Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast

Megan Basham: If everyone is speaking well of you, particularly everyone who is powerful and wealthy and in those highly influential positions, maybe that should be a gut-check moment. What am I compromising on that all of these people who do not love the Lord, if they're all speaking well of me, why?

Allen Jackson: It's true that Jesus did preach some messages that were about tolerance, but it was not his life message. We want to succeed in the context of what's pleasing to God, not what's celebrated by the pagan culture around us.

Megan Basham: In a very real way, we are the last people standing in the way of their agenda. As long as we are restoring some of these important Christian institutions, then I'll happily take some slings and arrows.

Allen Jackson: Welcome to Culture & Christianity. This is the podcast version, not the conference version. We'll share the conference version with you at another time. But I am really excited today. I have an author that I've read the book and celebrated the book and follow on X. Megan Basham, we are really excited to have you today. Thank you.

Megan Basham: Oh, gosh. Well, thank you so much. I am so excited to be here. I'm thrilled with the lineup you've put together and all the work you guys are doing here, so it's just a joy to be with you.

Allen Jackson: Megan's here to be a part of the conference, but she graciously agreed to give us another bit of time so we could do this podcast and you could get some extra conference material. The book that you wrote, *Shepherds for Sale*, I want to start with that because it's a *New York Times* bestseller. It had a lot of success across platforms, not just a Christian book.

But it was not an easy book. You did a lot of research. It wasn't just your opinion. It wasn't a personal testimony. You did research on the state of American Christianity, and what you came out with wasn't completely flattering.

Megan Basham: No, it wasn't. I did not, maybe naively, quite expect it to be the lightning rod that it was. I feel like just now, probably a couple of years after the release, am I really coming to terms with the reactions that it got, both positive and negative.

Allen Jackson: There had to have been pushback because you named names. You did the research, so it was a reporting effort. It wasn't muckraking. You were doing some investigative journalism.

Megan Basham: Maybe that was the thing that, when I talk about naivety, I did not realize that I was doing such an unusual thing. I had come out of Christian journalism and conservative journalism, and when you're a journalist and a reporter, that's what you do. You have to be specific about the who, what, when, where, and why.

To me, it was just a natural thing that if I was going to put forward this thesis, I needed to be able to support it with specifics. I needed to be able to show here are the people who are getting involved with some of these secular left organizations, here's the money that they're taking, and here are the organizations that they're setting up with this money.

To me, that was just a natural thing to do, to sort of lay out all this information. But I somehow did not realize that in Christian publishing, that was fairly unusual to do something like that. When I put forward the thesis and then supported it with these various citations, I think that was the thing that made people so angry, on some of these people that I specifically cited.

If I had not done that, it probably would have been more roundly cheered across the board because then all of these institutions could have pretended you're not talking about us. They could have been like, "Yes, golf clap. We should clean up and not take this funding and not allow this influence," because all of them could have said she's talking about someone else. But they couldn't do that when I said who I was talking about.

Allen Jackson: The big premise was that there was a lot of money spent to influence the perspective being shared through these Christian, principally publishing, spaces.

Megan Basham: Yes. What it was really about was how various pastors and ministries and evangelical leaders, yes, some were taking money, but there are other kinds of currency. There was a lot of focus on the title. Well, if you said *Shepherds for Sale* and everyone in this book didn't show up at the railroad tracks at midnight to take a bag of cash, then your reporting wasn't truthful.

Suddenly, we didn't know how symbolism works or metaphor works. The thing that I was putting forward is that, yes, part of the book was about those kind of financial transactions, but also about fear of man, cultural accommodation, and other ways that we can see evangelical and Christian leadership compromising.

The money trail was just part of it, but there was a broad swath of different kinds of compromise because there are so many secular and progressive movements and organizations that want access to us as Christians. In a very real way, we are the last people standing in the way of their agenda. If you're going to overcome that agenda, you have to find a way to target that audience, and that's the way they've been doing it.

Allen Jackson: The two pieces that I thought, one was the compromise on the Christian side where we could be manipulated with the right motivation, and the other was the intentional attempt to change the messaging from the progressive, liberal, whatever label you want to use.

