00:00:00 Jeromy Johnson: Welcome back. Today I'm sitting down with Bob Hildreth, a pastor, a storyteller, and a man who spent a lifetime walking with both the holy and the hurting. What happens when grace meets the mess of real life? What if faith isn't about tidy theology or perfect answers, but about the kind of grace that shows up in the raw places, in doubt and grief, in laughter that cracks open the silence. Bob and I talk about what it means to find the divine in unexpected corners. How do we keep loving when the system rewards certainty? How do we find hope in the ruins of old religion? This is the kind of conversation that reminds us that God's not waiting in the clean places. God's here in the mess, in the tension, in the beautiful wreck of being human. I'm your host, Jeremy Johnson, and you're listening to slutty Grace. I am so excited to have my next guest on. His name is Bob Hildreth, and he has an energy that is contagious. And, Bob, how are you?

00:01:25 Bob Hildreth: Man, I'm doing great, but it's going to get better. How are you doing, man?

00:01:29 Jeromy Johnson: I'm doing well. And I notice you say that every single time. And when I've asked how you're doing, you're like, I'm doing great, but it's going to get better. And it kind of just shows your outlook on life. And I know that you're contagious. You have an energy about you. I'm assuming that probably hasn't been true your whole life and your whole story. And so I wanted to kind of just ask you, can you give us an overview of your spiritual journey so far?

00:01:55 Bob Hildreth: Yeah, absolutely. Um, for the first twenty seven, twenty seven and a half years of my life, I was extremely religious and very, you know, and I think my personal opinion had experienced a tremendous amount of religious trauma. Now, I define religious trauma a little bit different than what some people might. I define religious trauma as anything that exacerbates the separation that you already have from your soul. When we're born, we are born perfect. We are born connected to our inner divinity, and we all have an inner divinity. We're born with divine DNA, but we learn at a very early age to throw on a mask. And what happens in religious trauma is it's mask after mask after mask. And there's so many times when so many people are sitting there in church pews going, huh? But they learn to put on the mask because their social context, their everything is based in that that group. And it's very scary when you lose your group or tribe. I mean, that's in our DNA at our at our deepest level. You know, when we were Neanderthals, when we were cavemen, when we were whatever. If our tribe didn't support us, we died, you know, that that's kind of like not a good day, you know, or a good look for people. And so, you know, so at the end of the day, it's like, wow, I don't want to die. I need my tribe. And that still really sticks with us. And one of the things that I really love about the creation story and the creation narrative is this idea that even after it was obvious that Adam and Eve were going to have to leave the garden, where do we see the divine? Where do we see God? We see the divine knitting outfits for them out of animal skins, because he already knew they were going to be full of shame. He already knew they couldn't walk around hanging out naked anymore. He already knew that there was a shame base that was in them. So he said, hey, guys, I'm gonna help you with this. Everybody has to leave the garden. You have to leave the garden. You have to throw on the mask, but you have to do that to take the journey. And as Jesus said, the kingdom is within you. Now we have an option. We can say, well, screw this BS. I don't want to go to the I don't want to take that journey. Okay, well, it's, you know, you're gonna exist. You're gonna have an existence. But if you take that journey, there's going to be some really sucky moments because you're going to realize some things and you're going to grow through some things. Now, on the other side of that sucky moment is some really cool stuff, but I'll just share this one little passage with you, if I might. It's from Isaiah fifty one verse one. And Isaiah is a really fascinating, uh, element, if you will, to the Old Testament and to the, to the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition, because what Isaiah did was it set the stage for what's coming, and what was coming was revolutionary. What do you mean? This divine being loves me. Are you flipping kidding me? This divine being knows I'm an @$$hole, so. But at any rate. So here's this passage, Isaiah fifty one one. It says, listen to me. You who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord. This is the beauty of beautiful part right here. Look to the rock from which you were hewn. Look to the quarry from which you were dug. I like to tell people. Is the journey difficult? Yeah. It's a narrow path. There's a bunch of rocks. You're barefoot and you're gonna stumble, and it sucks. You know? It's like. It's like when you go to each, you know, at a at a lake and all of a sudden you realize every sharp rock ever made is here. You know what I mean? And you're walking barefoot. Look to the rock from which you were hewn. You and I were hewn from the same rock. You and I were cut from the same quarry. And. Oh, by the way, that quarry is the divine. That quarry is God. That quarry is the big kahuna, the Wakka Wakka, whatever you call that being. That's the quarry from which we were hewn. And I think when we realize that, it's like, okay, cool. The problem has never been, in my personal opinion, that we didn't have this big, huge divine being. The problem has been always the size that we saw, that divine being with, you know, and you and I talked about this yesterday, right, because I called you and we were visiting.

00:06:34 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. We were.

00:06:36 Bob Hildreth: If I were to say, how big is God? You know, just that question alone. A lot of people, when we talk about grace, I like to break grace down into several different elements. Like, for example, we have cultural grace. Well, my cultures. Got it. But your culture is pretty well screwed, you know? And then we. Yeah, we've got denominational, grace. Well, my my fellowship has it, but you guys. Well, you're on the bobsled to hell. And then we've got this generational grace. Um, generational grace says, well, our generation has it, but those poor pilgrims, man, they were just really, you know, they just didn't get it. And the next generation. Oh my gosh, you know, they've gone too far type of thing. So there's there's several different types of grace. But what if grace and what if the divine what if God and I, I say the divine because I know people have been who have been raped in the name of God? Let's just take that back a step and just say, what if grace? What if God? What if it was bigger than human comprehension? So let's just say.

