theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin 1.11.26

Back in Catholic grade school, the nuns would walk up and down the aisles drilling us through the Baltimore Catechism. We’d all recite answers from memory in that sing song way kids do. She’d ask, why are we here? We’d answer, to glorify God. Had no idea what that meant. Seemed to include praising God…all the time? I liked praise, assurance I was doing things right, right things, enough, part of the group. Was God that insecure?

Also seemed to include doing good works for God…the bigger and more spectacular, the better. But all these years later, I realize those works, however good, are ego-deep, and as mere accomplishments, God is not impressed if in the process, we still haven’t gotten to know him intimately. So, remembering that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, seems glorifying God is really reflecting God’s essence in our lives. Jesus came out of the wilderness saying that he and the Father were one. We glorify God by becoming indistinguishable from God in the way we choose and experience our lives.

We’re not here to do the things we do. We’re here to be so connected that we are indistinguishable from, one with, all that is. Does that mean that all our accomplishments are meaningless? Ecclesiastes says yes, all tasks are equally meaningless, unless through them we engage the task within every task: to fall back in love with the moment that contains the task, with the sensation of the work itself, with those and everything sharing it with us. Falling back in love is how we come to know God, is all God is hoping for in us.

This doesn’t mean we don’t pursue excellence in what we do. Without taking the task seriously, we won’t seriously engage the task within it. But Jesus is trying to rewire the way we look at the world, give us back our priorities. He said that there was no one born of woman greater than John the Baptist, but the least in the kingdom of heaven was greater than he. Even the least in the kingdom is still one who has fallen back in love with this moment.

God’s “greatest in the world” is anyone who realizes they’re nothing great except in their connection to everything else.

Dave Brisbin 1.4.26

The hardest thing to comprehend about Jesus’ Way—what I call the Fifth Way—is its utterly stark difference from the first Four Ways we use to get from here to there in life. They are as far apart as east is from west, which never meet or change direction at the poles like north and south. You’re just always going west until you turn and face east. The Fifth Way is like that. If you haven’t stopped and consciously turned to face it, you’re on one of the other Four.

We know the Four Ways well. To acquire what we need and want in life, we can yield to, manipulate, exit, or destroy the challenges we face in any combination. In gentler language, we can compromise, influence, set boundaries, or disempower…completely healthy and necessary in life, but always beginning at the point of need, in a world of scarcity in which we scratch out our living.

Jesus isn’t denying that this is the way the physical world works. He works within it himself. But if where we ultimately want to go is not of this world, then a completely different vehicle is needed. A jet is the greatest method of travel across the earth, but if where you want to go is even a low orbit, you must get out of the jet and into a rocket capable of escape velocity. The Fifth Way is that rocket, taking everything we know about life and turning it on its head. It’s the only Way to the Father because the Father has nothing to do with scarcity. When we experience abundant presence, that God is all poured out around us, nothing withheld ever, then our Four Ways become not only instantly irrelevant, but a block to the connection, oneness, love that is God.

As long as we’re working for what we already have, we’re not living the abundance that already is.

The Fifth Way is not another method of acquisition, but a relinquishment of anything, everything that obscures the abundant truth… We’re not here to acquire something to make us whole or acceptable. We’re here to fall in love with love itself, the all-poured-out-ness of in-love-ness.

The relinquishment, the letting go of in-love-ness is the difference…no longer aching for what has always been freely given.

Dave Brisbin 12.28.25

Before he sails off to the Trojan war, Thetis tells her son Achilles that if he stays home, he will find peace. Will marry a wonderful woman and have children and grandchildren who will love him and remember his name. But when they are all dead, his name will be forgotten. If he goes to Troy, he will find such glory that his name will never be forgotten. But he will not come back, and his mother will never see him again.

Obviously, he went or we wouldn’t be talking about him. The world remembers those who do great things, leave a legacy of spectacularly big things. But such legacies always come at a price. Did Achilles make the right choice? Is the building of a legacy that lives beyond the generations we actually touch more important than what happens within them? Such choices are not binary, of course. If we’re consciously careful, we can have at least some elements of both.

But where do we find real meaning in life?

