The Power of Gratitude and Overcoming a Defeatist Mindset

Just imagine a moment when you felt utterly lost, only to find yourself back on track with a renewed sense of purpose. That's my journey with faith, a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs, with the constant struggle to keep faith as my guiding light. Let's get real about something that most millennials experience, losing and rediscovering faith. In this episode, I share my personal journey, how I managed to escape a doomer mindset, found blessings in life's trials, and how my faith helped me overcome. 

As the holiday season approaches, we often get caught up in the festivities and forget to acknowledge the true power of thankfulness and gratitude. But what if we began to see every day as a time to give thanks? Join me as we delve into this topic, reflecting on the current state of society and the importance of appreciating the freedom and tools we have to battle wickedness. The message is clear: count your blessings, avoid a defeatist mindset, and ensure gratitude becomes a daily practice. At the end of the day, we'll explore the long game of preserving the remnant and the significance of spending time with those we love. Don't miss out on this enlightening conversation.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

What's going on everybody? Andrew Torber here, ceo of GAVcom. Welcome to the Parallel Christian Society podcast. I'm very excited today because I have a new microphone and this is the very first episode with the new mic, so you're going to have to let me know how it sounds. Hopefully the quality is better and we'll see how it goes.

Speaker 1: 0:35

So today, you know, I've been obviously pondering on Thankfulness, right, the topic of thankfulness. You know, as we're approaching Thanksgiving here, there's a lot that I have to be thankful for and you know I try to sort of embody the spirit of being thankful, which is a good thing to practice on a day to day basis. You know, not just once a year, but we have so much to be thankful for. I know that a lot of people are struggling right now and our country is a mess and our government is a mess and a lot of society is a mess. But you know, even through this storm of trial, our God is sovereign, our God is good and reflecting even in my own life of the just incredible blessings that I have in my life I have three beautiful children, I have a wonderful wife, I have a very supportive family, I have my health. You know, these are all things to be thankful for and these are all things that, as I'm praying every night, those are the first things that I thank God for, and actually that's how I start all of my nightly prayers before I go to bed is by thanking God. You know, having this spirit of thankfulness for the wonderful blessings and, you know, also for the trials, because some of the trials that I've been through here at GAB, you know, both personally and professionally over the past seven years, have helped me mature and have helped me grow in my faith and you know they've made me more resilient and strong and so I'm thankful for them. And it's really difficult, like when you're going through a trial, it's really, really difficult to see the silver lining in that trial or to see the purpose in that trial. But you know, looking back with hindsight, of course, you know I can see what God was doing through those trials and how he was transforming my heart and I'm thankful for that. And you know it sounds weird, it's sort of paradoxical right, like how can you be thankful for, you know, the persecution and the trials that you've been through and you know that's just the heart of a Christian right, that's the fruit of the Holy Spirit is. We know that life is going to come with challenges and with trials and with tribulations, but we know that our God is good and our God is sovereign and he is with us every step of the way through those trials.

Speaker 1: 3:26

You know, I made this post the other day. I had a specific call for prayer for those who may be struggling with seasonal depression right now. Um, you know, right now is sort of the season of despair for a lot of people, and during this time of year we see deaths of despair skyrocket. Um, there's a lot of suicides that happen this time of year, and this is something that I, um, you know, know very well, because when I was 18 years old I was a senior in high school I lost, um, one of my good friends to suicide and it sort of turned my world upside down, and so I'm very familiar with this topic and it's it's something that's very near and dear to my heart. You know, I've I've written in the past.

Speaker 1: 4:17

Um, long before I started gab, back when I was, I was blogging. Um, you know, when I was in college, I wrote about my struggles with seasonal depression and, um, you know, this is a thing that happens, but I actually haven't. It hasn't been as bad over the past few years, as my faith has gone stronger. I've noticed that the uh, the seasonal depression that I've struggled with in the past, um tends to not pop up its ugly head as often as it did in the past, and even when it does, you know, I'm sort of able to get through it, uh, thanks to my faith and thanks to focusing more on my health, um, and you know, there's there's sort of a biological component here, but there's also a spiritual component, and so, you know, if you start to understand the biological component, it's like hey, listen, we're not getting enough sun, we're not getting enough vitamin D, um, we're not spending as much time outside. It's really cold, um, even as I record this, it's gray and dreary and rainy outside, and so it's it's sort of um, um, you're in an environment, just sort of naturally all around you, that is sort of conducive to uh being a little bit depressing.

