Jeff Feldhahn: Is Your "Sacrifice" Deal with God Totally Wrong?

Jeff Feldhahn (00:00)

He closed his eyes, prayed about it, and when he opened his eyes, he had a pained look on his face, and he said, "Close it down."

I couldn't believe the words because that wasn't how the deal was supposed to work. I was going to sacrifice and trust God, and it was all going to be okay in the end. My parents were going to be taken care of. I didn't know what was going to happen to me, but I wanted my parents taken care of. And now you're telling me that's not going to happen the way I thought it would? It didn't seem like the right deal that I'd made with the Lord.

Jason Montoya (00:26)

Mm. Welcome to an inspirational people interview on the Share Life podcast. I'm Jason Scott Montoya, and this episode I'm speaking with Jeff Feldhahn. Jeff, say hello.

Jeff Feldhahn (00:38)

Hey, Jason. Hey, listeners.

Jason Montoya (00:40)

Glad to have you joining us. Jeff is here to connect two worlds. In one, he's a Harvard-educated tech CEO and attorney who masters complex systems. On the other, he's a best-selling author and social researcher who has surveyed over 40,000 people to decode the messy systems of human relationships. Jeff is a master of building ways of life, both for business and personally, and for hearing God's direction in our lives, even when it takes a long time to see the fruit of what he's asked us to do.

So, Jeff, you are both a people person and a technical person. How did that person come to be? Where did you come from? Tell us about you.

Jeff Feldhahn (01:19)

Wow. Well, let's see. I had a great family upbringing in Michigan, small town, loved all of it, every moment of it, but really it feels like my life really started when I was 18 years old and came to know Christ. It just really transformed how I came to view life and the world and the interactions with me in it.

Jason Montoya (01:47)

Tell us about the context. If that was at 18, you said you had a great growing up, but what was the atmosphere at home, and how did you go from where you were to that point?

Jeff Feldhahn (02:21)

I never doubted my parents' love, never doubted that they didn't prioritize me and my brothers, and sacrificed for us. It was a terrific childhood. I look at oftentimes when I think of maybe some of the things that God has allowed me to do, and I think, "Anyone can do it. It's not rocket science." But we all don't start with the same soil, with the same watering. I realized that, as I've gotten older, I just had tremendous advantages.

Jason Montoya (02:52)

Hmm. Yeah, what would be some of those advantages?

Jeff Feldhahn (03:01)

I remember being anxious about school and studies and doing well, but I didn't have anxiousness about, "Are my parents going to stay together? Do my brothers hate me?" Those kind of interpersonal things. They put a foundation in me of what I believe is what we can all have. It is a lovely thing to have, even if some of the other things in this world that we desire or think we need, we don't get. If we have those things, man, we're set.

Jason Montoya (03:48)

Yeah. It's interesting that you say that because I have a neighbor who goes to our church, and they are fostering through the Fostering Together program. It's interesting just how many dynamics you're describing, that when you have a fairly normal or even a positive upbringing in a family environment, we just take for granted. When you're in the fostering environment, you realize how much you take those for granted and how often those actually aren't the case.

Jeff Feldhahn (04:19)

For sure, for sure. In my case, it set me up to try things. Maybe it was because somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I could always move into the basement of my parents' home if things really went south. I had this conversation yesterday with someone: both of my parents have passed. They passed when I was in my mid-50s.

Jason Montoya (04:46)

Okay, wow. Within a short period of time of each other? Wow.

Jeff Feldhahn (04:46)

Yes, within a year of each other. So I was a grown man with my own family, with my own obligations, with my own life. But somehow in the back of my mind was this solidness that if everything went south, my wife, my kids, we can move into my parents' basement.

Jason Montoya (05:12)

Yeah, like a safety net of sorts.

Jeff Feldhahn (05:16)

Absolutely. And when they weren't there, then it was really real. "Gosh, it's kind of on me."

Jason Montoya (05:25)

Did it feel like the rug was pulled out from under you when they both passed?

Jeff Feldhahn (05:28)

Well, you know, it was a long, kind of expected but not expected. In the actual moment, yeah, it felt like that even though you knew it was coming. They were both 90-some years old. They had a good, wonderful life, and they had made the journey to a journey of faith like I had many years earlier. So all things that could be unsettling were settled.

Jason Montoya (06:01)

Yeah, so talk to me about the dynamic of there's the idea of trusting God. Like, in that situation, you have this safety net in your parents. But when that safety net is removed, when we face these type of situations where it's us and God, it's trusting Him. How do you differentiate the two? The dynamic of like we say we trust in God, but then when it really comes to those situations where we actually have to. Talk to us about that.

