Sky Gitani (0:00)

That had the marks of a giant. That had the marks of a soul with gravity. Hello, and welcome to the Sky Pod, brought to you by Holy Post Media. I'm Sky Gitani. This week we're doing another skydive. That's an episode where it's just me. No Drew Dick, no guest, no Mike producer, asking your questions. Just me to monologue about stuff and share some thoughts. I'm recording this early in the morning. No one yet is here at the office. I'm trying to get this in before. I have a dentist appointment and a lot to do, a lot to produce. This weekend I'll be heading back to California where I'll be preaching and I have to get that sermon written. So that's my. My afternoon task, which kind of looking forward to partly because the weather here in Chicago has just been so miserable this month and freezing cold. Had to shovel the driveway again this morning, which is one of my least favorite things to do. But getting a little bit of warmth in Southern California will be nice. Although fires, you know, it's not exactly like they're having a better time there. I don't know if I've shared this yet, but throughout 2025, I'm going to be speaking in Southern California with some regularity. New Song Church in Santa Ana is a community that I've been connected to for some time. Dave Gibbons was the founding past the pastor there, and he and I have been friends for decades. And so over the years, he's invited me to speak from time to time. New Song used to be in Irvine, and they moved to this really beautiful old church building in Santa Ana. And a couple months ago, I think in November, I was there speaking and talking to some of the team there and interacting with Dave. And they invited me to come back and for various reasons decided, well, let's just simplify things. And so I planned on being back at New Songs every other month throughout 2025. So every six to eight weeks or so, I'll get a chance to speak there. Looking forward to that. Really like that community. Love what they're doing there. I've always appreciated Dave's leadership and wisdom. So I'll be back in Southern California. Some regularity. So if there are Holy Post listeners there or Skypod fans or people that just want to say hi or greet me in some way, maybe I'll see you at New Song. So I'll be there this Sunday, but I got to prep for all that. The other thing is we just have a lot of content that we're producing right now at Holy Post. Hopefully many of you saw that our new studio is kind of up and running. We shot one episode there when Caitlin was in town, and then we're getting it equipped so that we can do more remote interviews. So when Caitlin's not around in person, we can still have her on the show and Phil and I can use that studio space. I'm hoping to do more of the interviews I do for the Holy Post as well as for the Skypod in that space. And we're configuring it so there's a lot of tech stuff going on there, but a lot being produced on that front. I have a new With God Daily series, my daily devotional for people who hate devotionals coming soon. So I've been writing a lot on that. That whole series is going to be on temples and temple theology. If you listen to my conversation with Carmen Imes a few weeks ago here on the Sky Pod, that was kind of a preview of that content. If you want to sign up, go to withgodddaily.com and then finally, I've been writing some stuff for Holy Post, which is what we're going to talk about today. Holy on the Skydive earlier this week I wrote an article that is@holeypost.com we'll post a link to that in the show notes of this episode. The article is called the Land of Small Men and I thought I would take this skydive to just go deeper into the content of that article, explain some more in more depth what's behind it and what's going on. But the whole thing started because of the inauguration on Monday. I didn't watch the inauguration. I just, I don't have the the mental bandwidth or emotional fortitude to consume a lot of political news right now. It's just too taxing and I'd rather spend my energy doing other stuff, like all the content that I'm trying to produce that I already mentioned. So I didn't watch it live, but I did catch highlights and I certainly read some articles and it was enough. So what kind of struck me about the inauguration and none of this is like revelatory. It isn't like we don't know who Donald Trump is or we don't know the kind of that attached themselves to Donald Trump, but it was just kind of in high relief on the first day of his new administration. And that is the smallness and pettiness of not just Trump, but a lot of the leaders that we now elevate in this country. And in the church. So a couple of examples, and I mentioned some of these in the article, but there's been more that's come out since I wrote wrote the article. Right after being inaugurated, Trump tweeted, naming specific people in the government that he didn't like and announced that they were going to be fired. So it's pretty odd for a president to, on social media, identify people in the bureaucracy of the government by name and kind of give them a dressing down and say, you're fired. He ordered the removal of a portrait of General Milley from the Pentagon because he was a general that criticized Trump. So to have his portrait removed from. From a government building just because you don't like the guy, that kind of stuff is what grabbed my attention. And since then, there's been other stuff. I'm sure many of you have seen the controversy over the bishop at the