00:07:38 Jeromy Johnson: Which I think it has to be.

00:07:40 Bob Hildreth: It has to be, right? Yeah, it has to be. Because otherwise it's like, well, those people over in Africa are pretty well screwed to hell, you know what I mean? It's like, you know, because they don't get it. Oh my God, you know. And yet, in the midst of all this, I find it fascinating that the one person who really understood the message of Christ, the one person Jesus said, this guy's got it. Who was that? A Roman centurion. Let's put that in perspective. He was Roman. He was a centurion. He was polytheist. He was probably at the very least bisexual, if not gay. So we have all of this kind of stuff going on and stuff that we didn't ever really address. And all of a sudden, um, I found myself at the age of twenty seven, not being able to figure all that crap out.

00:08:35 Jeromy Johnson: If you grew up for, he said, about twenty seven years or so in the church, you probably didn't always hold this divinity is within us mentality. And so you were twenty seven. And I mean, we can go into like kind of what? What did that church experience look like for you? But what happened there like kind of take us through the path from, from that stage to a little bit where you're now?

00:08:58 Bob Hildreth: Yeah. So I, I wound up at, um. Oh, gosh, let me see. I'm trying to go back to where that whole piece.

00:09:06 Jeromy Johnson: And what year was this about?

00:09:07 Bob Hildreth: Was this around ninety one ish or downturn really started to spiral. It was a religious university, Baylor University, and I'm quite proud to be a bear sick and bears and all that. I was at this school when a guy comes in and I was there for summer school and this friend of mine says, man, can you believe this? This guy's selling drugs in the dorm room. And I go, no way, man. He said, no, I'm serious. I go, okay, well, I'm going to go over and just kind of mess this guy's head and see if he's real. And so I did, and he offered to sell me some stuff. And so I went over and called the local police department and I said, hey, this guy's willing to sell me this. Um, are you interested? I'll go in and try to buy some from him. But I want to do it knowing that you're gonna deal with it. And they go, are you serious? I go, yeah, sure. Why not? Okay. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's kind of a fun thing to do on the weekend. It's something different, you know? And I've always said you have to take action. On what? You know, that my heroes are like guys like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. My heroes are guy. People like. Like Corrie ten boom. My heroes are people like Martin Luther King Jr. My heroes are people like Gandhi, people that just said no to the bull$#!%. People like Jesus. They just said no.

00:10:18 Jeromy Johnson: What does grace and love look like in the real world?

00:10:20 Bob Hildreth: No, absolutely. And I think that, you know, you know, I like to tell people, um, when I speak, I like to say, you know, Jesus could have been a very successful Jewish carpenter if he just would have done two things. Shut up and color. Martin Luther King, Jr. Could have been a very successful black minister if he would have done two things. Shut up and color, you know, and and Gandhi. Same thing. You very successful Indian lawyer. Shut up and color. But when you choose to not shut up and color. One of the quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer I read in his book, oh gosh, The Cost of Discipleship, I think it was, I don't know, I'd have to go back and look. You know, he said they came for the mentally retarded and no one said anything. And then they came for the for this group and no one said anything. Then they came for this group. No one said anything. And the final line was, and then they came for me, and there was no one left to say anything. So I've always felt like you have to be out there taking action and doing something. To me that was really important. So at any rate, yeah, I went in and did what's called a controlled by. That led me to another and that led me to another. And before you knew it, I was like making buys because I could walk in and they could they trusted me and and I did that. And that began to kind of play with my head in some ways. I wasn't taking anything. I was doing what I felt like was right.

00:11:42 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.

00:11:43 Bob Hildreth: These religious people that I knew who were elevating me to positions of leadership, where all of a sudden worried about me. And I said, no, no, I don't think you understand. This is what's going on. And I told them the truth and they said, well, that's not you shouldn't be doing that.

00:11:58 Jeromy Johnson: Mm. Interesting.

00:11:59 Bob Hildreth: And I'm like, really? So what you're telling me is what? Keep in mind that the, the Christian church by and large, supported slavery in the South. Keep in mind that the church, by and large, supported Hitler. The early Christian church was the first originator of the original Holocaust. As soon as the Christian Church was formed and Christianity was legalized, which is three hundred and thirteen years after Jesus, by the way, Jesus had nothing to do with Christianity, but that's another story. But the bottom line is the first Holocaust, the first persecution of the Jews was known as well. We have to go kill these Jesus killers. That happened right after the Christian religion was formed. So I think of the more honest we get the more we see that. Oh, there's some stuff that's really difficult to deal with. And that's why there were some people who, in Rome in three thirteen AD said, yeah, we're going to take off now. They were known as the Desert Fathers. And for people who haven't studied the Desert Fathers, Saint John of the cross, Saint Teresa of Avila and some of these, you really need to go back and read some of the things that they wrote, because if you do that, it will radically alter the way you see some things.

00:13:14 Jeromy Johnson: So the church felt like you were coloring outside of their lines. You were doing this soft drug enforcement partnership. Um, and then what happens?

