lived or die, and probably hoping, at least subconsciously, that I died because I wanted the pain to be over. I want to say, I gave my life to God, but I feel as though he almost wrested it from me and said, “Look, you can't do this on your own. You can't do this halfway.”
[00:13:27] JR: I think there's a lot of wisdom and how you worded that, right? Paul tells us, nobody seeks Him. He seeks us, and pretty clearly grabbed you off of that windowsill. You already touched on this a little bit. But I'm curious how your perspective on work, your vocation, you're already working as a journalist, as a writer, how did your perspective on work change pre, post that experience?
[00:13:52] EG: Well, it changed because the writing that I'd done up to that point was about me. I wanted to write about myself. Journalism was only a way to earn a living, but I wanted to write was – I had an MFA in playwriting and I also wrote fiction and short stories and novels. I wanted to write about myself. I wanted to be one of those authors who used his own life and his own perceptions to create fictional worlds for readers to enter. But it was very ego-based in my case. It was very much about – it was very internalized with my work.
What I was led to do in my work, what I think God led me to do, is to take whatever talents that he blessed me with, stop misusing them in the way that I was, because it wasn't getting me anywhere and I wasn't writing anything significant. And use those talents to tell stories that glorify Him, and that's what Guideposts gave me the opportunity to do. I could never have imagined. I mean, this is the amazing thing about God, I think, is that he imagines things and has things for us that we could never imagine on our own. I could never have imagined when I wanted to become a writer that I would be writing for His glory, other people's stories.
And in those other people's stories, I mean, our stories of the roadmap, through our lives. Our stories are who we are. I think everybody has a Guideposts story. But everybody has stories in their lives to show how they move down the road of faith, and ultimately towards God. And to be able to articulate, help other people articulate that, was the gift of my sobriety and my coming to Guideposts. In addition to the fact, I don't think I ever would have found my faith or deepened my faith if I hadn't come to Guideposts.
It's funny, you referenced Paul earlier and how God finds us. But I feel that in my drinking years, leading up to Guideposts, I was running away from God. I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know how much God was a part of my life. I grew up in a very religious home, and I was an altar boy, and I wanted to be a priest at one point. I think a lot of my alcoholism and drug use was an attempt to run away from God because I feared giving my life to him. I didn't want to give up what I thought was my will and my ego. That was my struggle, I think.
[00:16:20] JR: Yeah, it's good. It's easy to see how your faith influences what you do at Guideposts. I'm curious to know how you see your faith shaping how you do the work, how you approach the work that you and your team do.
[00:16:37] EG: Guideposts, so it’s story-based magazines, it's devotional-based magazines, and so it’s website and social media. Our mission is to really make people believe that hope, faith, and prayer make a difference in the world and in their lives. And those are the three things that are almost like a checklist. What every day, when we go to work as a staff, we think, is the work that we're doing, is the thing that I'm doing now. And this isn't just the editors and the writers, this is everybody throughout the organization. Is the work that I'm doing today, bringing hope, faith and prayer into the world more than yesterday?
So, in that respect, that's our core fundamental reason for being. If you're not thinking about that throughout your workday, in connecting the activities that you do with the mission that you serve, then you need to work on that. Guideposts has tremendous employee retention through the years. For example, during the pandemic, and in this post-pandemic time of people leaving their jobs, Guideposts really hasn't lost anybody. I believe because it's a mission-based company. I think mission-based companies are the ones who are suffering the least right now from the great resignation, as has been called. I think that's because of the mission-based work that we do.
[00:18:06] JR: Yeah, that's interesting. So, seeing that reality, does that shape how you guys approach hiring? I've heard people argue before. "I'll take a B player, who's an A-plus mission fit, over an A player who’s a B mission fit, because I know the person that is a mission fit is going to stay forever." Would you agree to that approach?
[00:18:33] EG: I've been hiring people for a long time now. My first belief is God brings us the people who we need. I do believe that people are – God directed to work for Guideposts. That may sound like a little bit of a cop-out. But I truly believe that because it happened with me and it happened with so many people who have come to Guideposts, many of whom were like me and were only going to stay for a year or two. They saw this as a stopping-off point, a nice place to get to know the work.
Your question is really interesting, because I am faced a lot with writers and editors who have great skills, but they may not seem to have a strong faith underpinning. When I was hired, my faith was very shaky and the editor-in-chief at the time told me, “Look, what we ask of you is, no matter what you believe personally, you respect the beliefs of our audience and our readers. We won't ask you what you believe in, there's no religious test to come work for Guideposts." But it's hard to believe that anyone would stay at Guideposts without having a faith foundation. Even if they come there without a strong one.