I speak to a lot of churches or church leaders or pastors' groups and people will say to me, "Well, why won't my pastor deliver this message?" It's the same challenge. In most local congregations, the pastor's an employee called by the presbytery, the board, or some administrative group, and they control the messaging.

If he veers outside of whatever their approved lanes are, they come for him. I know that because they call me with some frequency and say, "I'm in trouble because I advocated for this." If we want to change our churches, we have to change the hearts of the leadership in the churches. We can't give authority to people that don't hold the biblical worldview.

It is so widespread and it's so commonplace, and I was so grateful for the light you turned on because it was helpful and you documented it. It wasn't like a personal attack. It was just a revelation of the reality of what's unfolding.

Megan Basham: Part of the reason that I felt like I had to do that, and I absolutely believe that it was a God thing, is that I never set out to become a controversial writer or reporter. It was really just what I experienced as an ordinary Christian mom out there.

I started going, "Wait, Lord. I feel like some of this ideology that is coming into our own church at the time and the Christian school we were at, I was hearing things that I went, this is not biblical, Lord. Where is this coming from?" To give one example that I very frequently cite, but we got an email from our children's ministry director at our then-church, and this was in 2020 or maybe early 2021, telling us how we could talk to our kids about their white privilege.

These were the moments that I went, "Lord, this is not biblical." Then you would get the email and you felt like you would get the "churchy-speak." I'm like, "churchy" is different from biblical. That was what I wanted to confront. How have we made these assumptions based on "Christianese" terms that are not actually scriptural terms?

That was so much of what I wanted to examine. What was interesting is when you quoted people directly, and some of them were leaders that I had benefited from in other ways, but if you take someone like the late Tim Keller who had some good teaching, but also when he wrote for, say, *The New Yorker* that evangelical witness was being destroyed because we voted for Trump.

That was a very political statement. It was so strange to me to have this evangelical establishment that was saying the people who are making the most moral choice that they can with their vote, meaning I'm going to make the choice that protects babies, that protects gender-confused children, that this was destroying our witness.

I went, "That is a level to me of being politicized," not the people who are making a pragmatic but also faithful decision with their vote to say, "I am going to do the best that I can as a representative," because we are, we're in charge of the government in the United States. So as a very small representative of this government, I am going to do the best that I can with my vote. I was really bothered by seeing all of this guilt and shame heaped on ordinary Christians in the pews for making these reasonable choices.

Allen Jackson: As an observer, I think of courage as a muscle and that if you exercise it like any muscle, you gain strength. You have continued to take on some difficult topics and use your voice in the public square. I'm sure you get a bit of pushback on that.

Megan Basham: Just a little.

Allen Jackson: I don't know a lot about your spiritual background, but what prompts you to be willing to take that space?

Megan Basham: One, I think was providential ignorance, if I can put it that way. I didn't really know what I was wading into at the time. So I think that's a part of it. I also think I have to give a lot of credit to my husband because when I started to speak about these things, my husband was kind of the one going, "Say what you gotta say because we don't rely on your income."

We had always sort of set up our finances and my work when my girls were littler, we have two daughters, and when they were small, I worked very part-time. Then as they got older, my ability to do a little bit more expanded. But we always kind of set up the parameters of let's not structure our lives so that if you lost your job, it would create any hardship in our family.

I mean, we'd have to economize, but there would be no "we can't make the mortgage this month." I think that was really wise of my husband because suddenly it was like, what's the worst that can happen? I get fired. So there wasn't a real threat there. I think that's part of it too, was just I happened to be in a position where there wasn't really a lot that could be done to me if I did continue to speak out.

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One of the advantages or outcomes of shining the light into places is it brings chances for realignment and improvement. I like to find the God stories or the things that are happening. Where have you seen positive changes come from using your voice and telling the truth and calling out bad? Have other people rallied to you? How does that work?

Megan Basham: It's been both. I've had certainly a lot of people rally and certainly a lot of people who have done, and I think this is the typical approach, the gatekeeping approach of the establishment. When you criticize them, the move is then to try in every way possible to depict you as disreputable in some way. That is difficult, so you sort of have to armor yourself and be prepared for that. That's what's going to happen.

Allen Jackson: Discredit the messenger.