National Cathedral, who I thought in a very Christlike yet prophetic way, asked the president to be merciful toward vulnerable people. And both the president and his followers kind of lost their minds about this. And the way they've responded has been anything but magnanimous. He issued an executive pardon. This one really struck me. He issued many, many executive orders on his first day, more than any other president in history. Some of them very frivolous and symbolic, but others actually substantive and in some cases, disturbing. One of them that caught my attention is he signing an executive order immediately ending all refugee resettlement in the United States. It's not exactly a surprise. He essentially did that in his first term, and we know what he thinks about immigrants. And every time this topic comes up here or elsewhere, people always respond to me, oh, no, no, no, no. It's not all immigrants. It's just illegal immigrants. He's just against illegal immigrants. I'm sorry, but that's patently untrue. Refugees are not illegal immigrants. They are people going through the legal system to be legally resettled through U.S. law in the United States. And by ending all refugee resettlement, he's not banning undocumented citizens from entering the country. He's banning the most needy, documented citizens from entering the country. But the part that really got me is he made no exception for Afghani refugees. And these are women and men who helped the United States military of the 20 year war that we conducted there, sided with the US military, were translators, oftentimes times. And when the US abruptly left Afghanistan, many of these folks were left behind and at great peril, because now with the Taliban back in power and the enemies of the United States back in power. Those who aided and assisted the United States are targets. So they have applied for refugee status. And there have been a lot of reports of US Military officials doing everything they can to try to get these folks out and their families, because they're in real threat. And the fact that Donald Trump's executive order made no exception for those refugees was just sad. Like, it's not difficult. It is not difficult to draft an executive order that says, we are immediately halting all refugee resettlement in the United States except those refugees who aided the United States military and whose lives are an immediate threat like that. You just had that sentence in its thumb. But he refused to do that. Another example, a lot of press on this was the January 6th pardons. He did a blanket pardon for what is about 1,500 people who had been arrested and indicted and convicted for various crimes related to the January 6 riot on the US Capitol. As others have noted, some of that is kind of understood. There were people who were just wrong place, wrong time, perhaps caught up in the crowd, but didn't actually engage in any. Anything more serious than trespassing. But there were violent offenders, people sentenced to years in prison for violently attacking police officers or those who, you know, strategized beyond just being caught up in the crowd, but were actually intending to kidnap and harm officials of the United States that were convicted. And Trump pardoned all of them as well, basically with no regard for what that would communicate to the rest of the country about police officers, about assaulting police officers, about attacking the government. Yeah, and we could parse all this ad nauseam. I don't want to continue this whole time talking about all the terrible things that Trump says and does. But my big takeaway from that was just the pettiness of Donald Trump to remove the picture of someone in the government that criticized you. He took away Secret Service protection for John Bolton, his former Director of National Director of Security. Something. Anyway, Bolton's been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump as well, after working for the man. And he has been threatened by foreign powers, including Iran. And so President Biden allowed Bolton to have Secret Service protection, and Trump has removed that. It's just the vindictiveness, the smallness, the refusal to care about American allies in Afghanistan, the refusal to take a gentle call to mercy from a bishop in a church service and go completely nuts as a result. Like, all of that just speaks to the character of Donald Trump and his inability to persevere through any sign of criticism, any critique of his policies, anything he Just can't handle it. And all this, the irony, people were making a huge deal, the fact that Michelle Obama did not attend the inauguration, and I don't even know what explanation she gave for not attending, but she wasn't there. And people thought this was the most horrible, offensive, vindictive act on her part. Again, I have no idea why she wasn't there. But they conveniently forget that Donald Trump himself, the President of the United States, refused to go to the inauguration of his successor four years ago, which has never happened before in American history. So his pettiness gets a pass. But when someone else is perceived as being petty, there's no end to the criticism. So all of this got me kind of stirred up on Inauguration Day. And I just have been wrestling with, how do we talk about this trait? And it isn't Donald Trump alone, obviously. It's something that I've encountered frequently over the years in my interactions with Christian leaders and at churches and in ministry settings and at conferences. And