Welcome back, you wonderful people who matter so very, very much.
I'm W.S.
Walker, and today I'm reading you Chapter 8, Breaking Part 2.
And I have to say, yes, I am aware that there is a so bad that it's good movie called
Breakin' and it's sequel, Breakin' 2, The Electric Boogaloo, but this episode will have
slightly less nunchucks versus trash can lids under a bridge dance fighting.
So in the previous episode, Part 1, we went over how messed up the Breaking Laugh actually
is, some of the uses of the Breaking Laugh, some of the really messed up topics that we
joke about, and ultimately what it does to us.
We talked about your compassion being your tether to one another, and that the tighter
you grip on my own path, the more that connection crumbles.
We covered that we use the sound of love, unaimed, to stave off the pain of not living
as we're designed to, to distract from the loneliness and the unimportance and the pain
of not being close to one another, of not helping and supporting others, of not allowing
oneself to be helped and supported.
And a note to that, that is part of the full embrace of the design.
Now I'm not saying you should be demanding of it, but you should be encouraging yourself
to ask for help when you actually need it.
Do this.
Imagine how you would want to be approached for help.
Go ahead, picture it, I'll wait, and then mentally pause the scenario right after they
finish your ideal version of asking for help.
Now, and this is important, in the moment that you imagine they're in your mind's eye,
imagine that you're actually unable to physically help.
In this scenario, the thing that they want is not something you have, and that character
will be leaving this scenario without what it is that they need.
So I want you to unpause the scenario and I want you to imagine the ways that you would
most prefer to have them react to that news, both externally and internally.
Let that be your model and your guide to what you should strive to be when asking for help,
or when somebody denies you the help you're asking for.
As a self-help gruer once told an old friend of mine, nothing is lost in the asking.
You are in exactly the same boat before and after asking.
It's you that applies the hurt to your pride, just as it is you that can choose to take
no wound.
I also recommend using this reversal of roles to examine what the best way to say no is
when you're unable to help.
Just picture how you'd want somebody to say no to you.
That said, back to our previously on the laughing matters.
So we talked about where you can find real, substantial happiness.
We imagined what it would be like to spend the day loving all of them openly.
And that caused us to run right into the granddaddy of all fears once again and stare it right
in the eye.
And I suggested that if fear of the unknown is the root of every fear, then faith is the
root of its antidote.
And it is here that we finally resume.
Chapter 8.
Breaking Part 2.
I hope that as you've gotten this far into the book, you've agreed that it's probable
that there is a creative force, that we are created with intent, and that there is meaning
to the design.
I believe that whenever that creator is, it cares about each of us and wants us to care
about each other.
In fact, what I've managed to see in the designs of us, our physical world, and our reality,
a lot of importance was placed on us caring about each other.
I mean, we were designed to, and we were told explicitly, to have compassion and to love.
Let me ask you something.
If everything is made of God, how impossible do you think it would be for Him to nudge
you out of oncoming danger without you knowing you've been nudge?
If you one day decided to try to love openly, to help when needed, to cause joy among others,
to live as you were designed to, and to do as has been asked of you, don't you think
such a creator might steer you around those dangers that were featured so heavily in your
predictive imaginings of what could go wrong?
That if you finally decided to do something that He's all but begged us to do, He'd
just leave you to be dashed against the rocks of chaos?
He is the only one that knows how to navigate these waters safely, and all the best places
to dock that will bring you real happiness are only known to Him.
He knows what will make you happiest better than you ever will.
You aren't taking your hand off the rudder so much as you're letting someone else navigate
and shift your angles as they need to be shifted.
It can be so difficult and yet so easy at the same time to override the fear that has
had so much control over so much of your life.
But placing your life in the hands of the One that made all life is a leap that one
must make before they are reassured in their decision.
For me, one of the most essential components to finding faith coincidentally and a bit
ironically was the most intelligent thing I'd ever said.
I don't know.
After spending years and years searching religion and science for the parameters of God and
how it all worked, I finally started moving in the right direction.
And that direction of course ends up running an interesting parallel alongside the direction
that leads a lot of mathematicians, physicists, and scientists to a belief in a creator being.