00:13:23 Bob Hildreth: I eventually well, I graduated and, um, I went into the military, went into certain elements of the military that was very demanding, shall we say. I felt again that there was this kind of push to not necessarily do some of the things that I was doing as far as, like the military goes, but I felt very honorable in what I was doing. There's this story where Jesus was talking to the to the Pharisees, and he said, oh my gosh, the outside of your cup looks great, but the inside of your cup is absolute filth. And to me, that's the way I look at most of the Christian church. To be honest with you, I mean, are there fellowships that are actually really focused on a bigger God? Yeah, I'm sure there are. I don't know that there's any around me, but I'm sure there are some somewhere. But I do feel like the inside of the cup was absolute filth. But the outside of the cup. Oh my gosh, you know, where does that make sense?

00:14:30 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah. And there's so many times where, you know, I fall into that too, where my exterior is maybe a lot more better looking than the interior. You know, my soul. And I'm sure you've you've been in that space too. Do you have a personal story where that moment of grace impacted you significantly?

00:14:48 Bob Hildreth: Yeah. Um, I mean, the first time was what I call my six thirty five moment. I was seeing a counselor.

00:14:55 Jeromy Johnson: What do you mean? Six thirty five moment. What is that?

00:14:57 Bob Hildreth: Okay, so there's a there's a a road that is around Dallas Fort Worth area. And I was in Dallas Fort Worth at the time. I was going through, uh, this therapy, and it's called six thirty five. It's the six thirty five loop. I was coming out of my therapist's office, and I had this old, um, eighty two seven that I loved. And I was driving down six thirty five. And it felt like for the first time, I saw the sunset in color.

00:15:27 Jeromy Johnson: Um.

00:15:28 Bob Hildreth: That, to me, was the moment where there was this massive grace switch. Keep in mind that before that moment had happened, I was in my second psychiatric treatment center, locked down facility. And Joe came in late one night and he said, have you ever heard of Grace? I said, well.

00:15:45 Jeromy Johnson: Who's Joe?

00:15:46 Bob Hildreth: Oh, Joe was my counselor. I'm sorry, Joe Quillin, great guy, amazing guy. He's actually out of Boulder, Colorado now. But I said, well, of course I have. I'm a Southern Baptist preacher's kid. And he shared with me seven questions.

00:15:57 Jeromy Johnson: No. He's like, no. Have you really have you really heard about Grace? Yeah.

00:16:01 Bob Hildreth: But he showed me seven questions in Scripture. He said, well, then just take some time to answer these. You know the first question, what is the purpose of the law? You know, and if we don't know the purpose of the law, then I don't think we could ever really fully understand grace. I don't think we can. That's been my experience. You know, the purpose of the law, the purpose of the law was basically to make everybody feel like crap. You know, if we're going to, like, narrow that down, the purpose of the law was to say, no, we're all guilty of something. And Jesus actually expanded that thought. Sin. Well, you've already thought about that girl. I remember hearing that scripture sitting in, you know, this Southern Baptist church in Euless, Texas, and looking up at the alto and soprano section of the choir thinking, oh my God, I am so screwed. You know, come on. I mean, I was a sixteen year old boy in America. Yeah, of course, I was walking around with this, you know, like, oh my God, you know what I mean? So I mean, it was there just wasn't a question of like, you know, have you done that? Well, of course, you know, in my mind I've done that. You know, if you've been angry at your brother, who in here has not driven down the road and been angry. So I think that there was this element of no, no, no, you everybody needs this. You know.

00:17:15 Jeromy Johnson: There's like it's like the great equalizer. It's the.

00:17:18 Bob Hildreth: Great.

00:17:18 Jeromy Johnson: Equalizer. This or that. And it's like, no, we're all equal.

00:17:22 Bob Hildreth: Yeah. We're all equal. And yet we had this leveling of sin, you know, and this level of sin said, well, no, the hooker is worse than the person who just drove sixty five in a sixty mile an hour speed zone. And yet Jesus said, no, that's not the case. And actually the Bible says, no, that's not the case. And Rob Bell really sums this up really well. He asks a simple question does God? Does the divine get what they want? Well, it's the divine will that no one should perish. You know Jesus, for God so loved the world you know, and no one perishes. And this kind of mentality, this idea that it's just not what I was taught all of a sudden, we're opening up to this idea that there's this divine being who really is literally in all you know, and you can make a choice. Here's your choice. Well, you want to live now. Okay, we'll go inside, go inside and heal generations of generational, you know, your sins of your fathers, if you will.

00:18:24 Jeromy Johnson: So that moment with Joe really started to open the door. Maybe a bigger grace and I imagine. Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine your second time in a psych ward, your soul and your body was probably starting to to open up to some of that.

00:18:38 Bob Hildreth: Sure. And I think that part of it was the first time in a psych ward it was this Christian psych ward, this Christian counseling center, this Christian psychiatric hospital. I had never experienced a anxiety attack. Keep in mind, in the military, I jumped out of planes, jumped out of boats, had my scuba, had my jump wings. I was with special operations and all of this stuff. So I was the man. You know what I mean? I was tough, but I came out of this Christian psych ward and all of a sudden I found myself going, ah, anxiety. I was having an anxiety attack. Never happened before. So six months later, I'm in this secular psych ward and Joe is my counselor. Now, here's an interesting thing about Joe. What my mom didn't know, and if my mom had known, we never would have had Joe as a counselor. He was a defrocked. I didn't even know what the term meant. I it sounded like something you do with a chicken before you send it to Kentucky Fried. But he was a defrocked Baptist preacher, and he was now counseling people. But he didn't have his counseling license. It didn't really matter.

00:19:45 Jeromy Johnson: So defrocked means he was like, uh, had his paperwork removed. He wasn't accepted in the Baptist church anymore. Right. Is that their term that they use for that?