So, I would say we do hire for skills, and we assume that the mission of the company will become infused in that employee, or they won't stay. I can't imagine anyone who would be at odds with what we do wanting to work for us. Everybody I know in this organization wants to be here for the mission.
[00:20:00] JR: So, you guys have been executing this mission for 75 years. And the core product for most of that time has been print. We've been saying, people have been saying for decades, print is dying now. Obviously, it hasn't happened yet. And what I find interesting this past summer, you guys announced a really big investment into that core print product, the magazine. You guys are doubling down. You redesigned it, you added something like 30 pages. I'm curious, did you have a lot of people telling you and the board that you guys are crazy for doubling down on print at this time?
[00:20:34] EG: Well, a couple of things about that. We have a very, very supportive board. And fortunately, I've never known them, to call us crazy, at least not to our faces. And there are several experienced publishing people on that board. You’re right. We made a huge invest in the magazine. We bumped it up to 100 pages. We added features, particularly more of the third-person features to balance out some of the first-person stories that we do. We reduced frequency from – we’ve been publishing 10 times a year, and we reduced frequency to 6 times here bimonthly. All of our other magazines are bimonthly. So, it wasn't that odd.
Some of the money we saved, say, in postage and paper and ink in production, in eliminating those four issues, we plowed back into making the magazine bigger, brighter, more durable, more shareable, and more giftable. We want to get the magazine on a stable financial basis, and print is very, very tough now. But Guideposts magazine is the core, it's the flagship product for the company.
And we felt that we hadn't – as such, we felt like we really needed to invest in it and we would get a payoff in that, particularly in our conversion numbers. And conversions are the people who take a couple of free issues and try it out and then convert as subscribers. We felt that those numbers were in jeopardy somewhat because we'd done what everybody else did in the publishing business. We had reduced the number of pages. We used less expensive paper. We had done a lot of things to improve the margin short term. And we believe that this strategy is something that will stabilize our margin long term, it remains to be seen.
But the response we've gotten so far has been very, very good. I mean, the one obstacle is really producing it six times a year. Guideposts readers usually tell us we should be publishing it every week. So, that is a hurdle for us. But I think we're going to be really happy we did this. We worried that we were crazy. You're right. I’m probably thankful we actually made a very sane decision. And we're getting to see the fruits of that decision already. The magazine is big and beautiful. If you'd like to try out the magazine, just go to guideposts.org and you can order a free issue.
[00:22:50] JR: Yeah, you've said before that to make bets like this one, you've got to create space for long-term thinking. And that's just very contrary to the reactionary, constantly putting out fire mode of a lot of leaders. So, I'm curious, how do you make the space to think and plan for long-term bets, like expanding a print magazine?
[00:23:14] EG: That's another great question. I think it's something that a lot of organizational leaders struggle with. Guideposts is a not-for-profit company, which doesn't mean we don't – I mean, we run our business on the principles of a for-profit company in the sense that, how we manage our budgets and how we manage our bottom line is something that is responsible stewardship to the money that our subscribers and our donors give us.
But I think, a lot of profit companies are thinking in terms of quarters and reporting their profits. And I think that really stymies long-term strategic thinking. What we do, I think, at Guideposts is we try to make space for two things. One for the leaders of the company to have the space and the time to think strategically, and to imagine where we will be in 5 or 10 years. For instance, currently we've looked at a 10-year projection of how many people – how many lives we're going to touch. We set that number at 17 million in 10 years. And that’s easily a tripling of the number of lives we're touching now. We know to get there, we're going to have to expand digitally. We're going to create new digital products, as well as keeping our print products alive and well. And they are doing well. Our print products do well. It's not like the trend is dead for us.
But for us to reach that goal of 17 million lives touched, and for us to bring spiritual wellbeing to 17 million people, we're going to have to do a lot of thinking. And we try to give ourselves time for that type of thinking. We also, the second part there, which I think is very important about thinking long term, you listen to the rest of the employees, you give your mid-level employees and even your entry-level employees, you give them a voice in those decisions. You bring them into that thinking, because they're your greatest resource, your people. They're thinking about the future, too. So, it's not just a little knot of senior-level strategic thinkers, conceptualizing what the future of the company in the world will be in 5 or 10 years. It's the whole company thinking that way.