Quite a great deal of one's time in these professions is spent finding the patterns
and the details.
We zoom in further and further in and try to make sense of what we're seeing.
Molecules being made up of atoms, being made up of subatomic particles, and further.
We also zoom out to see how it is that smaller systems affect bigger systems, biomes to ecosystems
to planets to nebulae, which by the way is the plural to nebula.
But many find themselves one day or one late night traveling in a third direction, a sort
of sideways zoom, one that bubbles to the top of the mind the thought.
All of these systems support all of these other systems.
The patterns overlap all over the place.
So how is it that these systems ever came to fit together in the first place?
How is it that these patterns ever came to repeat and become patterns?
I had a similar bit of a sideways zoom.
I had realized that God could never be proven because if literally everything was made of
God, then no contrast exists.
I had realized that God couldn't, by definition, be defined.
There was no way that His existence operates within parameters that we would have any frame
of reference for.
His exact nature would be beyond any human beings comprehension and that I was never
going to have the answers that I'd been looking for.
But, to be fair, I now understood that I didn't even really understand what the questions
I had were.
Ultimately, I believe that it had been extraordinarily helpful to the understanding that I now have
that my search had been something of a blanket search, an absorption of knowledge instead
of a pursuit of a specific question to be answered.
Because of the way that I had looked for God, it made it definitively easier to say, God,
I understand that I'll never fully understand.
I know that I'm not allowed to know.
I will always be blind, so please lead me.
I can't know your will.
I can't even guess at it, so please help me to know it when I see it.
I can't know that you exist, but I can choose to believe it.
Some time passed, and eventually, I got as close to complete faith as I've ever been.
It occurred during the journey I took during the Tennessee blizzard in late January 2011.
The shortest possible version was that God asked something of me.
I had reached a point where I was stuck on these concepts, failing to make any progress
in my understanding of them.
I had started growing stagnant in my search, though I had come to a place where I now decided
that I believed with certainty that there was a God, and had started to learn to listen
for Him in the world.
And they were there, these little small nudges in certain directions, as if the very fabric
of reality was doing the nudging.
An opportunity would arise over here, or a new avenue would suddenly be available just
as I needed it.
God had very effectively spurred my writing along through December 2010, and I returned
to my college dorm for my spring semester in January.
Now at the time, I had been studying to teach the sciences.
I was fast-tracking my way through my professional education degree, and so my 9-month love affair
with the newly found concepts of the breaking and genuine laughs definitely affected my
GPA a bit.
But on Thursday, January 20, 2011, my priorities in my life were shifted, and have remained
so for the last nine and a half years.
I had spent a few weeks searching for the ends of threads to pick up related to the
concepts I had found.
I had been pretty spoiled before, making new connections daily and having spent just an
entire month in December writing and puzzling as fast as I could at absolute breakneck pace,
being awake as often as possible, and sometimes forgetting to eat and still barely keeping
up with everything I needed to get down in writing.
But now?
Now I was in waiting, but I had no idea what I was waiting for.
I hadn't read the Bible from cover to cover yet in my life, so I decided, after spending
one day with the Old Testament, to read the New Testament.
Just before the 20th, I had started reading Matthew, and had already found some interesting
parallels to the concepts I had found, and would even get the occasional gentle nudge
of a scripture number that was always perfectly timed and relevant, and one that I had come
across in my own reading yet.
So on the 20th, having asked God for guidance on how to progress with these concepts, and
where to find those threads that let out from them, providing new insights into whatever
they led to, God offered a solid nudge toward what looked like at the time, the edge of
a cliff.
I was home from class, and I had just started reading Matthew 10, and everything around
me changed.
I could feel God drawing near.
The air itself had texture to it, and I could feel this ramp up of importance, viewing and
emblazoning the words ahead of where I was reading.
It was like being right in the middle of an orchestral swell, when it got louder and louder,
and as it rose as I got closer to what I was supposed to read, I could feel my skin and
my core vibrating.
At last, I came to Matthew 10-9 and 10-10, and it was like a gong went off in the room.