00:19:54 Bob Hildreth: Right. And I'm not either. I'm actually, um. Frocked. I guess if I'm if I'm not defrocked, I'm frocked. I don't know, but I'm actually a pastor. But it's in this very kind of open fellowship. I don't know if that's the best word for it. Yeah. I mean, there's a wonderful, uh, pastor friend of mine up in Aurora, California or. No, Aurora, Colorado, and he frocked me. I don't know that that sounds really weird. I don't know, whatever the hell it is. It's like, you know, you get your pastor license or certification. And so.

00:20:26 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah.

00:20:27 Bob Hildreth: At any rate, though. So, yeah, um, he was a defrocked Southern Baptist preacher, and he's now living with his husband in, um, Joe that is living with his husband up in Boulder, Colorado. And that was the other piece, is that at that time, nobody knew he was gay, because keep in mind that at that time in the state of Texas.

00:20:45 Jeromy Johnson: Well, yeah.

00:20:45 Bob Hildreth: You know, we're talking about the late eighties. If you were gay, you were on the bobsled to hell kind of thing. And I like to tell people that one of the things that really excuse me, pushed me to grace was the fact that I got really tired of standing beside the the graveside of a church assisted suicide.

00:21:06 Jeromy Johnson: Mhm.

00:21:07 Bob Hildreth: And, uh, I got really fed up with it. And I've now been by the graveside of eight church assisted suicides.

00:21:13 Jeromy Johnson: Hmm. But that hits you personally because I know that we talked before and you mentioned that you at one point had suicide thoughts and intentions. Yeah. And has that changed?

00:21:24 Bob Hildreth: Yeah. Tremendously. Absolutely. Tremendously.

00:21:27 Jeromy Johnson: And why do you suppose that is? What what is it that that helped change? Because I mean, that's that's serious and that's major, you know.

00:21:33 Bob Hildreth: Yeah. Um, because I got my. The divine got bigger.

00:21:39 Jeromy Johnson: Mm.

00:21:39 Bob Hildreth: I mean, I could sum it up really simple. I got a bigger.

00:21:43 Jeromy Johnson: The divine get bigger or your understanding.

00:21:45 Bob Hildreth: I think the divine. Well I think the divine got bigger because I think that my divine was so limited and I.

00:21:53 Jeromy Johnson: Oh. When you mean. When you mean the divine. Okay. So flesh that out. When you say the divine got bigger, you're talking about the the personal divinity experience of divinity in yourself. Or what do you mean by that?

00:22:04 Bob Hildreth: I guess, yeah, probably the best way to say that would be the divine. That I understood the divinity of my understanding. And what I mean by that is there's divinity in me, there's divinity in you, there is everything is divine. So I subscribe to what's called panentheism. And panentheism is different than pantheism. Pantheism says this brush is a God. No, no, no. Panentheism says God is in all and all is in God. And so the reason that's important.

00:22:36 Jeromy Johnson: Physics is physics is starting to show us that.

00:22:39 Bob Hildreth: Yes, absolutely. Physics and pretty much everything. We're at a really interesting point in the world because, I don't know, five, six hundred years ago when somebody tried to say, the world is round, weren't they like burned at the stake or something? Who am I thinking of, Galileo or one of these guys, you know, one of these heretics. Now it's it's almost like heretic is really a point of pride because you're willing to go on a journey. Keep in mind, Jesus was a heretic. Martin Luther King Jr was a heretic. Gandhi was a heretic. These are all heretics.

00:23:15 Jeromy Johnson: The heretic, meaning just one that is going outside of the accepted norm of that culture, or that religion or that belief. Right?

00:23:22 Bob Hildreth: Buddha was a heretic. I mean, you know, if you look at the Buddha, I love the stories of the Buddha and I, you know, I was I lived in a Buddhist countries for about twenty plus years, uh, in and out. I was living So when the war started, I'd already lived in in Korea. That's where I met my wife. And when I saw what, you know, the second plane hit on nine eleven, we were actually in. Where were we at? Somewhere in New England, actually, I was we were back here. We'd only been back in country for about six or seven months. We got married in Seattle, King County Courthouse, and then we made our way over here because I was setting up a language program at some school in New Hampshire. That's where it was, New Hampshire. And, uh, at any rate. So when we saw the second plane hit on TV, I, I told my wife, I said, you know, I'm, I'm going to get a phone call. And so would you rather be here or would you rather be in back in Korea because.

00:24:15 Jeromy Johnson: You're in the military at this time, right.

00:24:16 Bob Hildreth: No, I was out of the military, but I was.

00:24:19 Jeromy Johnson: Okay.