If all our focus is on not yet, imaginings of a great legacy, Solomon, traditional writer of Ecclesiastes has a Hebrew word for all our efforts: hevel. Vain, futile, meaningless, of no purpose or profit…chasing after the wind. After acquiring and accomplishing everything possible in a human lifetime, he writes, Meaningless! Everything is meaningless. Generations come and generations go…no one remembers the people of old, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. Sounds brutally depressing. Sounds like giving up, but it’s not.

It’s redirection.

Where do we find real meaning? In a legacy the world remembers even as we, the builders, are forgotten? Something more immediate? The question places us right at the crux of life. Solomon realizes that there is nothing better than for us to be glad and do good while life is in us, take our food and drink and have joy in our work. He’s saying all that matters is contained in this moment and nowhere else. Even if we work to build a lasting legacy, if we’re immersed in the joy of the work itself and those with us, we find meaning. Because in the end, the only legacy that matters is a legacy of little things.

Dave Brisbin 12.14.25

Christmas is our biggest cultural holiday, but even among those still celebrating Jesus’ birth, what do we really know about it? Only Matthew and Luke relate any birth narratives, but Matthew tells only of the visit of the Magi, leaving Luke to give all the birth details we have. And there aren’t many.

Luke tells us Jesus was wrapped in cloths and laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn. That’s it. In any good story, details are critical, never random, always set with purpose. So what do these details tell us? That Jesus’ birth followed ordinary Hebrew practice—so unremarkable that those in the house where Joseph and Mary were staying, most likely relatives or friends, didn’t even make room for them in their living space. That’s what the word mistranslated as “inn” means. Not a hotel, but the interior living space of every Hebrew home that was separate from the cooking space and that reserved for animals. Luke goes on to say that local shepherds are caught up in spectacular sights, and Matthew tells of astronomer-priests who travel a thousand miles to worship at the feet of a poor child they believe is king.

How did those right in the house with the holy family miss all this?

Truth is, every one of us can only see what we’re prepared to see. Confirmation bias eats up the rest. The point these few birth details make is that our God is an unassuming God, a humble, vulnerable God who must be believed to be seen. To see significance under an unremarkable exterior is the preparation, the goal of spiritual formation. If you’re already poor and marginalized, it’s easier to disregard facades, but no guarantee. The genius of the Magi is that they were wealthy, powerful, educated, and yet still humble, vulnerable, willing to make fools of themselves on a long, risky journey with no guaranteed outcome.

If we’re to understand Christmas, it will be through the Magi’s eyes, because we are wealthy and educated too. To let that go, sell all we have is the only way to see the promise of our star in an unformed child.

We will always find our God as a child. Unformed and forming. Are we prepared to see?

Dave Brisbin 12.7.25

We all know when we go too far. That can be measured.

When we cross a line, feel the negative reaction or outcome, we can evaluate and pull back. But how do we know when we haven’t gone far enough? How do you measure a negative, the absence of something? Can’t do it directly, but there is a way.

We can measure our disturbance.

Not going far enough, means something inside is resisting, slowing or stopping forward motion. Unfamiliar ideas and landscape challenge the way we believe things should look and feel. That’s disturbing and always seeks relief. Hard to remain in disturbing places. But we can’t grow in comfortable places, smack in the middle of everything we already believe. Something different always creates dissonance, which feels like disturbance; something radically different creates radical disturbance, which feels like anger, outrage, panic.

No disturbance, no growth.

We need rites of passage, to embrace all three phases: separation, transition, reincorporation. The movement from child to adult, from any perspective to another is always preceded by the painful separation from what is comfortable and familiar, followed by the disorienting transition through a new world of altered concepts and action. Only after such a journey can we reincorporate into our relationships, whitened like Moses by the experience, offering more.

Nothing is more radically different than the impossible love, with all its implications, that Jesus is teaching and living in the gospels. But if our reading of it is not disturbing, if our attempts at applying it in our lives is not disorienting, then we haven’t yet separated from the world we imagined for ourselves. We haven’t let love be impossible. Let it take us far enough and not too far at the same time.

In a prayer attributed to Sir Francis Drake as he set sail to successfully circumnavigate the globe: Disturb us, Lord, when we are too pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little, when we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore…

Measure your disturbance. If you can’t find any, you’re too close to the shore.

Dave Brisbin 11.30.25

Gratitude and thankfulness are not the same.