it's certainly not everybody, but there is this increasing, not just tolerance, not just acceptance, but actual celebration of this kind of pettiness of these fragile egos that particularly men in leadership roles can display. And it used to be there was a time when this was seen as unvirtuous, when it was unbecoming, when it was looked down upon. And now we seem to be in a place culturally where it's actually celebrated, that people think this is a wonderful quality, that you would rip the portrait of a general off the walls of the Pentagon just because he didn't say something nice about you. That's now seen as a virtue rather than as a sign of a vice. So that was in my mind. And then the other piece was last week's episode, Skypod episode was with Drew Dick. We did a Drew's News episode, and he and I had a conversation about Andrew Tate. And we don't need to rehash all that, but the fact that there are a lot of younger Christian men apparently, who find him to be some kind of role model or enamored with his grotesque form of masculinity, when I was just wrestling with all that, and go, well, how do I get my head around what's going on right now in this conversation about masculinity of leadership, both political, cultural, religious leadership. I've been engaging more with some other thinkers, podcasters. Scott Galloway, who's a professor at nyu, Business Guy, listen to him from time to time, especially when he talks about issues facing young men, which is a big focus for him, not 100% on his wavelength, but a lot of what he says I find interesting. Then I was thinking about Kristin Dumay and Jesus and John Wayne, where she outlines the history of this bravado that infects a lot of American white evangelicalism. And I think she does an excellent job of tracing the different manifestations of that throughout the 20th and 21st century. All of that was kind of put in the blender of my brain. And what came out was this article about small men. So I want to talk about what I mean by small men, how it manifests itself, what's the alternative, and why I'm framing it that way. One of the disclaimers I give in the articles, I didn't want to get into this trap that I think a lot of discussions about masculinity get into, particularly in the evangelical subculture where we take cultural definitions of masculinity and make them into biblical definitions of masculinity. For many talks about David as this great man of God, this great warrior of God. And I've yet to hear a men's ministry talk about David that highlights the fact that he had a proclivity for nude choreography, used to dance naked in the streets in his worship service. Like, that's not something that modern American men would see as stereotypically masculine, but it's what David did. Nehemiah is another one. Oh my gosh, I cannot handle any more masculinity. Talks about Nehemiah and his great leadership. And I've been in auditoriums with literally 15,000 people, mostly men in ministry conference settings, and have the speaker go on and on and on about the bravado and the strength and the, the wisdom and the, the role model that Nehemiah should be to us men in the way we lead. And it's always framed with all of this, again, culturally defined, testosterone laden view of masculinity. And they make Nehemiah out to be this exemplar of this, of a strong man. And, and they never talk about the fact that he's identified in the book of Nehemiah as a eunuch. Like he, he literally had no testicles, and yet he's become a figurehead of the testosterone gospel for people teaching the Old Testament. So, like, I don't want to fall into that trap of culturally defined masculinity becoming biblical masculinity becoming a prescription for how we're supposed to live. So in the, in the midst of all this brain blending, I remembered a recent documentary that I had seen about Einstein. And I don't know if it was a nova special or something like that, but sometimes I go down these rabbit trails of weird stuff that I'll watch on some streaming service. So I got into astrophysics in Einstein and his theory of relativity, which a lot of you probably remember from high school science class. But Einstein's theory of relativity basically tried to bring a unified understanding of space time and gravity. And what Einstein said was that massive objects like planets, galaxies, stars actually bend space time. It's a weird idea, but the idea is when you have a massive object, object of significant mass, gravity is not a force that is detached from space time, but it actually bends space time so that objects that come near that massive object get caught by it. And. And that's what gravity is. So it bends space time. And we'll get into, like, how that applies to Christian masculinity, perhaps, or just Christian maturity may be the better word in a minute. But that kind of set for me the metaphor that helped me understand what I'm seeing in leaders like Trump and others. And that is these are small men. They are men who lack gravity. Gravity of soul might be one way to put it. Those who have gravity of soul, just their very presence has an effect on people. It. It bends space time. The way that the sun doesn't have to do anything to affect things around it. It just is there. It's, it's. It's massiveness does all the work. It doesn't have to manipulate planets and comets into its orbit. It's just its very presence does this. I'll give you an example of where I kind of felt this one time, experienced it many times. But here's one that I can actually