 We are so glad that you are part of our family here on Hope Today. I'm here with Anna to such a joy always to be together, friend. And we have an incredible show coming up, talking about that very thing about people feeling lonely. Yes, we certainly do. And welcome. We're so glad that you're with us. And we get to welcome Justin Whitmore early to talk with us about the power of friendship and how to overcome loneliness. This book made for people comes at just the right time as our country admits to being in an epidemic of loneliness. If you long for community and strong relationships, this conversation is for you. And so, Sydney, I just, I wanted to ask you, like, what has it been like for you building friendships as an adult? Cool. Let's talk about this all day. And I think like, I think there is, it goes from a time when you're growing up from, you know, high school and then to college and then people fall off and then you're changing and you're evolving. And I was actually having a conversation with one of my dearest friends just about this very thing of like how you evolve, how you heal, how you change. And it's sometimes people fall off or you're in different seasons of life. And it can feel very lonely. And so one thing we talk about, you know, Jesus has like the, you know, the three, you know, there's only like, there's like the three people that you maybe you talk to that's like the inner circle, the holy of holies, whatever you want to call it. And in the season and time of just, you know, even though we have social media, even though we have all these ways to connect and engage with people, there's a lot of loneliness that can happen. What about you, Anna? Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I, the first time that I remember like really hearing a lot about loneliness was whenever I worked with the mops group, the mothers of preschoolers and you know, that season of life in particular being a stay at home mom where you really are with your kids so much and isolated in a lot of ways really starts to plunge women into that loneliness. And we really found that those, those groups to like intentionally put ourselves into where we could connect with other women in the same season. It just helped to build those strong relationships. And it's really beautiful to see all these years later how the friendships that we made there. And stepping out of our comfort zone to talk to a new person and be able to share from our hearts and how those friendships have continued to grow. You know, I love the power of like group settings, maybe in your small group or just even getting with a group of people just to talk and have conversation and open up about, here's a really vulnerable part of my life. And I think a lot of times shame or we try to act like everything is okay. But when you're able to open up to people, then you're like, oh, you're walking through the same thing too. Cause we know that God didn't call us to walk alone. I'm so glad he made other people. Cause it'd be a really lonely world. We are made for a relationship or we're going to get into that conversation here in just a minute, but I want to say you'll have to stay tuned also for after the conversation, because we have a God story that we're excited to show you about a wonderful family that is in our local area that through their business, they're doing incredible things for Christ. They're called sacred gate farms. So that will be coming up later in the show, but for today, our guests, Justin Whitmoe early joins us to talk about the profound impact of friendship. In his book, made for people, Justin offers transformative strategies to combat loneliness. If you're struggling with feelings of loneliness or have struggled to build strong friendships, know that you aren't alone. Justin, we're excited to get this conversation going. So welcome to hope today. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here with you all. So Justin, tell us a little bit about yourself and why you felt this was such a critical time to put this book about friendship into the world. I'd be happy to. So my name is Justin early. I am a business lawyer here in my office this morning, but I'm also a writer and author and a father of four boys who are now between five and 11. So there's a right answer to why I wanted to write this book and there's a real answer. The right answer is that if you look at the statistics, America and the West is in an epidemic of loneliness. It is actually shortening our lifespan. We are dying younger. We're experiencing all kinds of mental health impacts. And we desperately need to talk about how we do relationships. It's an art that we've lost and I care about that. But the real answer is not really the out there answer. It's the in here answer. I am somebody who has experienced the difficulty, the devastating difficulty of loneliness. So this book starts from my experience in high school when I was moving to a new town, knew a lot of people around school, but nobody really knew me. And I remember everything about life seemed hard. Everything was a cause for anxiety until this magic moment where I found my first friend. And I remember from that point in my life on everything began to change, not the circumstances, but the way I faced the circumstances were different. And ever since I've had this feeling that I was made for friendship. I was made for people. And I see that exact same thing happening around me every day. Difficulty of circumstances