I see thankfulness as a positive reaction to a specific gift or circumstance, and though gratitude begins there, it journeys on to a non-specific attitude, a view of life that is all-inclusive, sees everything around us as a gift we could never give ourselves. Once we’re aware that life is the free reception of what we could never give ourselves or repay, that repayment is not even required, any sense of entitlement vanishes.

Jesus said the highest form of love is loving the enemy: loving—identifying with—someone who had not earned the right to that gift. And the flip side: the highest form of gratitude is being thankful for something we believe we have already earned. We can’t know love until we know gratitude, the opposite of entitlement, the ability to see everything as a gift no matter how hard we work.

What blocks this ability? To help us survive, our brains have adapted to focus on anticipating and solving problems, to start from a base of scarcity and fear. This makes us quicker to react to challenges, but jealously entitled to what we can catch and kill. Jesus rejected scarcity, started from a base of abundance, that everything God has and is, is already ours, within us. Even as we struggle for the legal tender, using our minds as survival guides, our job spiritually is to learn the balance of remaining thankful for each gift we earn, let thankfulness incite the journey to gratitude.

Gratitude is an umbrella term, covers and includes all positive emotions, excludes the rest. You can’t be grateful and depressed at the same time. Or angry, anxious, envious, entitled, victimized. Literally impossible. So what does gratitude feel like? Like enough. No more or less than just enough. Enoughness is the feeling we call gratitude, which feels like happiness, fulfilment, meaning, purpose.

We can’t create gratitude. It’s what happens when we begin to see everything in our moments as gifts we could never give ourselves—let go of the complexity, calculations, judgment upon which our minds insist. Instead of scarcity, see the abundance of each moment as enough.

Dave Brisbin 11.23.25

When I’d tell people the title of my book, The Fifth Way, first question was: what are the first four? That made perfect sense, because you can’t understand the fifth way of Jesus until you understand how the first four operate in our lives.

There are several systems that try to explain human behavior in terms of personality types, unconscious ways we process experience and approach challenges in life: Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, DiSC, Kiersey…the four ways operate similarly.

In Jesus time, four sects dominated Jewish life, and each had a specific way of dealing with threats to their powerbases—specifically the Roman occupation. The Sadducees, yielded to Roman power; the Pharisees tried to influence or manipulate; the Essenes exited to build their own communities; and the Zealots tried to destroy Roman presence through rebellion.

To yield, manipulate, exit, and destroy, are the north, south, east, and west of ways we can deal with challenges in life. From dysfunctional marriages to nations and armies, these four ways, with all the combinations in between, are what we have to work with, and each of us has learned to favor one as primary in our personal lives. They aren’t bad or evil; they’re necessary for navigating life. Only when we apply them to spiritual growth do they become limiting, destructive, never taking us where we need to go.

The four ways answer physical needs we all have as humans, but until we become aware of them, they strip free will, reducing us to predictable, type-based behavior. When Jesus comes out of the wilderness, having overcome three temptations symbolic of all human need, he begins teaching a fifth way, turning the other four on their heads.

Everything Jesus teaches and models is a refutation of our normal, ingrained ways of meeting our needs. Starting within and working outward, from an awareness of inexhaustible presence rather than scarcity, we realize that all we really need is not gained through acquisition but in giving away all we have. In the giving, we learn what we really possess is inexhaustible, restoring free will—our ability to choose in love, not just in need.

Dave Brisbin 11.16.25

Have you noticed that people fight? Silly wabbit. Of course. Ever stopped to wonder why?

Fear. Always fear. Even if it doesn’t feel like afraid-ness, unconscious, overriding concern for personal survival drives us fearward in a zero-sum world where there’s only so much oil in the ground, where the resources absolutely necessary for survival are finite. It’s basic envy and jealousy: fear of not getting what someone else has, fear of not keeping what we already do.

Fights are made of this. No fear, no fight.

Then why do religious people fight? Spirituality by definition is infinite, yes? Unlimited resource, enough for all. So when Christians fight, debate, defend, excommunicate, and they certainly do, they are saying they don’t really believe in infinite spiritual resources, or at least that the spiritual does not override the finite where we really live. Fighting Christians don’t trust that the perfect love Jesus lived and died to make real for us is enough. There must still be something we need to acquire or perform to gain the acceptance that is our eternal survival.