That vibration rippled out and immediately raced back to watch as I read.
I remember my hands shaking as I read it.
I like to think that now, having seen how the last nine years have played out, I have
some understanding of why I was asked to do what I was asked to do the way that I was
asked to do it.
Matthew 10-9-10-14
It's a quote Jesus speaking to the apostles before he sends them out.
Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts.
No bag for the journey or extra shirt or sandals or a staff for the workers worth us keep.
Whatever town or village you enter, search there for some worthy person and stay at their
house until you leave.
As you enter the home, give it your greeting.
If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it.
If it is not, let your peace return to you.
If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake
the dust off your feet.
I paused.
There was no way that this was the answer that God was responding with.
My college semester had just started and I was coming up on my residency and I would
be teaching my first classes soon.
I had to put in a bit more effort this semester to pull my GPA back up to as close to four
as I could get it, but as I read, that permeating presence had reached a crescendo but held
steadily there.
I know God is always there, but right then, his eye, so to speak, was fixed on me.
Anyone who has ever hit a crossroad in their life and suddenly felt God's attention focused
on what you choose to do next knows this feeling.
Suddenly you feel a bit more real.
Every detail of your surroundings feels like it retreats a bit.
I asked God if he was asking me to do what I thought he might be.
In that moment, suddenly you feel a bit more real.
Every detail in your surroundings takes on a sharp focus, but it also feels like its
importance retreats a bit.
I believed I was about to do a completely defenseless walk with no resources into the
unknown in the middle of a blizzard and leave everything and everyone behind.
I could feel him there, watching as I waited for my answer but not offering one.
The thrum was still there and palpable, but gave no indication which way.
This was to be my choice and mine alone.
Openly weeping for the life and love that I was giving away, I wrote nine letters,
one to each of my siblings, my parents, and my two closest friends.
Each held some different sentiments and things needed to be said before I went.
You see, in those moments, I didn't believe I'd ever see them again.
I knew that there was a very real possibility that this was the end game that I was walking
into.
I was about to travel by God's directions and offer up my compliance to whatever he
wished for me to do.
I was terrified, but not as much as I could have been.
It would still be some time before I realized that they stood opposite of those fears and
neutralized their paralytic effects, and the next morning I stepped out my front door with
a surprisingly light heart.
I opened my heart to every single person I met on what I have referred to since as the
journey, completely defenseless, helped where I could help, and left without a dollar, scrap
of ID, or change of clothes.
Just a satchel with a briefcase umbrella, two mechanical pencils, a pen, two empty books
that would become my road journal, and ultimately the very first handwritten draft of The Breaking
Laugh, which you're now reading as The Laughing Matters.
I took a hoodie and a coat.
During that 44 day journey, I was not harmed once or made to want for anything.
I only remember feeling fear once the entire time.
A moment of not doubt, but non-understanding.
I had found myself at the time, out in the open, during a downpour, at night time, in
freezing conditions.
I was homeless during the journey, and I had been dropped off in Cookeville, Tennessee,
on an exit ramp.
At the time, I was going wherever I wound up, hitchhiking the interstates.
Unfortunately, the exit where I was deposited at was a bit of an interstate stop, primarily
hotels, fast food chains, and little else.
None of the buildings seemed to have overhangs, or anything someone might sit beneath and
not be on the soaked ground.
None of the businesses had a lobby that was open, and I was becoming afraid.
All of the people that I'd met that day while hitchhiking warmed me out of concern to make
sure that I found shelter for the night, because it was supposed to drop into the single digits
and the rain would not be stopping.
I spent my first three hours in Cookeville exploring the buildings for a possible shelter
for the night, to no avail.
I had a glint of hope at one point, but it was quickly undone.
There was a small portable barn-style shed behind a Japanese restaurant that looked promising.
The business was already closed, possibly permanently, and I approached the shed, only
to note that an old padlock was fastening the door shut.
I was about to continue my search, concerned, but not yet afraid.
But I saw that their back patio area had about a foot and a half clearance from the ground,
and the wood slats weren't too far apart.
I looked underneath the patio, the dirt ground, and there was mostly a wet mud slurry that
would have to be crawled through.