Jeff Feldhahn (06:33)

Yeah, I'm not sure I have a simple answer for that other than it's testing over time, it's experience. I didn't question my parents' love for me because I saw it modeled, I saw it done, day in and day out. I think when it comes to trusting in our Father, it is that sense of "I've seen Him show Himself faithful," oftentimes in micro kind of opportunities of faithfulness, but then also in the big ones.

One of my favorite verses is from Psalm 112, and it talks about the righteous man, and it says, "For he will be remembered forever. He is not afraid of bad news. His heart is firm, trusting in the Lord. His heart is steady; he will not be afraid." Honestly, that's what I want to be said of me. But that doesn't just automatically appear. It comes, it's hard gains. And I look back to seeing God's faithfulness.

I can dive a little back into my story when things changed and kind of how I got from there to here. So I became a follower of Jesus when I was 18. Believe it or not, it was a high school teacher. I was her student assistant. She shared the gospel with me. Through a series of events, it made sense, and I accepted Christ.

That was in my senior year. I was planning on going to college, enrolled at the University of Michigan, accepted. In between that time, I had become a Christian, started sensing, "Gosh, what is God's plan for my life? Is it go to college or what?" As you do when you're 18 and thinking back in the day, in 1980 when I graduated from high school, it was kind of in the era of the books The Late Great Planet Earth. In my 18-year-old brain was this idea that, "Heck, if things are going to wrap up within the next 10 years, what the heck am I getting a college education for?"

Jason Montoya (09:44)

Interesting. That's an interesting parallel to my generation, which grew up in the Left Behind era. It's just a different form of the end of the world.

Jeff Feldhahn (09:50)

Exactly. So that was there hanging out in the back of my brain, plus the idea that I did want to serve God.

Then another event occurred, which was my older brothers opened up a restaurant in a city nearby where I grew up in Michigan. My parents invested their life savings in that restaurant. I agreed that I would work the summer with them and get it off the ground, and we'll see what happens.

Shortly after the restaurant opened, I started college, and I felt unsettled leaving them, leaving my parents. So I prayed about it, and I really felt that God was leading me to withdraw. So after two and a half weeks in college, I withdrew and came home and worked in the restaurant, assuming it was going to be maybe a three or four-month period just to make sure that it was on solid footing, provide free labor, all of that sort of stuff. Then I'd start back in the winter term at college.

Well, the restaurant didn't start as a success. My free labor became necessary because we couldn't afford to pay others to do the work. So, seven years later, I'm still in there, and I was growing in my faith, which was tremendous. It was a really challenging time. I never took a salary those entire seven years. I would buy my clothes at the local Goodwill store, and my mom would hem them up and fit them to me. That was how I lived for seven years, but God was growing my faith from 1980 to 1987.

It wasn't all drudgery. I was working with my brothers. My parents had started working in the restaurant, too, so it was fun as a family. We loved one another, served together in this. But money comes in handy every now and again, and we didn't have it. We ate for free, but we didn't have much in the way of financial benefits.

Jason Montoya (12:28)

So what's your—how do you attribute the—a restaurant that's doing well should be able to pay its people. So what was the problem?

Jeff Feldhahn (12:34)

Location, location, location. The location was Flint, Michigan. Flint, Michigan, in the 1980s, was the birthplace of General Motors, a factory town. In the 1980s, there was significant contraction among the auto industry. So timing and location.

I felt God was in this, and so we embarked on a journey for maybe the last two or three years of when we were in the restaurant to see if we could sell it. My prayer was, "Lord, this is what we need for my parents to be made whole." I didn't care if I didn't get anything out of it, but let them return their life savings to them because they're in their 60s, and they needed it.

During that time, I was growing in my faith. It was a small little church in Flint, Michigan. It was ethnically diverse, maybe about 50, 75 people in this little church. There was an individual who would come once a year and hold revivals. The church was a full gospel, non-denominational, charismatic church.

Jason Montoya (14:12)

And for someone that hasn't had that experience, how would you describe that person?

Jeff Feldhahn (14:38)

A guy who hears from God, and it comes to pass, some of the things that he says. You know, I don't know any other way of just saying you have to kind of experience it to believe it. This guy took a liking to me. He was physically deaf; he'd lost his hearing a decade or two earlier. He would say, "Brother Jeff, when I'm in town, I would love it if you could come and spend an hour or two with me. We'll just talk. And if you have questions that you want to ask of God, you write them down, and I'll pray over them, and if God gives me anything, I'll share it with you."