Megan Basham: Exactly. I could give you a lot of examples, but they would do things like pore through my footnotes and find one example. Like with Phil Vischer, the creator of *VeggieTales*, who had made a lot of comments that were very unclear about his position, say on abortion in early pregnancy.

When I quoted those comments, I accidentally pulled the wrong podcast. So they were sort of acting like, "Well, she pulled the wrong podcast episode, therefore this book is discredited." Never mind that everyone acknowledges, "Yes, he did say those things. The quotes are real. I just happened to pull the wrong podcast."

That was kind of one of the ways that they would approach it to say, "Now because there was a small irrelevant mistake, you are now discredited." That's kind of the sort of thing that you expect to see. Even though in a very large, heavily researched book, you're always going to find some things like that.

Part of what encouraged me is a good friend of mine who worked with Norm Geisler on his books called me and said, "Megan, they did the exact same thing to Norm Geisler when he was coming out and criticizing the establishment for its position on biblical clarity and sufficiency and inerrancy."

That was encouraging to me, and then another example, and I just came from an event at Grove City College. That was so encouraging to me to see some of the changes that that school has made. I don't want to take credit for that because it was actually the parents, a group of parents and alumni and students. When they had some concerns about what was going on at that school, they had reached out to me and I had ended up doing some reporting on it.

I think that reporting helped support them in trying to move the needle toward reform. So they ended up dropping a class that was designed to, or I think they just redesigned the class. I'm not sure if they dropped it entirely or redesigned it. But it was basically sort of a critical race theory class and it was an anti-racism advocacy class, which we all know if you've tracked that ideology, it's not actually anti-racist, it's racist.

Those were the kind of things that I feel really good about, that I was at least played a part in helping support those parents and student alums to make those reforms. I look at Grove City College and I think this is preserving a great institution for the future. So that is what makes me sort of shrug off the critics and go, well, who cares? As long as we are restoring some of these important Christian institutions, then I'll happily take some slings and arrows.

Allen Jackson: When you advocate for the truth or you advocate for biblical worldview, one way of explaining that is it's a spiritual conflict. When you engage in that, the pushback, the challenge, is the nature of that encounter.

When you were describing that, when Jesus healed the man in John's Gospel that was born blind and he put the mud on his eyes, the man could see. It was irrefutable. So the religious leaders said, "Well, he wasn't born blind." So they go get his parents and they say, "Help us with this." Even the parents were tapping out on it and going, "Yeah, that's our boy and yeah, he was blind, but we don't know anything."

It's not a new pattern, but we have to have the courage to continue to walk or people don't get help. If Jesus had wanted to be less controversial, he could have done less miracles.

Megan Basham: I think that is as Christians what we are going to have to overcome. We have a dominant culture and even within the church, a Christian establishment that wants to accommodate that culture because that's where the rewards are. Those are the things that will make you someone who is hailed as a great academic or a great theologian or apologist if you accommodate what the culture already values.

We see them sort of twisting themselves into pretzels to do that. But as Christians, not many lofty, not many highly respected and revered in an un-Christian culture, which is what we have today. I think we do have to sort of ask, if everyone is speaking well of you, particularly everyone who is powerful and wealthy and in those highly influential positions, if they're all speaking well of you, maybe that should be a gut-check moment to say what am I compromising on that all of these people who do not love the Lord and are certainly not interested in the health of the church, if they're all speaking well of me, why?

Allen Jackson: I think you've opened a conversation that is fascinating to me. If we allow the secular culture to create the definitions and the guidelines for what is to be celebrated, then the only way we can be celebrated is by becoming increasingly secular. I think the church has not totally, but overwhelmingly, capitulated to that.

It's true that Jesus did preach some messages that were about tolerance, but it was not his life message. We've become so afraid of being criticized or labeled. My experience is if you stand up for biblical truth, you're going to get labeled. You'll be a sexist or a racist or you're going to be Islamophobic or homophobic. You're going to be some kind of phobic and you've just got to be willing to collect some labels for the truth.

I think even more damaging, and you're a mom, you can at least speak to it at that level. If our aspirations are for our children to be celebrated by a secular culture, then we're going to coach our children in a set of values that will lead them away from the biblical worldview. I know every parent has aspirations for their children to succeed, but we want to succeed in the context of what's pleasing to God, not what's celebrated by the pagan culture around us. I don't know how we get that message to the parents in a way that gives them the courage to be not contrarian, but they'll have to be counter-cultural.