It looked like there was a dry dirt area, just big enough for a person about fifteen
feet back.
I shuddered and tucked it away quickly as currently the best option.
I marveled at how depressing that was and used it as new motivation to find a better
place to stay for the night.
For several hours more I walked and I walked, finally, sitting down on the side of a building
where a tiny overhang offered a little bit of protection from the ceaseless rain, but
not the wind or the cold.
The temperature had already started making its descent below the twenties, and I knew
that I had exhausted the options that I would be able to find.
I had only a small briefcase and a berlin with me, and I had gotten pretty thoroughly
soaked in my search as it had been coming down in torrents.
Businesses had all shut their doors, though some restaurants still had their open drive-thru
windows.
I had realized prior that I had to find or build shelter for the night, but it was then
that I really began to understand that I might die that night, that this was a real, REAL
possibility that was quickly becoming a probability.
Thus far on the journey I had been acting at God's whim, including the small nudge
to seek shelter in Cookville instead of getting back on the highway with my thumb out.
The entire trip so far I had gotten by by praying for direction and something would
happen that would point me in a direction.
This time, for the first time on the journey, there seemed to be no response.
I sat and I prayed and I tried to riddle out what to do for a long time.
My shivering became really violent and I felt fear, not that God had abandoned me, but that
this was where my journey came to an end.
Maybe my writings would be discovered and get out into the world and that I had played
as much of a part as had been written for me.
I didn't feel ready to die, but I had faced a lot over the last few days and the last
nine months and if that was what had been asked of me.
Well, I had faced that too.
Even though the temperature was steadily dropping, my shivering was beginning to subside.
I didn't feel the cold as much.
I just felt tired, drowsiness kept trying to sneak in and trick me into closing my eyes.
I just couldn't keep my eyes open anymore.
I heard three words clearly.
Get up.
Walk.
I did not want to, but I did.
I shuffled along the road looking for something, anything.
Past buildings I'd already passed several times and I found myself in front of that
Japanese restaurant again.
I walked around back and stood in front of the patio again for at least a minute, trying
to work up the courage to slide on my belly inch by inch through the icy, slimy mud.
I felt compelled to turn around to check out that storage shed just one more time, but
it was still padlocked.
I lifted the lock slightly and gave it just a small tug.
A resistance, ever so slight, gently gave way with a small metallic snap, and the lock
popped open.
I quickly stepped inside and shut the door.
In the dark I was able to make out the only thing in the shed.
It was a single wooden box in the center of the room and folded neatly on top of the box.
It was a single large movers blanket, like the ones that come in a U-Haul truck rental
that looks kind of like the inside of a grapefruit cake.
I cried from relief and stripped off my soaked clothes and bundled up in the cold blanket,
and it was horrid.
For the first several hours my sleep was wet tissue paper thin, the linus of sleep that
was ripped to shreds instantly with every shivering fit.
The blanket barely seemed to work, was really stiff, and it itched everywhere.
I actually began to fear someone would hear me because my body bucked against the plywood
floor after wave after wave of racking shakes and shivers ran up and down.
My teeth chattered so hard that I feared that I would either break them or accidentally
lop off part of my tongue.
But at some point I finally lost consciousness and fell into a deep slumber.
And when I woke, the first thing that I noticed was how blissfully warm I was.
The entire shed was flooded with warm, bright daylight.
It was then that I saw an unusual addition to the shed, a large window that took up more
than half of the wall that faced east.
As I looked, I saw that the shaft of light had been beating down on my discarded, sopping
wet clothes.
I reached out and I touched one of my socks.
Dry as a bone, as were my shoes, clothes, and satchel.
The moisture that evaporated in my enclosed room seemed to have been absorbed by the blanket,
transforming the stiff, coarse fabric into a fluffy, comfortable comforter.
I dressed myself while seated to avoid being seen from the window, feeling enormously refreshed,
having had the best sleep that I would get during my journey, and then approached the
window to see just how much ice had hardened around my world.
I remember having the fleeting thought that perhaps I had been encased in ice hard as
it had rained that day and all night, and that I was now trapped in a frozen over shed.