00:24:19 Bob Hildreth: Really good at language acquisition, and I was really good at doing certain jobs. And so I said, I've got a job to do, basically. And, uh, as soon as I get the opportunity, I'm going. She knew the score after I kind of explained it to her and she said, well, I suppose all things being equal, I'd rather be around my parents, you know. And I said, okay, well, let's arrange that. We started making plans and started heading back toward Asia, and she stayed there while I was going in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan and other various wonderful tourist places. That was really a great time to share grace in places like, I got to share grace in Iraq. I got to share grace a very little bit in Afghanistan, because I got out of Afghanistan as quick as I could, but I got to share grace with people there. And I think that part of what I was blessed to be able to do was to share grace overseas. And I think that that was part of my journey, because I think it's really hard to find grace in the United States. People don't need it. They don't need it. And when you find people like Jonathan, who this young man is. Well, he was from Uganda. He ran to Kenya to a refugee camp where he is literally threatened for his life on a daily basis because he's gay. So he escapes that refugee camp and he's living in Kenya. But the problem is, is that everybody recognizes his Ugandan accent and they know why he's there. If you came from Uganda to Kenya, you're gay. That's the general assumption. And so as a result, interesting. That's like, you know, in Uganda, they execute you if you're gay. That's all there is to it. There's no ifs, ands or buts, you know. It's like, wow, okay. You're gay. Well, here's a bullet with that in mind. Uh, he follows me very religiously because he still believes very strongly in the divine, in God, in Jesus. He's still very strongly believes that. And he finds great comfort in the default excuse me, in the divine that I teach, as do many gay people that he's connected with there.

00:26:27 Jeromy Johnson: So you had that moment in the psych ward? Yes. You were You're having some suicidal thoughts and intentions. Back then, Jesus hints at this right where we really need to come into a space of loving ourselves and accepting ourselves and recognizing our own dignity before. And I'm not just saying outwardly, right, because a lot of people are arrogant. They go, yeah, I'm the greatest. But it's like deep down they really don't like themselves. And a lot of times that that boasting and that pride is just to because they're so insecure. But we have to have a security and a love and acceptance of ourselves before we really even have the capacity to love and embrace others and recognize their dignity. Right. How has this played out in your experience of just coming to a more healthy acceptance of yourself, and then how is that reflected back? And maybe I'm assuming it has. Maybe, maybe it hasn't. Maybe you hate people. I'm assuming here, but how is that? How is that becoming more healthy in yourself, reflected towards your your view of humanity and others?

00:27:29 Bob Hildreth: I think. And that's that's a great question and a very powerful question. I believe that the more we see how much the divine loves us, the more we can love ourselves, you know? And I believe that to be able to connect with our own inner divinity is to be able to connect with the love for ourselves, a healthy love for ourselves, not based on our performance, not based on our political views, not based on, you know, our social climbing, whatever, but based on the idea that we see that there's a divinity in in ourselves. And as I see that divinity in me, I see that divinity in you. And as I see that divinity in in the other, I see the oneness in us. And there's this great passage in the Old Testament that says, hear, O Israel, our God is one God. And one of the biggest problems that we have in America today, outside of the idea that we have a instead of a a transformative God. We have a transactional God. That's just Western Christianity one hundred one. You know, it's transactional. Jesus came to die so God wouldn't send you to hell on a bobsled, you know, kind of thing. So we have that kind of a thing. But the reason for that is the duality that we have. We have a God of duality, and God was never a God of duality.

00:28:50 Jeromy Johnson: What do you mean? What do you mean by a God of duality?

00:28:53 Bob Hildreth: Sure, a God of duality says good, bad, right? Wrong. Uh. Black. White.

00:28:58 Jeromy Johnson: Saved. Not saved.

00:29:00 Bob Hildreth: Yes. Saved. Not saved. Whereas this God of unity, this God who is who is one God is saying, no, I am in all, and all are in me. And the more that we can rest in that now that puts you in some very odd situations. Don't get me wrong, that's some very awkward moments.

00:29:23 Jeromy Johnson: How so?

00:29:24 Bob Hildreth: Well, okay, so for an example, I got this question one time. They said, do you believe Hitler is in heaven? Yes. Yeah, that's what I got then too. Is this crickets kind of thing. And it's not you.

00:29:37 Jeromy Johnson: Well, no, I was thinking because there's there's even the theology that that even Satan and his, his demons will be restored and redeemed. So compared to them, like Hitlers like, you know.

00:29:49 Bob Hildreth: Yeah. No. Absolutely. That took me some reckoning, don't get me wrong, because I knew people who were knew them. I mean, I met them, I was blessed to meet people who were Holocaust survivors, you know, still had the tattoo thing. And and I was very, very blessed.

00:30:05 Jeromy Johnson: Well, say more about that. You met some Holocaust survivors. And what was their view about all this stuff?

00:30:11 Bob Hildreth: Oh, yeah. No, I mean, we're talking people who now, when we talk about seeing some $#!%, you know, they they saw the worst part of humanity. There's no question about that. You know, I look at what I've gone through and I think, you know, I. Come on, dude. Cub scouts have been through more, you know. But you're absolutely right. I think that there's a great book called, um. Oh, gosh, I'm going to mess up his name. Eli Wiesel Wentzel, uh, wrote the book, uh, night about his experience going through the the concentration camps. He lost his his wife. He lost his mother. He lost his father. They all could have gotten out. It was a really pretty amazing story. I've got to try and find his story again. But anyway, all that to say, in his book, he said that the ones who made it through were the ones who had a different outlook on what was happening, the ones who would find the divine moments in the middle of the $#!%. And I think that that's what you absolutely have to do. You know, I learned I really my meditation practice got a lot better in war zones than it ever did outside of war zones.

00:31:18 Jeromy Johnson: Oh I bet.

00:31:19 Bob Hildreth: You know, honestly, it it, you know, really did.