Megan Basham: Amen. When I think about these things and I'm going to use a term that is a little bit slang, but I think we have to get more comfortable with being viewed as low-rent, if you know what I mean. I do think that there is such a pull that it often isn't even about money anymore. I think it is more and more about that cultural respect and there's such a craving for it in our evangelical leadership.

I'm so grateful to those like you who are willing to stand aside that and take the insults and the discrediting to say no, here is what is true because as we look at this cultural landscape, those who are most esteemed within Christianity and evangelicalism certainly do not tend to be those who are most challenging to our cultural assumptions.

That's my concern. When I look at this, I don't want my kids to be pugnacious just for the sake of being pugnacious, but I do want them to be prepared to be looked down upon. I want them to remember look, the political establishment of Christ's time, the religious establishment of Christ's time, didn't think particularly highly of him. They orchestrated his execution.

I just had a conversation with Ken Ham, who built the Creation Museum and the Ark. He built an Ark for Pete's sake. It's hard to deny and he pushed it in everybody's face that I believe this is a reality and not some mythical assumption in the context of Scripture. I have such admiration for people that will live that truth out, which I think is really why your book and your work has captured my attention because you do it in a winsome way. I've heard different, but I try to be. I think you do, but there's no mistaking your determination either. That's what makes me smile.

Allen Jackson: You mentioned DEI a moment ago. This current administration has taken DEI and CRT and pushed back on them for the first time in a long time. But I don't have the imagination they're gone. I have the imagination they're just lying dormant waiting for a change of administration. They've rebranded, relabeled. You live in this world in some levels that I don't. Am I being pessimistic or I don't think that's been completely rooted out?

Megan Basham: It's both. Just last week, we saw this story on the state of Massachusetts taking a child out of the home of a Catholic family because they refused to address their daughter by trans-pronouns and a boy's name. We had all kind of thought we had won that cultural victory. You need to say actually, no, wait, this is still going on.

In fact, in California and a couple of other states, it is still on the books' regulatory approach that they can take foster children or adopted children out of parents' homes if they refuse to capitulate to this gender ideology. That's one front on which I say hold on a minute, we are not past this. I think that's true with the DEI and the CRT. Maybe they've gone dormant a little bit.

On the other hand, I do want us to celebrate those victories so that the people who have taken so much abuse and name-calling and so many insults over what they did with their vote in 2016, 2020, 2024, that we can look at something like the University of Texas at Austin is cutting its women's studies, gender studies, its various racial studies degree programs.

That is a huge victory. That wouldn't have happened, I don't believe for a minute that that would have happened if those much insulted and disparaged evangelicals hadn't been willing to sort of take those insults and say no, we're still going to do politically, also spiritually, but this is an outgrowth of our spiritual life. We're going to do politically what we think is the best thing.

We took so much disparaging to do that, and yet here's the results. These are good results and we should celebrate them. Absolutely. I think President Trump and many in his administration have been vilified and their character flaws celebrated, but they've had more courage to stand for a multitude of biblical worldview issues than most of the Christian leaders in my lifetime.

Megan Basham: Yes. When people talk to me about Trump and his personality and some of his personality foibles, there is one thing I have to think about sometimes that I go, but it took a very unique personality to withstand what he has. If someone had been threatening to bankrupt me, jail me, I don't know that I would have the wherewithal to stand up to that and to continue fighting back.

Yes, he has a unique personality, but I also think that it was going to take that in order to resist so much of the fire and the overwhelming attacks. Also, people want to point out some of the more extreme and insulting things that Trump has said, and I don't necessarily disagree with that. But at the same time, they don't talk about the absolutely obscene insults that are directed towards him and his wife and his family sometimes.

There's sort of two sides of that coin and that's not to excuse things that were beyond the pale because I think he has said a couple of things that were beyond the pale, but at the same time, I do go, I do think providentially God selected a unique personality to do some unique things in this area.

Allen Jackson: Leading nations making sweeping cultural change is not for the faint of heart or for those that have very carefully modulated speech. I think it takes a bit.