More revealing: how do Christians fight? With scripture. Always with scripture. Any fight among Christians is a fight over the book. We’re the people of the book. Even before the early church had the book, it fought over what should be in the book, and once it had the book, fought to defend and enforce it. Five hundred years ago, Western Reformers went even further, saying the book was the only source of revelation from God, that to literally understand the text was to understand God—or at least the terms of eternal survival.

Reducing faith to rational belief has put Westerners on a collision course with an Eastern text that is made of entirely different stuff. The ancients who wrote our book were not even trying to answer literal questions to satisfy our craving for certainty.

The bible is the map of a journey to the experience of infinite resource, unlimited love. When we stop defending it, asking it questions it won’t answer, let it ask us who is asking…it can begin pointing us to trust what we can never understand—only experience.

Dave Brisbin 11.9.25

The founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, was one of the most driven men of our time. His desire for more, his dissatisfaction with the status quo, created a lifelong willingness to strike out in radically new directions. Raised in the Lutheran church, by his teens he became disillusioned, dissatisfied with Christianity-as-practiced and non-answers to his existential questions. He embraced Zen Buddhism, spending three years in India, returning with shaved head and traditional Indian garb, which translated to bare feet and jeans in the Apple offices as tech innovation became his driving force.

Couple decades later, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Fought it with everything he had for seven years but by 2011, had accepted he was dying. Friends and family created a stream of visitors to his home, and conversations slowly morphed from business back to those existential questions he had never answered to his own satisfaction. His sister said at his funeral that after making eye contact with everyone in the room, his gaze refocused beyond them, over their shoulders at something only he could see. His last words were, “Oh wow! Oh wow, oh wow!”

To overcome the fear and uncertainty that radical change represents, to persevere through the time it takes to assimilate radical change, we need a tremendous amount of desire. We need to feel a divine dissatisfaction, the blessed unrest such desire creates. But where does all that come from?

If you’re reading this, it’s because you desire something more or different. But at a level that motivates? You could say that the entirety of Jesus’ message was a series of shocks to the system, a constant overturning of the tables of our status quo. The shocks are what break through business as usual and present the possibility of something more. Like a beautiful face that promises new relationship or a loss that lays waste to old ones, motivating desire always follows.

Death is the ultimate shock to the system.

Jesus taught and lived a constant laying down of life-as-practiced to create the shocking space for something more. Something that will make us say, Oh wow!

Dave Brisbin 10.26.25

Book of Genesis tells us that God gave Adam permission to name all the animals in the Garden. It’s not a casual detail. For the ancient Hebrews, authority to name something like a child or an animal, was a symbol of dominion over that something. That’s the point. Control. To this day, Jews do not speak the name of God. But the rest of us continue to name everything in sight, including God…and the theology we build around God.

God told Moses from the burning bush that his name was hayah asher hayah. That is, I am that I am. How can we get any closer than that? How do we describe raw, ultimate existence any more clearly? How do we, using finite tools such as language and logic or even the mathematics of physics, describe what is by definition infinite? Our limited language, concepts, and equations melt all over the dashboard long before temperatures and velocities ever reach the neighborhood of infinity.

But we keep trying. Control is an aphrodisiac.

To be fair, the scriptures are always talking about knowing God. Ezekiel uses the phrase over seventy times in his short book. Jesus says that some of us, knocking on the door of kingdom, will be refused because God never knew us. Really? Once again, entering the Hebrew mind helps us square this circle. To know—yada in Hebrew—comes from the root for hand, so to know is not to think, but to handle. Jesus is saying that some of us, for all the religious work we do, have still never been intimate with God. Now God won’t throw us out for that, but God is intimacy personified. If we’re too unripe, immature, traumatized to enter the defenseless vulnerability that intimacy requires, we don’t know God. We can’t know what we’ve never experienced.

God occupies space beyond thought and performance. If we can stop naming God, trying to understand and dominate for just a moment, we enter God’s space and experience what we’ll never understand. Relax... Understanding is overrated. For Jesus, a precognitive child is the embodiment of kingdom.

Trust beats certainty the way rock beats scissors.

Once we experience God, there is no name that can hold or express what we know.