00:31:22 Jeromy Johnson: And they really I think some of the Holocaust survivors came to a place of even forgiveness against the people who had wronged them. Yeah. And I feel like if they can do that, how much more so can I with a guy that just cut me off at a red light or, you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And I'm not going to dismiss because there's, there's people that have been molested and. Oh yeah. Have gone through a lot of stuff that are on par with, with the Holocaust survivors, that even capability within ourselves to forgive someone who has been so damaging and so robbing of our dignity and hurting our us physically and everything else like that points to the ability of the divine to do that. Oh, yeah. And none of these people asked for forgiveness. None of these people said, I'm sorry, can you forgive me? Which is that transactional part of. Yes. Some of the evangelical belief is like, you have to come to that place of like, forgive me. And yeah, that's pretty fascinating.

00:32:18 Bob Hildreth: No, absolutely. And I think that to me, what we have to do in my way of seeing it now, I mean, and this is like, you know, after years, I mean, like, keep in mind, whenever I started coming to Grace, it was like late eighties, early nineties. This is when families disowned you for saying the kind of things that we're talking about here openly now. So we, we, we've jumped millenniums in a short time space, you know, to to me. But but keep in mind.

00:32:44 Jeromy Johnson: Did your family do that.

00:32:45 Bob Hildreth: Oh yeah. Some some of my members, some members of my family, you know, they still would be kind of, like, hesitant to talk to me. But all that to say, you know, win some, lose some. So what next? I, I know that's a really difficult thing to say. And and don't get me wrong.

00:33:01 Jeromy Johnson: Well, you can't control how they're going to react. No, you can't control what other people are going to do. You can't.

00:33:05 Bob Hildreth: But this is part of.

00:33:06 Jeromy Johnson: That.

00:33:07 Bob Hildreth: Journey. It's all part of the journey. You know, there was this moment where Jesus's mom came up to her and said, hey, hey, listen, listen. We squared it away with the rabbis. We said that you were temporarily nuts. So if you'll come back home and just, you know, look, the carpenter shop, you know, come on, dude, You know, your dad left you all the tools. It's all good. Just, you know, shut up and color his own mom. And he said, you're not my mom. You're not my brothers. You're not my sisters. These people are. So that's how Jesus responded. We have to get. This is my personal opinion. We have to get away from seeing Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins, and see it instead as the sacrifice. That said, perfect love doesn't even recognize death. Physical death doesn't even touch you. And when you get that, you're going, okay, so it's not such a big deal. It's really not. You know, you're just transforming from one state to the next. I don't know, that's that's kind of the way I see it. I think that we have to allow room. I like to tell people, yes, I believe Jesus is the way, but there are as many ways to Jesus as there are souls who've ever been born. I want you to think about that.

00:34:20 Jeromy Johnson: There are a trillion paths into this grace, and it's all going to look different. Which is why I love having guests like you on here, because it's like. Like Bob, share with us your path. Right. Share with us how you got to this. Yeah. This place. And yeah, I think for every person there is a unique, you know, some of the questions like, well, Jeremy, are you saying that all roads lead to God? In other words, like all religions lead to God or like, you know, Jesus said, there's one road and that road is a narrow one, and all the other ones lead to destruction. Yeah. And in my mind that that that's asking the wrong question because I feel like God will meet us on all roads.

00:34:55 Bob Hildreth: Absolutely.

00:34:56 Jeromy Johnson: God doesn't wait for the road to come to him. Yeah, the divinity and God will meet us on any road possible.

00:35:03 Bob Hildreth: Yeah. And let me let me try to address that. Let's let's talk about, you know, a wide path. Is the worship of money a wide path? Well, yeah. I mean, you know, there's a lot of ways to make money. That's a wide road that a lot of people travel down. It's a well-traveled road, very well maintained, the Non-well maintained road is that road. That's the spiritual path. I think that one of the things that we forget is how Jesus was tempted in his, in the temptations against him. Number one, he was tempted to forget his inner divinity, which is our number one temptation. Let's recognize that if you are the Son of God, so the if is challenging you to forget your inner divinity. That's the first temptation. Second temptation. Power. Third temptation. Prestige. And fourth temptation is possessions. So power, prestige and possessions. For me, I put that at the intersection of organized religion when I was a part of that power. Well, you want to be a preacher. You want to be in charge of a church, a megachurch. You want to grow the church power, prestige. You want to make sure that, you know, you go to the right schools, you look the right way. You, you know, and don't do this and don't do that. And the exterior, exterior, exterior, you know, and all of the temptations of Christ to me, I met for the first time in organized religion.

00:36:36 Jeromy Johnson: And that's a possibility for sure.

00:36:38 Bob Hildreth: Yeah.

00:36:39 Jeromy Johnson: And it's a possibility that some don't give in to that. You know, there's there's the.

00:36:43 Bob Hildreth: Oh, absolutely.

00:36:44 Jeromy Johnson: Small pastor who's just content with his congregation and just really doing his best.

00:36:48 Bob Hildreth: Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that there's all different kinds. I mean, you know, one thing I learned in English class long time ago at Baylor University is when you say words like all, always, and you know, that type.

00:37:00 Jeromy Johnson: Of thing.

00:37:00 Bob Hildreth: You're pretty much always wrong. The only exception that I would say is that God the divine whatever is, um, always bigger than what we can imagine, always bigger than human comprehension.

00:37:12 Jeromy Johnson: Which I agree part of my story was finding, when my foundations crumbled, that there was this much larger God. Underneath those really skinny foundations of mine. And I want to ask you, because you brought that that great point of God being a big God, a bigger God than you ever imagined. So why are we? I mean, we like people, maybe those that you've come across. Why are we afraid of a big, generous God? A God that could be more generous than our imagination? Why are we so afraid of that? Why do we think like that's such a wrong idea?