[00:25:35] JR: Yeah, so I'm hearing three things, this is super helpful. Number one, you got to be setting big, hairy, audacious goals, like 70 million people in 10 years. They're going to force your team to think bigger and more long-term. Number two, you open up to the whole team for feedback on how to go about reaching those goals. And then number three, you make space on the leader’s calendars, to actually go do the hard work of thinking strategically about how to do it and planning for that long term.
One other thing I read from you in preparation for this, is talking about how to deliver feedback well. We talk a lot in this podcast that to master anything vocationally, we got to be great at receiving and implementing feedback. But you've talked about how to deliver feedback in a way that balances encouragement with constructive criticism. What advice do you have for our listeners who want to get better at delivering feedback that improves performance?
[00:26:33] EG: It's funny that word feedback, because really, the most important part of feedback is listening. To listen to your employees. To listen to the people who report to you. Communication has to be two ways in a successful corporation of any size. I think that's something that larger organizations suffer from greatly. Guideposts, is a relatively small company, on the scale of things. So, to be able to – we survey our staff a lot. We ask them a lot of tough questions about how they feel about their job, about the mission of the company, about where we're going, about the decisions that senior management makes. We want to know what they think because it matters in the decisions that we make.
I think the most important thing about, even with an individual employee, is to really listen and open your ears, listen with your heart, and to some of them, with your soul and find out you hire people because you see potential in them. How do you help them realize that potential? You're there to help them.
When I became editor-in-chief in the last year of the last century, I had all sorts of plans and they were all editorial plans, how the magazine would look, the stories we’re going to tell, all this editorial stuff we were going to do. What I found out, what would consume most of my time for the duration, was managing people, launching staffs as teams, and then managing the individuals within those teams. And those chess pieces are always moving. As a manager, you need to be aware of that movement. People change in their lives and their situations change. And you need to stay focused on that to keep them on a track for growth and improvement. But I go back to saying the most important thing about feedback is listening.
[00:28:20] JR: Yeah, that's a good word. We get to get good at delivering it and receiving it. Edward, other than what we've already talked about, what do you think world-class leaders do that their less masterful counterparts don't do? What's the delta between good and great?
[00:28:36] EG: Well, I certainly don't consider myself a great leader. I'm a flawed leader and I try to stay abreast of my flaws. I think really good leaders are careful about the assumptions they make about their business and about their employees. I think a strong leader questions his or her assumptions all the time, almost on a daily basis. I assume this yesterday –
[00:29:05] JR: I want to go deep here, because this is interesting to me. How do you identify assumptions? Because the nature of assumptions is they're just there, they're hanging around, you take them for granted. How do you spot the assumptions that you're making and isolate them and really rigorously test them?
[00:29:22] EG: I think the best test is to question what the assumption is that you're most confident. If you really believe something to be true, I think you have to go back again and again, and challenge yourself on that assumption. If you assume a certain project is going to be done in a certain time and have a certain result. That assumption is great, because it sets a goal and setting goals is essential. But you have to step back and look at that project at various points of its development and say, “Well, is my assumption being proven out? Or is there something here that I can change about that assumption?” That assumption needs to be elastic and it needs to grow with whatever that project is.
Now, maybe, it's a project of A, B, and C, and it comes off perfectly. But as a leader, you have to be able to change your assumptions as you move forward without any specific thing that you truly believe. That can be painful. That can be very painful to realize that what you assumed to be the goal is either not attainable or is in fact, a different goal and a better goal. Divorcing yourself from your most confident assumptions is very hard. But it can certainly make a huge difference in what you achieve.
[00:30:38] JR: That's a good word. Edward, I'm curious. What is your typical day look like from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed? What does it look like these days?
[00:30:46] EG: It's strange. I still kind of inhabit two worlds. Then when the pandemic hit, my wife, Julie, and I, we were fortunate enough to have this little vacation cabin up in the hills that we would go to the weekends. My wife sometimes spent more time up here, because she is the type of professional where she can work independently.
In March of 2020, I packed up and fled New York, thinking that pandemic would be over in a few weeks, or maybe a month. And frankly, it's still with us. So, my typical day when I'm up here is, I wake up, and I try to meditate just on what lies ahead and ask God for the strength to face whatever it is I'm going to face that day. When I'm up here, I get out in the hills. My little place is right on the edge of the Appalachian Trail. I have a very energetic golden retriever, who may have been hearing barking in the background, and she needs her exercise, and I need my headspace. That's where I get it.