for fathers, for mothers, for the stage of parenthood for your job of mental health. And I just want to tell everybody that those circumstances are difficult, but they radically change when you face them alongside a friend because you are made for friendship. So right. And in your book, you talked about how miracles can come out of friendship. But before we delve into that, you also talk about loneliness with God. That is a real thing. Can we start there and then begin to unpack the rest? It's a great place to start because we're looking out on the world at this epidemic of loneliness and seeing the mental health and the physical decline that's causing. And there is a reason for that. If you look at Genesis, Genesis, too, has an incredible and very interesting moment where God says to Adam, it is not good that you are alone. Now, remember, God has just created the world. He's called everything good, the water good, the light good, making Adam good. And then he looks at him and says, it's not good that you're alone, which is just so interesting because of course, remember, God is there. So it's an incredibly important theological moment where we realize that we can be lonely next to God because we can't experience God the way that we were made to until we experience him alongside others. And that is an ode to marriage, but it's also an ode to friendship. When God creates Eve, Adam is now in the kind of communal relationship with God. Of course, we're made in the image of the Trinity, right? He's in the kind of communal relationship with God where now he could walk alongside God the way he was made to. And that's true for us today. Walking with Jesus is essential, but it's also essential that we do it alongside others. So I want to push back on this Just Me and Jesus narrative and say that we need to walk with Jesus alongside other deep relationships. Oh, that's so fascinating. And so out of that, talking about Adam and Eve and how we can parallel that with marriage, but also friendship because it's not everybody is married and you talk about covenant friendships. What does that mean? How does it differ from a regular friendship? Well, friendship is a word that has suffered recently. In the past century, a friend has gone from being something that was just held in the utmost high regard to now something you can do with a click on Facebook. So it's a tough word to use. So I use the phrase covenant friendship as a way to recover, not to invent, but to recover the glory of friendship as the way Jesus described it when he said, I have not called you servants. I've called you friends. And he says the greatest act of love is to lay down your life for a friend. So covenant friendship is an idea of spiritual friendship. It's where you dive into relationship, not just into connections and conversations alone, but where you're actually vulnerable and you're committed. I like to put it like this. A covenant friend is someone who knows you completely and sticks around anyway, because this is exactly what Jesus did for us and his active friendship for us on the cross. Jesus said, I know you're sent fully. I know all your deepest secrets, but I am here to commit to love, to sacrifice anyway. And when we know our friends fully through repeated conversations and being with them in presence, when we know them fully and they know us fully and yet we love each other anyway, we're acting out a gospel sort of relationship to each other, a reflection of what Jesus did for us. And I call that covenant friendship. So beautiful. And you say that men struggle with friendship. It's like in a pretty dire state. Why is that? Well, it's important to note that we are all struggling with this, but it's very important to note that the male outcomes are extremely dire right now. I think there are a couple reasons for it, but one of the reasons is just the sense of modern manhood is usually not to be somebody who is vulnerable, who tells their secrets. It's usually to be somebody who is quieter and carries the world on your shoulders. And I really want to speak to men particularly and say that one of the most manly things that you can do, one of the most masculine acts there is, is to live without secrets, is to be known amongst your friends. I think that everybody, but particularly men, should have one or two other people who know them completely and love them anyway. That's a covenant friend. And I do this with my friends Matt and Steve on a regular basis. They know everything about me. I don't have any secrets with them, but I know that despite my flaws, stick around anyway. And that makes me feel not just strong, but strong in the Lord. It makes me feel like the man that Jesus was. And I think that's really important for men to hear in our modern moment. And you say that there are strategies that we can implement to build strong connections. You talk about a couple of your favorite strategies. Yeah. If you read the book made for people, I talk about friendship as an art and as a habit. And it's important because relationships are totally habits. They're not things you can put on autopilot, relationships are somewhat an art. But there are really significant things that you can do to put yourself in the way of friendship. One of the most important that I say is one hour a week spent with friends. One hour a week. This is not really hard. You know, for everything else important in life that we need for survival and thriving, food, sleep, work, parenting, we