00:37:46 Bob Hildreth: Sure. And and it's funny that you would mention that, because I get this on a regular day. We've been trained to have certain verses that are like our. Okay, well, this this verse is my knife. This verse is my nine millimeter. This verse is a grenade, you know, and we throw these things at each other like there's some sort of like war going on here. And I think what scares us is the unknown. And yet everything about faith is based on unknown. So I mystery. Yeah it's mystery. And so what I like to tell people is, well, thanks for your opinion. And they go, well, wait a minute. This isn't an opinion. This is what the word about says.

00:38:25 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah, well, that's your opinion on what the Word of God says, right?

00:38:28 Bob Hildreth: But beyond that, I said, okay. So are you accepting this on faith or not? Well, of course I'm accepting it by faith. Well, faith is an opinion on what you can't see, right? And I think that we're very much afraid to say, well, I can't see it, therefore it's not there. And I reckon this to a foggy morning. And one of the things I love about North Carolina is we have some very, very foggy mornings. And to me, Jesus was good with fog. You know what I mean? Like, he's on this boat and he's asleep down below, and this massive storm hits and all of his disciples go, we're gonna die! And they go and wake him up, and they're going, why? He's like, why are you waking me up? And so he goes, okay, calm down. And then he goes back and goes to sleep. And the interesting thing about that is he's going, oh, you of little faith. You of little faith. Why? Because. Do I know I'm gonna die? No, I mean, I know I'm gonna die. But here's the whole thing is like. So what? You know, I call it the so what? Sainthood. There are some things that we believe so strongly. So what? Let it go. It doesn't matter. But, but, but but just so what the. So what? Sainthood was the sainthood that Paul had? Paul believed all things are working together for my good. There's a so what moment? Jesus was scared. Jesus was so afraid because he knew he was going to be crucified. And then there was this moment where he got to the so what? Sainthood. He goes, okay, all right. And that's so what sainthood, I believe, is kind of the ultimate level of grace. That's that's when you're actually able to the kind of like, you know, I tell people my last lessons in my last exhale, I have no idea how to die, but I'm going to learn really quick.

00:40:18 Jeromy Johnson: Yeah, it's going to happen.

00:40:20 Bob Hildreth: Yeah, it's going to happen. You know. But when? With your grace. So was there a moment like you're sitting in some organized religion and you go, you're waving a bull$#!% flag? Or how did that work?

00:40:34 Jeromy Johnson: No, I mean, I don't think that there was any one given moment for me. I feel like I've always sat with questions. I've always had a little bit of that, that discomfort with some of the things, you know, especially like like hell and this, this idea that there's this inferno that the majority of humans are going to be sent to, that God created. Um, but I don't think there was like any one, one point in my life where that changed. Um, I think it was a it was a gradual thing. It was something that I started going to to different expressions of church. I went to a vineyard church, went to a Presbyterian church, went to an Episcopal church. And it's like, here are godly, genuine, loving people who just believe different things about what Scripture says and honestly, just as biblical, right? Like they can pull their verses.

00:41:20 Bob Hildreth: Sure.

00:41:21 Jeromy Johnson: And so that just begins began to open me up to this broader notion, this broader notion of God. And I think just ultimately, my path ended up to this grace that says that all are going to be welcomed. Yeah. That all are going to be accepted and not going to be, but already are. It's not some future tense. Yeah. I do believe that every single human on this earth that has existed, that exists now and that will exist, is already embraced, is already accepted. And at that point, when they believe that that's the reality, when they repent, if they turn to see like, oh, I thought God was against me this whole time because of this and this and this, God was never against me. Oh. And they turn like that changes everything. And they're they're saved from a lot of things or saved from from their destructive life, like thoughts of suicide and yeah, going to psych wards and all this other kind of stuff. They're saved from so many things and then they can live in this reality. Um, how is how has God been showing up in your life recently, Bob? Like like nowadays. Like what? You have, like a story of where you can pinpoint that.

00:42:39 Bob Hildreth: Yeah. I think that, uh, I've got a really great app. It's called Insight Timer, and I meditate. I learned I actually went to a Buddhist meditation center, which was great. It was really rocking. It was really rocking. It sounds like a disco, but it was. It was this, you know, I went for this one week of Silent Retreat, so nobody talked for a week. The only time that anyone talked was when they read the Dhamma, which is, you know, one of their, um, text and and the. Oh, I'm sorry, the only other time that you talk is like one of these meditation teachers pulls you in at some time during the day and they ask you, how's it going for you? So this meditation teacher pulled me in and said, well, Bob, how is the how's the meditation retreat going for you? And I said, well, it sucks. And she was kind of like taken back. Nobody said anything. That and she goes, well, could you be a little bit more, you know, explain a little bit more? I said, yeah, okay. Sure. Because I'd just gotten out of Iraq or Afghanistan or someplace. I said, yeah, okay. Sure. I said, it sucked a camel's ass. It sucks a camel's ass. How's that working for you? And she's like, wow. Well, okay, so can you tell me why? And I said, yeah, well, you you guys, when you guys read the Dharma at night, you guys say, hey, listen, we hear someone weeping in the back of the meditation hall. If you're struggling, please come up. We would love to visit with you. And so she said, yeah, yeah, we've been kind of trying to find, you know, where that sounds coming from. And I said, well, that's me. It's the big tough Green Beret guy back in the back. That's that's me. Yeah, I'm the one doing that. And she goes, okay, could you tell me a little bit more? I said, yeah, sure. Whenever I close my eyes and I begin to meditate, I begin to see the day my dad passed and they came and got me at school, and they told me that the cancer got him. And so they take me back to the house and I go into the house. And my dad knew a lot of people because he was this big Baptist preacher, you know, in this area. And so everybody was at my house and I went into the front door and I ran out the back door because I just couldn't tolerate that. And I ran into this empty field in Artesia, New Mexico. We'll never forget it. And I knelt down on the ground. I extended my middle finger up to God, and I said, %@#! you, God, if this is who you are, I never want to hear from you again. This was an eleven year old boy who was extremely hurt and extremely in pain. And so she said, okay, could I stop you right there? And I said, yeah, sure. Why not? She said, here's what I want you to do. She said, I want you to close your eyes and I want you to go through this visualization. She said, I want you to see whoever you believe, the divine God, whatever to be coming down, wrapping their arms around you. And I can still see this and holding you to their breast and saying, I love you, my child, and this is so gonna suck. This is the $#!%tiest part of life, and it's all gonna work out for good.