Megan Basham: There's also a double standard because we have had plenty of Democratic politicians and even Republican politicians who have said things that are equally controversial, but they didn't become headlines because people decided not to make an issue of them.

Allen Jackson: Without question. The stand for biblical definitions of marriage and simple things that Christians should have been shouting from the housetops that we had capitulated on, we owe this administration a debt of gratitude because they have affirmed those things and we in the church world had lacked for the most part the courage to do that.

Megan Basham: Absolutely. It's insane that just a few years ago, we had within the church, and I'm not talking about progressive church leaders, I am talking about recognized conservative theologians and pastors arguing for things like pronoun hospitality.

Again, not talking about the mainline churches, we're not talking about Episcopalians, I'm talking about presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is supposed to be one of the most conservative, if not the most conservative Protestant denomination in the US. That we were that far gone that you had a lot of, not Christians in the pew, it was actually the Christians in the pew who pushed back, but in the leadership class going this is defensible pronoun hospitality. I look back at that and I go that was insane that we got that far.

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I want to ask one more question and then I want to ask a more personal question. Using your voice as a woman in this culture puts you in opposition a lot of times to a broader group of women. We've watched some things lately with the trial for the mom who strangled her children or when the governor of Massachusetts signed the bill for abortions up through the point of delivery and the room's filled predominantly with women who are applauding and celebrating.

It feels like we need a course correction even amongst Christian women or people that stand at least under that umbrella. I call it generic Christianity. We don't identify as Muslim or Hindu. How have we gotten to a place where life is so cheap or my personal agenda is so high that children become accoutrements to my life as opposed to a sacred assignment for a period of time?

Megan Basham: Speaking of controversial, I am going to say something that I think is a little controversial and that is I think a large part of it comes from men abdicating their leadership role both in the church and in the family and in civic life.

I am like a good Baptist, a complementarian, and I do think that we have had a problem within the church of being led by the comfort of women. We as women, and I'll say I'm a little bit of an exception in some ways I think here, but women generally are not as comfortable with blunt speaking. We tend to be more agreeable, more community-oriented, so we want everybody to kind of be on the same page.

It makes us uncomfortable when we're not. I think that because we have become such a feminist culture that even in the church, we got into this place where we had so many church leaders capitulating to the comfort of women so that they did not say things that needed to be said, they didn't engage in the conflicts that needed to be engaged in. I think that's a huge factor and there's a lot more, but I think that's a big one.

Allen Jackson: Jason Whitlock moved to Nashville. I don't know if you know Jason.

Megan Basham: I do. Well, I know of him.

Allen Jackson: He certainly has some strong opinions and about the feminization of the sports world and it's I think similar to what you're saying. It's another place where I think there's we've got to pray. You have in the midst of all of this, your success, the recognition of your book, the doors I pray that that opened for you, you've had some physical challenges. You've had to face a cancer diagnosis, but you have come through that and are flourishing. How do you integrate that? Most of us imagine if we tell the truth and we take a godly stand that we're going to skip down the yellow brick road and everything's going to come up and life's going to be perfect and I don't find that always to be the case. How have you navigated that internally?

Megan Basham: As you ask me that, I feel like I'm still kind of navigating it so maybe I'll have a different answer in a year. But God has been very faithful in ways that I'm still experiencing day-to-day. It is in things like as I said I spoke at Grove City and I had these students who are 19, 20 years old coming up afterwards going, "Can I pray for you? I just..."

When I was 19 or 20, that is not a thing I would have ever done. That was very moving to me and I have seen people like, I hope I'm not going to speak out of turn here, but I'm going to talk about my dear friend Rosaria Butterfield and I didn't ask for her permission for this. She was somebody who looked at me and went, "I feel that you you just need prayer and Bible study at this time," which I'm doing that on my own, but she goes, "I don't know, I just would you be open to that?"

It was like right at the moment where I felt like, "Lord, I feel like I'm drowning." That was the moment that Rosaria texted me and said, "Hey, would you want to do like a weekly Bible study together?" I went, "Gosh, do I? Yes."

There have been moments that have been hard. I mean I can tell you just this past week I've had people, and you get this right when you're a political writer or conservative writer, I have had people go, "You probably got cancer because you wrote this book." I have had people say, "She's probably lying about having cancer," where I kind of laugh and go, "Man, if there were anything ever in my life that I wish I could go just kidding, I don't really have cancer," I wish that was one.