have to do all the time. But friendship, if you set aside one hour a week, maybe that Wednesday morning Bible study or that Thursday morning coffee group or that Saturday running club, whatever it is, if you set aside one hour a week and commit to that rhythm, your life will begin to drastically change. I see this all over the place. It can be a small group. It can be accountability group. It can be a workout group. But as long as you stick with it and actually talk to these people and make yourself known, you're doing that incredible act of vulnerability with commitment. Remember being known and sticking around anyway. And that is the rhythm of covenant friendship. So I would recommend anybody just start there. It's a radical thing just to devote one hour a week to friendship. Yeah, it's all about being intentional, right? Because we live such busy lives, our schedules. We compact them with so many things. And we have to schedule in that intentional time with friends to be able to build those strong connections. You also talk about the different habits that are so important. And one that stuck out to me was forgiveness. I can't say enough about this because anybody who tries a deep relationship, like covenant friendship, will very quickly realize that people are flawed, right? Every friendship has two ingredients, a center and a center. So it's no surprise that we hurt each other. It's no surprise that we let each other down. And I think for men and women, this is particularly important. We have to be ready for our friends to hurt us. We should expect for relationships to be hard, not easy. And that really, when we change that expectation for our friends, it really helps because we're not surprised when our friend doesn't completely rise to the level we hope they will be. We're not surprised when we found out that we've hurt somebody, but rather we realize this is an opportunity for forgiveness. And if you don't practice forgiveness, then any conflict, any argument, or any moment of disappointment is kind of the end of the road for friendship. You need to discard it and find a new one, someone who will do better. But when you realize that forgiveness is the heart of the gospel and the heart of human life and relationships, then difficulties become the doorway to deeper relationship, not the end of relationship. And I'm not saying this is easy. Nothing important is easy, but this is crucial because if we don't know how to do forgiveness, if we don't practice forgiveness, then we can't do friendship. I'm thinking back to conversations that I had with the mops' moms, the moms who were full-time at home with their kids and their struggles with loneliness and found that a lot of insecurities would get in the way of stepping out into new friendship. Can you talk a little bit about being brave to step out? Absolutely. I want to note that it is precisely those hard times of life. Let's say infants, new stages of motherhood, a move, new jobs. Those pivot points, that was for me in high school when I moved to a new place where everything was changing, everything was hard, and I didn't have a friend yet. And it's at those times that we become scared to admit that life is messy, life is difficult, or failing in lots of ways. But here's my encouragement. What you think is your flaw. When you share it with someone else, sounds like bravery to them. So when you act vulnerably and say, I am so struggling in my mental health at home with the children, you feel embarrassed because you don't want other people to know that, but the person on the other side of the conversation hears that and sees courage. They see bravery because they're saying somebody else who is brave enough to speak the truth about what was going inside their heart and their head. And so I am with you. This is difficult. But when we're in those phases of life and we are vulnerable anyway, we, one, do an incredible thing because we invite help. And that is exactly what you need. And two, we inspire others to do the same. Vulnerability is contagious. And when you are courageous enough to tell the truth about your life, you inspire that mops group, you inspire the small group, you inspire other people to share their secrets too. And that is a beautiful and magic moment. So I just encourage everybody towards that courage to be vulnerable. Yeah. Great miracles come out of strong friendships and communities. So Justin, thank you so much for being with us today. Again, your book is called Made for People, Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship. Thank you again for your time and for your heart that you have shared. So wonderful to be with you all. You're very welcome. All right. Well, we're going to be unpacking more of that conversation in just a few minutes. But as promised, we want to share with you the God story from Sacred Gate Farms. I tell you what, I learned about this wonderful couple, Lorraine and Martin. And I visited their blueberry farm and we picked blueberries and we went home and made a delicious blueberry dessert. But I so fell in love with their story of how God used them in such a mighty way to be a blessing in the community and show people the love of Christ. So here is their story. We moved to the area in 2010. Back then we really didn't have any farming knowledge or any farming background. And we always knew it that we wanted to be out of the city. So whenever we move out of the city, we purchased that property and there was 20 acres here. We