And then I saw it all.
While I had slept that morning, the pouring torrents of rain had become gigantic snowflakes.
The world was blanketed in it.
Each flake looked like it was a cluster of ten to twenty individual flakes, some growing
to the size of my fist and larger still, so large that I could actually hear when they
hit the window.
The world was surrounded by warm daylight, filled with gentle tufts of the stuff.
I have never seen their equivalent, and I doubt I ever will.
Between the reflected light of the snow and the uncharacteristically large window in the
shed, I had been warmed back to life.
Upon opening the door, I was met with no biting cold.
The air was cold enough to hold the snow, but the sun bright enough to warm anything
not made out of the bright white stuff.
I walked in the snow for hours without a chill.
My small briefcase umbrella kept the snow off me without a problem.
As I recall, I spent most of the walk that day singing loudly and wanting for nothing.
Now, there will come a point in this book where you will make a decision on how to proceed.
I want you to underline, or in the case of this podcast, write down the episode number
and the timecode for this moment right here, so that you can flip back to this easily when
you get to that point, so you can remember this at that time.
If you are so concerned with what will happen to you should you choose to live as you were
designed to, to the point that you let it stop you from living as you were designed
to, then yours is not belief.
It may be on the way there, but it is not believed yet.
There's a really simple but lovely part of the Bible where Jesus addresses this.
He says, Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life.
What you will eat or drink or about your body, what you will wear, is not life more than
food and the body more than clothes.
Look at the birds of the air.
They do not sow or reap or gather into barns.
And yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not much more valuable than they?
Who of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to your lifespan?
It can be terrifying to jump in with both feet aimed at the unknown and care about everyone
and love them.
That's your lack of faith.
Not a total lack, but a not quite enough lack.
And I want to tell you, writer to reader, that this is perfectly understandable for
you to have that.
You've literally been raised from birth in a society that teaches against this, and that
makes it as subconsciously clear as possible that it is suicide to do this.
Either you haven't made the leap yet, or you have and you need another leap.
The leap I'm referring to, of course, is famously known as a leap of faith.
It was a phrase I grew up hearing as a common term.
Until I was about 30, it existed to me only as a phrase that was used to illustrate an
act of showing trust in someone else.
And then I made my first leap of faith.
And while the start of my journey still holds the biggest leap of faith so far, it wasn't
the first one.
I remember being in my bedroom early December 2010 prior to my journey, working on some
of the concepts and typing away on my little laptop.
It'd been about seven months since that splendiferous, disastrous date with Alyssa, and the subsequent
removal of myself from the comedy career scene.
In short, I'd been on a date with Alyssa, and probably trying to impress her, when I
spouted off some of my musings on Why We Laugh, including the theory made in Stranger in a
Strange Land, and three of the main concepts snapped together suddenly.
Needless to say, the evening had been fairly ruined from there for that poor woman.
I'd had...
Please don't judge me on this.
I just found this stuff all at once.
I had to get it down.
I'd had one arm around her, my left arm around her during the movie, and the other hand was
furiously scribbling out notes on a post-it on a side table, with only a minor effort
put towards hiding my diverted attention.
During that period that followed that night, I had undergone some radical changes.
I'd still attended my fall semester at Austin Peay, though my afternoons had been filled
with long contemplative walks, writing, and reading rather than working on stand-up comedy
bits, or playing guitar, or doing up close magic, or playing video games with the other
residents of Killabrew Hall.
So during the summer and winter breaks, I'd head back to Nashville and stayed with my
parents, as it proved to be too difficult to secure and afford a place in Nashville
for a month to three months at a time.
I was working a full-time overnight job in Nashville that agreed to keep me on so long
as I was working during the school breaks.
That was particularly useful for my needs, as most of the world was asleep when I was
most active, which afforded me plenty of thinking quiet.
So late that December night, I was fumbling with one particular concept, and it hit me.
I believed there to be a God.
I had seen enough to know that it was likely, but never enough to be certain without a doubt.
And I finally realized that I was never going to know for 100% certain.