00:45:33 Jeromy Johnson: Mm.

00:45:34 Bob Hildreth: And that radically changed.

00:45:37 Jeromy Johnson: Yes.

00:45:38 Bob Hildreth: Um, my progression in grace. Nowadays, I see grace through, um, Lectio divina. Lectio divina is a process of just taking a very short passage of scripture and really chewing on it and let it sink in. Like I spent fifteen minutes on this look at the rock from which you were hewn. Look at the quarry from which you were dug. Let's just sit with that for the next fifteen minutes and see what happens.

00:46:12 Jeromy Johnson: See what shows up? Yeah.

00:46:14 Bob Hildreth: See what shows up. See our connection to the rock from which we were apart. And right now, while it looks like we're physically separated, we're really not. You aren't. I'm not. None of us are. I read. I'm reading. Well, I'm still reading because I'm rereading several passages from. There's a great book called Higher Self. I can't remember the name of the writer, but she's actually from California and it talks about the journey to higher self. There's a great recording by Richard Rohr called True Self, False Self. All of this points to the idea that you need to make an inner journey. You need to make an inner journey. And I counsel people every day all. I mean, I counsel them I mean, you know, they they come to me because of I put out the doctor Jesus quote. And at any rate, all that to say, people come to me and they go, well, what about this? And what about that? And, you know, and all this type of stuff. I point them all toward just one real revelation for me, and that is faith is simply rest. Just resting. What do you have to rest in? I have to rest in the idea that the love that embraces me is beyond my comprehension, beyond all human comprehension. If we put all the human brains of all history together, they would not have the comprehension to comprehend the immensity of this love.

00:47:35 Jeromy Johnson: Hmm.

00:47:36 Bob Hildreth: The interesting thing to me in the world in which we live in is Jesus was always in the middle. He wasn't Democrat. He wasn't Republican. He wasn't to the left. He wasn't to the right. He wasn't this or he wasn't that. He was always in the middle. There's a reason why his cross was in the middle. That's my take on it.

00:47:56 Jeromy Johnson: No, that's a good spot to end of just resting in that grace. In that love. Yeah. Because I really have found that that's so true that when you step into this believing in this understanding of a much larger divine grace that doesn't require anything to be applied. Yeah, there is a resting in that. There is relaxing in that. A lot of those walls fall down because I think, as you said so eloquently, Jesus is in the middle. And as we accept this grace, we just find all those walls and those differences fall down with us. Absolutely. Well, Bob, I want to thank you so much for just taking a moment of your time and conversing with me. I appreciate you and all that you've gone through. And I really, really wanted to say thank you for for being here with us. And is there any one last little parting thing that you would like to say and.

00:48:49 Bob Hildreth: Thank you for the work that you do for getting this out there and just for sharing. Um, you know what it is. That is the journey. I mean, thank you so much for that. I wish that. Well, no, I don't, because I believe everything happens by divine timing. But we are in such a beautiful fill space, because we're in an age where grace is so readily available to talk about. I caution the people that are in my country right now, America, because I just came from a country. The last country I lived in is a country that's enslaved completely. That country, you can't have these conversations, that country, the religion is the state in that country you cannot. The one you worship is the leader. That's it. Period. Any discussion, whether you're in the Catholic, whether whatever the church you're in, that's who you worship and grace. No, no, no, I, I think we're in a beautiful place and we need to expand that and share that and believe in it. So I appreciate you, my friend. I really do, and I hopefully we will continue to converse and talk.

00:49:57 Jeromy Johnson: And yeah, I think we should all be thankful that we can even have these conversations and yeah, have them openly and freely because I think the world needs it. The world right now just This needs to grow in that understanding of grace and what that love looks like. So Bob, I appreciate you. Thank you so much for joining us. And, uh, as you started out with how you doing? Great. And it's going to get better. And I think that's ultimately the hope. All right Bob.

00:50:23 Bob Hildreth: All right. Thank you so much.

00:50:30 Jeromy Johnson: What I loved about Bob's story is that it refuses to be polished. It's grace with dirt under its nails. Grace that's had enough coffee and way too many questions. If anything in this conversation stirred something in you doubt, hope, longing. Maybe that's Grace doing what she does best, sneaking in through the cracks. Wherever you are on the road, wounded, wandering, or still in the pew. May you find the kind of grace that refuses to let go. Remember, walk in grace. And if you can share that grace.