Speaker 1: 5:27

But you know what? What helps us overcome this is is our faith and a spirit of being thankful and content, uh, with the things that that God has provided and the um. You know the, the, the reality of the situation that he is walking with us through those trials and through those feelings. And so, you know, maybe you're listening to this and you're feeling a little bit blackpilled, maybe you're feeling some of this seasonal depression. Um, I know a lot of people are. I know a lot of people. I have a lot of close friends that struggle with this and it's, it's something that people are sort of shy, uh, when it comes to talking about it, but I like to talk about it because I think it's, it's, you know, it's a part of being human.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Is is dealing with being sad or these feelings of, um, of hopelessness and and, um, you know that is that is where faith comes into play. Is that you know we have hope. We have hope in eternal life with, with our Lord and Savior, jesus Christ, and, um, you know that is that is what we look forward to in the future. Is we're going to go through trials and tribulations here, um, during our time, our short time on this earth, but what comes after in eternity is is worth those trials and is worth those tribulations and is worth the persecution and is worth the sorrow. Um, you know we're, we're, we're, we're going to have to pick up our cross. Part of following Christ is we have to pick up our cross. And you know we have to understand that a part of being human is suffering. It's sort of inevitable.

Speaker 1: 7:13

But you know, our faith is it's it's it's it's faith and the power of the Holy spirit that's indwelling in us. It helps us to overcome that, and my heart goes out to the folks who don't have this and don't realize how truly powerful it is. You know I talk about this a lot. The same power that resurrected Christ from the dead is the same power that is indwelling in us. Right, the power of the Holy Spirit is just tremendous. You know I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. Right, that's not just a cliche, you know, it's the truth. And so you know, if you're feeling blackpilled by the state of the country or maybe the whatever situations, whatever unique situations are going on in your life, I encourage you maybe you're not a Christian to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. You know many of you have heard my testimony.

Speaker 1: 8:14

You know I grew up in the faith, but then I sort of wandered away from the faith, and this is a very typical story of many millennials, many people in my generation is. You know, maybe we grew up in the church and you know, then we got to our early 20s and sort of wandered away and, you know, went off into the world and did a lot of worldly things and in my case, you know, I was chasing the Silicon Valley Tech entrepreneur dream and I never sort of abandoned my belief in God or anything like that. But you know, I certainly wasn't living my life fully for Christ as I'm doing now and it makes all the difference. It makes all the difference, you know, maybe if you're just sort of going through the motions and, yeah, I believe in God, like whatever right that's, you know, maybe you're even going to church on Sunday. But you know what happens Monday through Saturday, right, if you're in church for an hour, an hour and a half every week, that's not enough. It needs to be all of life for all of Christ and anything less. And you're shorting yourself, right. It's like if you're on a diet and you take a cheat meal, right, who's bad thing from that? You're only hurting yourself by taking that cheat meal. And so it's the same thing where, if you're only giving God, you know, an hour out of your week and you're given the world every hour of every day. The rest of the week, well then, you know you're going to be miserable and it shouldn't be shocking to you to figure out why that's happening. You're not spending time in prayer, you're not spending time in God's Word, you're not discipling your family. You know these are all the things that we're supposed to be doing, not just on Sunday, it's supposed to be every hour of every day. You know, realistic, right, like we have to go to work, we have to do things right. But you know you do that work for the purpose of the glory of God. No matter what it is that you're doing, you're doing it for the glory of God. And so you know, I'm just, I'm so thankful for the work that the Holy Spirit has been doing in my life and for the blessings in my life and the people in my life and for the Gabb community.

Speaker 1: 10:43

It's been a really tough year. I'm not going to lie with you guys. You know it's been a very difficult year. You know the recession really it hit us hard, just like it hit every other company, every other business. If you're a business owner, you know you feel the pain too. Right, it's hurting everybody, but God is good and God provided and got us through it. And we're still here and we're still building, and you know, even amidst that we've been able to accomplish so much.