Not in this lifetime at any rate, and you may chuckle that off as, of course not, but
it's one thing saying it.
It's another thing to really recognize it in yourself.
And I had a choice to make, ultimately.
Yes or no?
For me, is there or isn't there?
When it comes time for me to lay down my coin, which box is it going in?
And here was that moment.
It was time.
And I did.
Now a good friend of mine, Jay Seals, told me once that miracles do happen to people,
but that they are only miracles to the people they happen to.
So many parents refer to their own children as miracles, and only they understand why
it is that they consider them to be miracles.
It can't be told in any way that would properly convey the enormity of the miracle to another
person.
I mention this now because in that moment, I experience something that I can't explain
and that I cannot convey properly.
I fell to my knees from it, and I spoke out loud to God.
God, I will never be able to prove you.
I know that now.
Instead, I'm just going to go ahead and believe in you.
I was already fairly certain of God's existence, but I hadn't spoken to God without prefacing
it with, if you are really there, God, since I had left the church.
I was speaking to God for the first time as a believer, and suddenly felt ashamed for
a lot of things I had done in my life.
And I asked Him for forgiveness.
I really genuinely meant it.
I wasn't after absolution.
I was just genuinely ashamed of so many of the choices that I had elected to make so
far, and my reasoning behind them, and my intent.
And I was genuinely sorry for all of them.
There was this brief moment of pause, and the sound seemed to go out of the air.
Absolute silence.
And then I felt the strangest sensation, as if a drop of some liquid had landed on top
of my head.
It spread out and down, slowly engulfing my face and neck, leaving behind that feeling
of pins and needles from a limb falling asleep everywhere that it touched.
It spread and spread until it covered my entire body.
And I don't really know a better way of saying this, other than I felt.
Cleaned.
I felt.
New.
It's a funny thing, Faith.
You don't really get the confirmation that you want of there being a God until after
you make the leap.
Kinda how courage operates.
You don't get it until you did the thing that you needed it for.
And just like a miracle, a confirmation is typically only a confirmation to the person
it happened to.
I got mine moments after the first leap, and the first thing on the morning that I left
from my journey.
For those that make the choice, your faith is often cemented shortly after.
This at its core is problematic for those who have not or will not make their own leap.
Show or show they say.
Of course they get the confirmation it's no fulfilling prophecy.
You believe all things are God, and that everything that is or happens is within God, and so everything
that happens is proof of God to you.
Like I said before, this is an argument that goes nowhere.
Either there is a God or there isn't, and neither side will ever be able to offer definitive
proof one way or the other.
So I submit to you that the point is to believe without immutable evidence.
The universe seems to have been designed in its mechanisms to support this, such as the
subatomic shoreline.
But we are all allowed to have just enough evidence to choose to believe and have faith.
Think about the design of it all, we have our blindness to the future path, the core
of all fears being the literal unknown.
The God is not only a much better navigator, but also happens to be everything that's
being navigated.
They all make our very existence something of a test, don't they?
A test that is across the board in many beliefs, very important that we pass.
One that the very blueprints of our universe were drawn up with in mind.
And that's it for me.
Thank you so much for coming to the reading.
Please subscribe.
That's not something I ever say to you guys, but please subscribe.
There's gonna be more after the book, and it's all good, baby.
You can check out the YouTube channel at youtube.com slash could help.
You can contact the podcast at willhelpmail at gmail.com.
Come talk about this stuff, ask questions, or hear what others think at r slash The Laughing
Matters on Reddit.
You can stay up to date with the show's Facebook at facebook.com slash I could help.
And then of course, you have the laughing matters dot com central hub.
So until next time, you've got a very serious series of questions to ask yourself.
And I implore you to ask some of those questions to other people as well.
There are a few better ways to achieve understanding than to gather understandings.
And they're going to say plenty of stuff you never think of on your own.
And the act of explaining your questions and laying out the groundwork so the person can
follow what you're asking will cause you to reorganize the information in a way that you
wouldn't normally be able to do on your own.
So in short, talk to them, be good to them, and be good for them.
And you're going to be great.
Be sweet.
Bye everybody.