In a way that is also a blessing because it's a weird confirmation that these people that I am opposing, Lord, that's pretty unloving. That's pretty hard-hearted to look at someone with whom you politically disagree and tell them you got cancer because you politically disagree with me. Yes, but in a way, in a strange way, it was almost comforting confirmation to me that I'm like, okay, Lord, some of these people that I have opposed, their hearts are not right that they would say something like that. Even those things can be a strange sort of blessing.

Allen Jackson: But you are recovering, you are gaining strength, you are on a positive road.

Megan Basham: Yes. I have a scan next week. I'm hoping that it will confirm that that is still where I am. But yes, so I mean it was strange timing that *Shepherds for Sale* came out in July of 2024. I found out in August of 2024 that I had made the *New York Times* bestseller list. Then in October of 2024, it was, "Actually, you also have cancer," and advanced cancer at that point, stage three. Later found out that it was actually stage four all along.

But I can tell you all through this journey, the Lord has brought people into my life and even given me access to treatments and therapies that wouldn't have been available even a year ago. So I feel very well covered even as I continue to ask for prayer because I'm a sort of a little bit fearful of a person anyway. My surgical oncologist kind of jokes that I'm his high-anxiety patient.

Allen Jackson: But even in that, if I can just really quick tell one more story. When I found out that I had this, my coworker at *Daily Wire* said, "I just interviewed Marty Makary," who was at that time he had just been appointed to be the head of the FDA. She said, "I'm going to call him and ask him for advice on..."

I had just found out so I was a mess. She said, "Well, I'm going to call him and ask what you should do and what should be our next steps." I was like, "Georgia, you cannot call Marty Makary who has just been appointed to the head of the FDA and bother him with my garden-variety cancer." She's like, "Nope, I'm going to do it."

She did. Then Marty Makary gets back to me, like he didn't have enough on his plate. Not only does he get back to me, he says, "Give me some of the options that you're looking at as far as your hospital network and give me the details of your cancer because I'm just going to make a couple of calls and see who might be a good option for you for a surgical oncologist because of course Marty Makary himself is a surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins."

So he did that. He calls me and says, "Here is a surgeon that he comes extremely highly recommended, very ethical." The surgeon is typically the head of your oncology team, so he said, "I would recommend this man to you."

Of course, I'm going to take Marty Makary's recommendation, so I go with this surgeon. I think it was my very first appointment with him, come to find out he's a very strong Christian. His kids and he, they're Presbyterian and I'm a Baptist, but I didn't hold that against him. We have the same boss. Yes.

He goes to the church of a dear friend who is a PCA pastor. So it was like even in this, the Lord said, "Not only am I going to give you a highly qualified surgeon, but he's going to be a brother in Christ." At every step of the way, even today when I get some question or some new news about how my cancer is progressing or at this point not progressing, so we're very grateful for that, he is able to give me spiritual advice and sort of talk me down out of a tree by citing Scripture to me. How kind is that of the Lord that not only did he give me a surgical oncologist who's great at surgery, he's also turned out to be a great spiritual comfort to me as well.

Allen Jackson: That is awesome. God is faithful.

Megan Basham: Yes, he is.

Allen Jackson: How your recovery is progressing?

Megan Basham: Good. I mean I keep feeling like I joke that I keep waiting for somebody to tell me we're just kidding, you don't have cancer, because I feel fine. Physically, I feel great. Lost a little bit of weight and so now I'm in the fun part of going you got to put weight back on.

Allen Jackson: Well, that's a fun season.

Megan Basham: Yes, it actually is.

Allen Jackson: Two women stopped me today up in the lobby. We have a conference, so there's people that I don't know. One of them was here last year for the conference and asked me to pray for a friend, I didn't remember, who was battling cancer. It had metastasized and she had brain cancer. So this woman stops me upstairs and she said, "You prayed for me last year."

I had never met her, but long story short, she's complete. She's clean, she's cancer-free. Wow. These are the stories I love. I'm like, I will take all these stories all day. There was no hope. Her friend was standing over behind her just waving at me because she didn't want to intrude. But how God does it and when God does it, that's not in our purview. If he uses medicine, hallelujah. If he does it with a talking donkey, I'm okay with that too. We just want to get to the outcome that he has for us.