were thinking like, how can we engage our kids? Because planting 20 acres of corn would be only so engaging to them. It was the same time when we're discovering who God is. We can't contribute this to anything else than divide intervention and just putting it on our hearts that that's what we are going to do in the future. And sure enough, 10 years later, here we are. Sacred Gate Farm is a Christian faith-driven farm located in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Martin and Lorraine are the husband-wife team behind this family-owned business. They, along with their seven children, operate the farm daily. We heard great things about this unique place, so we reached out to hear their story. One thing that was really significant for both of us, all through my journey through trying to discover Christ and trying to listen to him, I was always kind of big on like, Lord, please just send me a sign, just send me a sign. And although my husband was a little bit more skeptical of the signs thing, when we, this whole field was tilled and we had to add a lot of fertilizers and a lot of nutrients to the soil in order to prepare it to plant the blueberries. So if you can imagine our whole about four or five acres of this area was just brown and black dirt, just completely bald. And my husband said one day, walk up to the middle of the field there. And I'm like, why? And he's just go up there. So I will took a walk up and as soon as I got up to the middle there, there is this white dove just walking around in this dark brown black dirt just tilled up. And of course, you know, I'm starting to get ulterior eyed and I start praying. I was like, Lord, is this really that sign that I was looking for, you know, just really trying to... I am looking at it and I don't believe it. So I... It was hard to believe. There is a two different sides to the story, but it was literally there for three days, walking back and forth in that field. Never seen it again. Never came back again, yes. But it was definitely very revealing and confirming for us. So it was amazing to, you know, to feel just God's presence there because I wouldn't take that for anything else. When we came here and we got everything set and we're ready to plant our blueberries, we had 2,400 bushes to plant. So my husband planted the first couple and he looked out in this field and he's like, oh my goodness, how are we going to do this? It was literally two plants and four bear acres. And when I turned around, I was like, I'm not sure if I can do that, you know. Yeah. So we were kind of praying. We're like, Lord, please, you know, should we reach out to other people to help us? Should we, you know, please send somebody and everything? And I remember our children at the time, our two older boys were now teens. Six and seven, seven and eight came out and said, hey, can we help you guys? Can we dig holes? And we looked at each other. We're like, oh, you're going to be in the way. I just discredited a little bit. I hate to say it. Yeah, because it was a lot of work, physical work. And so we said, all right, come out with us. And sure enough, it took us what, maybe two months to plant the whole field. Yeah, it was about two and a half months. They were here for every single bush that we planted and through the process, like after planting all of them, mulching them, like every one of our children helped us in planting this farm and growing this farm. So they have their feet deep into it. And I just pray that not only that they have it in the farm, but that they're rooted in Christ through that, even though it's hard to see sometimes. It was a spectacular experience for me as a father too, because I discredited that I'm like, oh, six, seven year old boys. I'm like, I don't think that they can handle it. But sure enough, I felt like a fool when God was like, you had help all along. You just chose not to use it. So they literally dug 3,000 holes here that I put the plant in backfill. But they were measured and everything, it was great. And sure enough, they like to push the limits. And like we learned parenting as we go. I believe that God is working in their hearts. We all went through the difficult times. I hope that we are just walking along and pouring into them and just being available when the troubles come. But I believe we have spectacular children and obviously biased opinion. But they are often on their knees. And I think that they're heading in the right direction. So I think that that farm became more of a mission to where we can invite people and talk about God and spread the kingdom of heaven here on earth. It's not easy, as you know, probably from your experiences. Not everybody will be willing to be exposed to that truth through our behavior and our large family. We're just trying to at least make people think, like, oh, why is that like that? You know, like, why don't have a, why they are so nice? Why there is no set price per pound? Why I can take what I want and leave without paying for it if I choose to or leave all the money that I can as well? I think that we're just trying to make that very accessible to everybody. We have never been disappointed yet. We never wanted to take this away from, you know, for example, single mothers that, you know, putting up a certain amount per pound would be like, I can't do that. And there are people that will leave more than what they need to. And, you know, we are always grateful for generosity and how God is moving in