articulate. When I was a young editor at Leadership Journal, part of Christianity Today, one of my first trips I did with, with Leadership was to a ministry conference in San Diego. And it was, gosh, what year would this have been? Maybe 2005, 6, something like that. So I'm at this big resort in San Diego with all these other church leaders, and this was like the heyday of Rob Bell and. And some of the other young, restless reform folks were kind of up and coming. This was Mark Driscoll's, kind of a rising star. So all those figures were there, and they had platforms and they had breakout sessions. It was. Everyone was interested in who's the hot young pastor, speaker, leader, person whose church is growing the quickest. Well, one of the people who was at the conference was Dallas Willard, and there were a bunch of breakout sessions and myself and Marshall Shelley, who was my boss at the time and the editor leadership. He and I were looking around us to figure out which breakout session we wanted to attend that we could possibly report on for leadership or get content from. We poked our heads into a bunch of these different breakout rooms and most of them were young 20 something pastors with torn jeans and cool hair and they had a fair number of people attending in their rooms. And then we poked our head into the breakout session that Dallas Willard was leading and we couldn't even open the door. There were so many people crammed into that room. There were no seats left. People were sitting on the floor. They were sitting in the front of the breakout room, literally at Dallas Willard's feet. And Marshall and I poked our heads in there and listened for 30 seconds, but we couldn't actually get in the room, so we backed out and went into the hallway. And I remember Marshall saying to me, you know, I don't get it. What's the draw? Why, why are all these young, eager church leaders sitting at the feet of Dallas? Or why are they cramming and they're not cramming the spaces of the Rob Bells and the Mark Driscolls and those types as much. And I think what we were seeing there was a man who had real gravity of soul. Anybody who spent time with Dallas Willard, or if you've heard him speak or go on YouTube and pull up a little video of him, like, there's nothing glamorous about Dallas Willard. There is nothing flashy about the way he spoke or taught or looked or dressed. He is, I mean, from an objective, disinterested point of like he's, he's, he's kind of boring and he's a philosopher. He's not a dynamic presence on a stage at all. And yet those of us who spent time with him were captivated by what he taught and how he lived and who he was. And it wasn't because he was trying to be captivating. It's just who he was. He just had this stillness, this weight of soul that comes from somebody who has spent a lot of time in the presence of Jesus and radiated that presence to those around him. I'm not trying to make him out to be some flawless saint. No doubt he had his struggles and shortcomings and those who knew who best probably could share about that. But that's what I mean by a soul with gravity or a man who has a massive presence. It's not the magnitude of the impact the person has, isn't like their world changing and their effectiveness therefore makes them important. It's. It's an intangible quality that draws people to that person because there's a sense, even though you can't articulate it, that there's a value here, there's an importance here. There's a gravity that's attracting me that I can't quite explain. And that is in contrast to the small man who lacks that ability, doesn't have that gravitational pull of their soul. That small man, by contrast, has to resort to other tactics to make themselves appear big, to appear massive. And so in the article I get into what does that then look like? What's a mark of a small man? And there's a bunch of them. But one of the things that really identifies a small person for me is they resort to theatrics in order to hide how empty their souls really are. You know, pay no attention to the fact that there's nothing behind the curtain. Just be enamored with the show I'm putting on in front of the curtain. And one of the most useful forms of distraction, of theatrics that small men resort to is anger. With anger, outrage, passion, they try to convince the world that I really am powerful, that I really do have a weighty soul. And in our consumer culture today, sometimes that's plenty. All you have to do is be outraged all the time. And people think that you're important, they think that you are intelligent, they think that you have that weight of soul. And that anger comes out in a lot of different ways. Obviously it can be bombast, just screaming, yelling, ranting, all caps, tweets, whatever. But it can also be demonizing, like constantly figuring out who's your enemy, who to blame, who's our fight with. This hot headedness then is presented, at least in Christian circles, as evidence that I have God's spirit. You know, we take imagery like from Jeremiah where he talks about having a fire in his bones, and we assume, well, that means passion. And passion then is the presence of God's spirit. Maybe this will be a future skydive. But I did a talk recently for the Chicago Fellowship Group here in Chicago about what does it really mean to have a heart far from God. Jesus quotes Isaiah where he says, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. We have taken that and assumed that what Jesus is looking for is passion, emotion.