We drive to one of the most – any of the amazing trails up here in the Berkshires. And we go out for an hour or so, and we just hike into the silence of the Woods by ourselves. My dog, Gracie and I, and that's where I do a lot of thinking. I try to get that done as early as possible every single day, to get away from everything, and off there in the woods where I can feel God's presence. But where I can also just clear my head, clear my mind for what's ahead. What's ahead are meetings, editing, writing. I'm working on a new book, it'll be my third book for Guideposts and it's on my family's history of Alzheimer's, and particularly my mother's journey through Alzheimer's. Also, that book includes a lot of the stories that have been told at Guideposts through the years of people struggling with Alzheimer's.
Now, Alzheimer's is a huge problem in this country, or age-related dementia. It's going to overwhelm the health care system, in a matter of a decade or so. There’s a very strong prevalence of Alzheimer's in my family, very strong. So, I'm exploring that and I'm exploring my own susceptibility to the possibilities of getting Alzheimer's. I'm doing testing, genetic testing and neurology and finding out as much as I can about this and how faith – one of the premises of the book is that Alzheimer's can take an awful lot away from you. It takes everything in the end. But it can't take away faith. It can't take away God.
God is outside of Alzheimer's. I hope to prove that out in the book. So, these days, I'm spending a lot of time writing and trying not to go to too many meetings or too many other things on my plate until I finished this book. I think about all that. I spend more time thinking about the book than actually writing it.
[00:33:35] JR: That’s really wise. C.S. Lewis famously walked like, I don't know, two hours a day, as he was writing. He would walk a little, write a little, walk a little, write a little, so much of the work of great writers is thinking. So, Edward, we got to wrap up. I got three questions, I'd love to ask every guest. Number one, which books do you find yourself recommending or giving away to others most frequently?
[00:34:04] EG: Okay. Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that The Power of Positive Thinking, written by Norman Vincent Peale in 1953. It's a self-help book, but it's also a not by yourself help book, in the sense that it always comes back to faith and that the belief that God wants you to have a good and fulfilling life that is full of His grace. So, that's a book that I would give to anyone of any faith, or even have no faith. I've given it to atheists who loved it. Even if they have trouble accepting the faith content in the book, it's practical advice. It's the most encouraging piece of literature besides the Bible that I've ever read. That would be one.
I'm a huge fan of Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. That helped me so much in my early days of finding my fate. I recommend that book to everyone. To read those two. For people who are struggling with addiction, I recommend the Big Book of AA, which is a beautiful spiritual roadmap for people who are trying to find faith in their lives.
[00:35:16] JR: Let me ask this, who would you like to hear on this podcast talking about how their faith influences the work they do in the world?
[00:35:23] EG: Have you had Bono on?
[00:35:24] JR: No, that's a great answer.
[00:35:25] EG: Well, get Bono. I've been trying to get him in the magazine. We know that Bono’s faith is strong and he uses it to direct his artistic work and his philanthropic work.
[00:35:37] JR: That's a really good name. I don't think I've heard that name on the podcast. It's good. Hey, what's one thing from our conversation today that you just want to reiterate to our listeners, before we sign off?
[00:35:48] EG: The one thing that we didn't get to, and I really wanted to get to, and this is a good opportunity to do it, is the concept of gratitude.
[00:35:57] JR: Let's go there. Yeah.
[00:35:58] EG: You say, what do I wake up thinking about every morning, and I have to remind myself every morning that I am going to be grateful for whatever occurs. Whatever happens to me that day, I will learn to be grateful even for the toughest moments. The gratitude is really what gets me up in the morning and it's what puts me to bed at night. Without gratitude, I could never have gotten sober, I could never have found the relationship with God, and I could never have maintained that relationship with God, if it hadn't been for the sense of gratitude for it.
[00:36:31] JR: I love it. Edward, I just want to commend you and everybody listening for the important work you're doing in the world. Thank you for putting out content that points people to God and more specifically, Jesus, and for sharing your powerful testimony with us today. Guys, you can learn more about Edward and Guideposts, of course, at guideposts.org. Edward, thank you again for joining me.
[00:36:54] EG: Thank you, Jordan. It's been a real pleasure, and I'm very grateful for this opportunity.
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[00:47:15] JR: I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. Hey, if you did, make sure you subscribe to The Call to Mastery so you never miss an episode in the future. If you're already subscribed, do me a favor, take 30 seconds right now to go rate the podcast on the podcast app of your choice. That's it. Thank you, guys, for tuning in. I'll see you next week.
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