our lives and to this farm to advance His kingdom, you know. So we're just praying that we are aligning ourselves with His will. So we had an older couple that we were just recently met at the time, Tom Gamden and his wife, Evelyn. She has recently passed, but she was diagnosed with cancer. And he brought her up here to pick some berries one afternoon. And we came up to say hi and, you know, just kind of spend some time with her. And she just grabbed my hand and she just said that, you know, for this one hour while I was here picking berries, I forgot that I had cancer. I was just in her peace. And it just, it really warmed my heart and it brought tears to my eyes because I think a lot of us, you know, we really hope that families that come out, you know, ladies who come out on their own or gentlemen who come out on their own, they have a sense of peace here and they can just be in their thoughts. And, you know, one thing that I always, you know, when we pray in the evening as a family during our you pick season, I always say, Lord, please let every berry picked here on this farm, be a prayer for those people who need it, wherever, however they need it, let every berry just be a prayer for them. What an incredible story and testimony. I want to say a big thank you to Sacred Gate Farms. I'm just sharing their story and, you know, and I did a phenomenal job with that and putting it together and just even thinking about the beauty of when we come together. I know we earlier, we're talking with Justin about loneliness, but do you see the way that God designed it with the human family that we come together, we use our gifts and we're able to bless the community? I just think it is phenomenal to see that in action. And all those blueberries, I wish I could just make them and eat them and put them in my mouth. They looked delicious, right? Something that stood out to me that is applicable to today's conversation is how they have set up their family and their life to be outward focused. You see, they understand that they were created for so much more beyond themselves that this world, this life is not about them. It is about what God has called them to. And so as a family, they set about digging thousands of holes and planting those bushes and praying over each one for the people that would come out of faith. They had to trust that the people would come and that as they picked berries, I love that. Silurian said it's one of her favorites that every berry picked is a prayer. And to see the love of that family, the happiness and the joy of that family, even in all the grueling hard work that it takes to do what they do. But the Lord is using them in such a powerful way and friend you at home as you step out, whether it's into friendships, into being there for other people as a family to be a blessing in your community. Know that your life is not about you. It is about what is God is doing in you to be a part of his kingdom on this earth, what he is doing in this earth. And so know that God is calling you to step out of your comfort zone, even if that means it's friendship. And you will find blessing and miracles and happiness as you step out and be vulnerable and see what God will do. You know, as you're talking, and I just think about the fruit of the spirit that, you know, what God calls this is love, peace, joy, gentleness, self-control, patience. Am I forgetting one? I can't remember. There's like eight of them, but you all know what I'm talking about with the fruit of the spirit. But I was just thinking about when Anna was just speaking and sharing, is that isn't it amazing that God is calling us to have fruit, that it's not just for us to hoard in ourselves. And that's what the world teaches, is just have the success, have this fame. It's all about you and hoarding it. But God, the way in his divine plan is that he's like, you know what? I have created you. You're a spiritual being that I am in you. The hope of glory is in you. And as you seek me and as you look to the Father, he's going to bear fruit in you, that you can give out to others, to those in your community, to those in your neighborhood, to those in your family. That's what's important. That's what God wants us to do. You know, we're talking a lot. I just think about even the family and how they are leading in their community in a way. But at the leadership, I think we have taught a lot of ways that, you know, it's how many people are under me. No, it's how many people do you serve? That's what God is calling us. Jesus was the servant of all. So how much more should we be servants? How much more should we just look to the heart of Jesus and see a need and fulfill it? And that's what I love. We saw with Sacred Gate Farms is that they saw a need and they're fulfilling it in their community. And we want to leave you with this today. What can you do for that one person in your family, in your community, wherever God is calling you to go? Because that is the greatest that we have is to give that love out to others through the power of Jesus so that they will know us by our love. We are so glad you joined us on Hope Today. Have a great day. On Tomorrow's Hope Today, discover God's character by exploring the book of Revelation. Author Jeff Kinley examines 13 characteristics of God that Revelation uniquely and vividly illustrates through its foretelling of Earth's last days. Don't miss Tomorrow's Hope Today. We wish us to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.