Speaker 1: 11:16

I posted this infographic the other day on GAB about basically 1% improvement every day. That's sort of been our philosophy here at GAB. Is what can we improve by 1% every day so that at the end of a year you have compounded improvement? And if you look at GAB a year ago, you know, from product standpoint or from the features that we have or whatever bugs we may have had or whatever, the improvement is just dramatic. We have totally overhauled the site. We've added a bunch of new features, we're expanding on this vision of building out the parallel economy and the parallel Christian society, and what we've been able to accomplish with so little is just remarkable, and what we've been able to overcome with so little is remarkable as well, and it's, you know, all the glory goes to God, because without our faith we certainly wouldn't have been able to survive. We wouldn't have been able to accomplish all that we've accomplished and all that we continue to accomplish on a day-to-day basis. And so I'm just, I'm incredibly thankful.

Speaker 1: 12:31

You know, I encourage you if you're feeling blackpilled or if you're feeling hopeless you know, again, this is so prevalent during this time of year I would encourage you to count your blessings right. Look at everything that you have in your life, whether it's your health, your family, whatever it may be. Count the good things in your life, because I think far too many of us are. You know, especially if you're consuming the news on a day-to-day basis it's all negative, it's all bad things, right. You rarely, rarely see any sort of positive things happening in the news, and so if you're sort of hooked on the news, it's this endless cycle of fear and doom and gloom.

Speaker 1: 13:24

And a big part of that, a big part of the problem in American Christianity, is we've we've adopted this doomer mindset where we think that when bad things are happening, that is actually good because it means that Jesus is coming soon, and therefore we associate bad things happening with good, because it means that Jesus is going to return soon and come and fix all our problems. And this is sort of this is sort of a scapegoat, this is sort of an excuse and I see this the same problem politically as well where people think, oh, I just go and vote for Trump and he's going to solve all our problems and I don't have to do anything and I can continue to sit on my couch and watch football, right? Well it's, you know it's the same mindset with the American church and with American Christianity. Well, yeah, there's a lot of bad things happening, and that's actually good, because it means that Jesus is coming soon and he's going to come and clean up all this mess and that means I don't have to do anything.

Speaker 1: 14:23

And that is that is historically not the mindset that Christians have had, and that is why we see Christians really just not building anything anymore. You know, there's a reason that we're not building churches, we're not building hospitals, we're not building schools, because we have this sort of defeatist mindset tied to this fan fiction eschatology, which is tied to Zionism, which is a false gospel which only popped up, you know, in the past 150 years or so. All of this stuff is foreign to every Christian that ever lived, you know, prior to the year like 1850. And so we have to sort of return to our roots, and a part of that is is having a humble heart of thankfulness and, and you know, showing that thankfulness and having this spirit of thankfulness in our day-to-day lives, not just once a year in our prayers of Thanksgiving to God and having having a heart of gratitude is is so crucial to help you overcome these feelings of hopelessness and this, this sort of doomer mindset that has infected our culture and and the American church. It's, it's really bad and we need to overcome it, and I think we can overcome it together, and one of the ways that we do that is, again, by being thankful.

Speaker 1: 15:59

So you know, I'm thinking more about in a parallel Christian society, having the bedrock of of being thankful and having gratitude and humility is sort of essential for people in leadership roles, because our ego and our pride and our fear, all of these are sort of negative things that erode and destroy not only us personally, but they sort of have this ripple effect right. So they ripple off into our families, into and then into our churches and into our businesses, and into our culture and into the entire nation, and it all starts, you know, in your own heart. That is that is where, if we're going to rebuild, if we're going to influence the next generation, we have to start inwardly. And I think that's that's a huge problem that our leaders and that the people currently empower across really every facet of society. They, they sort of lack this ability to have any form of introspection, any form of self-reflection, any form of self-accountability, any form of self-responsibility. What you'll always see them do is they'll never, they'll never look in the mirror, they'll never say, well, why, why are people saying these things? Why? Why is quote hatred on the rise? You know, it's surely, it can't be me, it can't be my behavior, it's just the other people. They're just, they're hateful For no reason whatsoever.

Speaker 1: 17:45

And this is sort of baffling to me as someone who has always been, I've always been able to to sort of self-reflect and and understand, you know, what my behavior or what things that I'm doing, the impact that it's having on how people are sort of responding to me or treating me, you know, and the problem with the current leadership in this country and, by the way, that's, you know, including the current leadership in the church, in media and government, politics, all of it we have this fundamental lack of the ability to self-reflect and self-examine. And this is this is actually a pretty good example of what I'm trying to say. This is this is actually a pretty a socratic. This comes from, like Greek philosophy, right? I think it was Socrates who said know thyself, right. What does this mean? Well, you have to know and understand and be able to sort of look in the mirror and say why are people responding to me this way? Why am I getting this hatred? Or why am I? Why are people being more critical of certain groups or of certain people?