Megan Basham: Amen. I have had a lot of anxiety and I worry about it. This was kind of one of the things that this surgeon helped me think through. He said, "You keep worrying about if you get to that stage, will you have the faith and the courage to trust the Lord even if the outcome isn't what you want? I hear you worrying about that a lot."

He's like, "Megan, if you get to that point, you're asking for tomorrow's bread today. If you get there, the Lord's going to give you that when you get there. But you're not there. So stop thinking about am I going to have the ability to overcome that when I get there." He's like, "Trust that you will, but also don't worry about it because that's not today's fight."

Allen Jackson: Every day brings new reasons to worry: family, finances, health, the future. Sometimes it feels like the weight of tomorrow steals the peace we're meant to enjoy today. But Jesus gives us a different invitation. In Matthew chapter 6, he tells us, "Do not worry." Not because life will always be easy, but because our Heavenly Father is faithful.

In the updated book, *Freedom from Worry*, Pastor Allen Jackson shares practical biblical encouragement to help you replace anxiety with confidence in God's promises. Through Scripture, discussion questions, memory verses, and daily reflections, you'll discover practical ways to experience the peace Jesus offers every day.

Request your copy of *Freedom from Worry* with your gift of $20 or more at AllenJackson.com or call 800-880-5102.

Do you know Corrie ten Boom?

Megan Basham: Yes.

Allen Jackson: I remember, I may not tell it exactly right, but she was traveling with her father on the train and she asked a question about something, I forget whether it was Germany or her father's. Father said, "Corrie, that's too much for you to carry." He said, "You know when we go to the train, I don't give you the ticket until we're getting ready to get on the train." He said, "When you need to have the answer for that, we'll have the answer for that."

I have found God to be extraordinarily faithful. When I get out over my skis and start being concerned about what I don't need to be concerned about today, I lose my ability to stay in the moment and do what I need to do. Doesn't mean I don't do it from time to time. You're very normal. I think that's a very typical response. I want to pray for you, if I be allowed. But I want to pray for everybody else listening because we all have challenges.

I think sometimes we're embarrassed to invite God in or reluctant or afraid we'll be disappointed. I've never been disappointed in God. I don't always understand God's timing. I don't always like the places I find myself. Why do we walk through shadowed valleys? I don't know why we walk through shadowed valleys. But we live in a broken, fallen world, and being a Christ-follower doesn't remove us from all the trauma of a broken world. But I trust the faithfulness of God to bring us through. So I want to pray for you, I want to pray for Megan, but I want to pray for myself. I've had a tooth that, the week of a conference, I have a tooth goes nuts and the doctors wanted to do awful things and I just said, "No thank you." God's faithful.

Father, I thank you for Megan, her life, her courage, her boldness. Thank you for the platform you've given her. Lord, I pray you'll multiply it in ways I don't even have the wisdom to ask for today. Thank you for the courage you have given her, for a husband who stands with her and for beautiful daughters. Thank you for her life.

Lord, I thank you that you will complete her healing. Grateful for doctors and all they do, but you're our healer and I thank you that you'll bring life to her, healthy tissue to her body, that every unhealthy cell will wither and go. I pray for everybody listening, Lord. No details hidden from you. We don't have to be in the room, I don't have to know the details, you know them all. But I thank you that you are Lord over all creation, that nothing's too difficult for you.

As we cast those anxieties on you and those concerns on you, Lord, we receive your peace. I thank you that you will make a way, that you lead us through those shadowed valleys, Lord. You don't leave us there. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Thank you so much for coming to be a part of this initiative.

Megan Basham: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's a joy to be here. I look forward to next. This is an ongoing story.

Allen Jackson: I look forward to that too. Amen. I agree. God bless you. Thanks for joining me today. Before you go, please like the podcast and leave a comment so more people can hear about this topic too. If you haven't yet, be sure and subscribe to Allen Jackson Ministries' YouTube channel and follow the Culture & Christianity podcast. You can do that on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. Together, let's learn how to lead with our faith. We can change our culture. I'll see you next time.