Speaker 1: 19:08

And it's just, it's baffling to me that they, they never are able to look in the mirror, they're never able to accept responsibility for their behavior and for their actions. And it's sort of like the mind of a child, right, it's like our entire society has the mind of a child, because this is something that children often lack, right. They, children, don't have the maturity level and sort of the mental capacity to self reflect or to self examine. Right, you sort of expect that behavior from children, but when you have these grown adults that will never accept responsibility for their behavior, will never look in the mirror and say, hey, maybe maybe I have to change something that I'm doing, maybe I have to change the way that I'm behaving, you know, they will never do that and it's, it's baffling to me, maybe because I take for granted the ability that I have to do that and I've sort of had that for so long, and that's how you grow and that's how you mature.

Speaker 1: 20:17

And it seems like our entire society is stunted. Stunted in terms of maturity level, stunted in terms of intellect and in terms of, obviously, spiritually as well, stunted spiritually with this, this fundamental lack of the ability to examine yourself and to take responsibility for your behavior. Everybody just wants to pawn off the consequences of their behavior and the reaction to their behavior and punish other people, right, cry out in pain as they strike you, right? So, as these people are sort of eroding our society and our culture and our history and people are starting to notice this, I mean, it's inevitable. And you know, god has given us the ability to recognize patterns and to recognize behavior, bad behavior in particular, and then they start calling it out and these people don't say, hey, wait a minute, maybe we need to change how we're doing things, or maybe I need to think about you know how I've been behaving and change it. This sort of never occurs to them. Instead, they want to punish the people that are noticing the trend and the patterns of the bad behavior and of the bad choices, and that's a recipe for disaster, right?

Speaker 1: 21:49

That is a recipe for disaster, and we're seeing this unfold before our eyes right now, and I think that there's sort of this trend of people noticing who's in power and the fact that they do not share our worldview, they do not share our faith and they do not share our history and our love for our people and for our place, and that is just a recipe for disaster. And so, you know, we need to pray for peace and we need to pray that there's a sort of peaceful resolution to this conflict of interest is really what it is. You have, you know, 2% of the country, these elites that have this alien worldview that are supposed to be. We're elected to represent the other 98% of us and they're only representing themselves, and they're representing even foreign countries and foreign ideologies and foreign belief systems, and so, again, that's sort of a recipe for disaster, because you have a misalignment of worldviews and of incentives and of beliefs and the fundamental lack of these people to self-reflect and to understand that their behavior is what is causing the reaction to their behavior. It's a big problem. So I think we need to think about these things, and these are all things that are on my mind, and we need to be thankful because I think things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better.

Speaker 1: 23:36

I talked about this a lot, too. This is a multi-generational effort, and that's why it's so crucial for us to influence the younger generations and for us to really, really have a strong focus on discipling our children. That is where our focus needs to be. I think we have this short-term, short-time preference mindset where, oh, if we just get Trump reelected, then things will go back to normal and things will start getting fixed and perhaps some things will be fixed and perhaps some things will start to go back to normal.

Speaker 1: 24:13

But there's a generational rot on the culture and on the minds of many, many millions of people in our country and if we're going to overcome that, it's going to take a long time and we have to be focused on influencing the younger generations and doing that through culture and doing that through strong leadership and doing that by building things and building communities and building infrastructure and building churches and, of course, proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1: 24:50

So that is the path forward and we need to be thankful that we have the freedom for now and we have the tools and we have the ability to be able to do these things.

Speaker 1: 25:02

So that's what I'm reflecting on in this topic of thankfulness and during this time of year where we reflect on these things and we reflect on what we're thankful for, and we need to have this spirit of thankfulness and this spirit of gratitude to God every day, because every day is a gift and every day that we're here to fight back against the wickedness that's going on in our country and our culture and our society all around the world, it's a gift and it's a blessing, and the remnant will be preserved and we need to focus on playing the long game and being thankful that we have another day on this earth to be able to glorify God and to be able to fight the good fight and run that race until it is finished.

Speaker 1: 25:59

So, thank you guys, thank you for tuning in. I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving. Remember to spend some time with your friends and family and spend some time in this spirit of gratitude and thankfulness to God for all that he's blessed you with and all that he will bless you with. Thank you, guys. Christ is King. Remember to speak freely.