It was kind of like in the Bible, the story of Saul, whose family had lost track of a herd of their donkeys. He went out to look for them, couldn't find them, and the servant that was with him said, "There's a prophet over here. Why don't we go ask him?" They arrived at the prophet, and the prophet was Samuel. He said, "Look, your donkeys have returned home safely. Your father's now more concerned about you." And then he told Saul a number of things about his life. That's what this sort of felt like.

In 1987, he comes up to our church to hold a revival. When he got to the church, he asked the assistant pastor if he could go over to the restaurant and talk with me. I went, "Sure." He came over to the restaurant. We went in the back stock room, sat down, and he said, first things out of his mouth were, "Your aunt, I'm seeing an image of her in my mind right now, and she's grieving terribly."

He didn't know I had an aunt. She'd never been to church. I've never talked about her. And the weekend before, my aunt's husband, my uncle, had passed away from a heart attack. Nobody knew about it. No one had told this man this. So I'm sitting there going, "Wow, he's plugged in."

He said, "Why don't you ask me any question?" So I wrote down on a piece of paper for him to read, "What should we do with this restaurant?" because it was failing, and yet I was praying that God would find a buyer for it and restore my parents' life savings.

He closed his eyes, prayed about it, and when he opened his eyes, he had a pained look on his face, and he said, "Close it down." I couldn't believe the words because that wasn't how the deal was supposed to work. I was going to sacrifice and trust God, and it was all going to be okay in the end. My parents were going to be taken care of. That wasn't going to happen the way I thought it would.

Then I wrote the next question down: "Well, what do I do? And if we close it, go to college question mark." And now I'm 25 years old. People from where I grew up don't start college at 25. I had felt that my life from that point on was going to be managing a fast-food restaurant or something like that. Not what I set out or wanted to do as a kid. It felt like not what I was hoping for my life. So I said that, kind of wrote that, and it was sarcastic almost.

He closed his eyes and he said, "Yes. Yes to the college thing. And if you will, you will do beyond your wildest dreams."

So I later asked him, "Well, I'd had in the back of my mind always from a kid that I'd like to be a lawyer. If I go to college, I'd want to go to law school. And if I went to law school, I'd like to go to Harvard. Can I?"

And he closes his eyes and prays, and he goes, "You can."

From that moment on, I believed it. It happened exactly that way. We closed the restaurant down. My brothers went and found other jobs. My parents, to make a long story short, the family farm that my mom had been born on was sold five, seven years later. They did fine. Everything that was lost in that restaurant was restored. And I went on to college and then to law school at Harvard.

It was because God intervened in my life. Now, He intervened in an extraordinary way through an individual that I wish I could still go and ask him every time I have a question. But what I've found over time is that God does speak through individuals in our lives, but He also speaks into that part of our soul and spirit. And then it's the matter of trusting. "Okay, I guess I'm going to walk this out." And that's been my journey since, whether it was through law, through getting married, or doing all the different things that I've done in the 30 years since law school. It wasn't clear in the moment all the time; it required steps of faith, a lot of uncertainty, but over time the trust was built into the goodness of God through that experience.

Jason Montoya (21:40)

So what would you say about the dynamic of asking God for something and expecting him to respond and intervene in a particular way and him responding and intervening in a different way than you expect?

Jeff Feldhahn (21:59)

Yeah, it's a really hard one. Sometimes I have to realize—and I don't know if I'm moving the goalposts on this necessarily—but it's oftentimes only in retrospect that, you know, when I ask for something in a particular way and it didn't happen, it wasn't even remotely close, but what did happen then caused something else to happen and something else. And the place where I'm currently at is like, I'm grateful. I'm grateful I'm here, and I wouldn't necessarily be here in this point if what I'd asked for occurred.

The Bible does say that all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose, and that means all things. Even those things that I didn't really want to occur or happen, it brought me to the place where I can look back and go, "Thanks be to God that I am here in this place."

That's all just hard-fought trust. I don't minimize the points where people, when they pray and ask God for something, and it doesn't happen, and it hurts, and it hurts a lot, and they get resentful of God. I understand that and certainly have been there at points and seasons of my life. But I'd just say the grace of God kept me from staying there.

Jason Montoya (24:01)

Yeah, so if someone's hearing this, let's say they're not a Christian or they're agnostic, and they're like, "Yeah, this is interesting. What would be a next step for me? What would be a starting point for me to kind of take my own step towards exploring this for myself?"

Jeff Feldhahn (24:18)

I think there's an intellectual argument for God. We can go back to "Who created the universe?" There seems to be some evidence that it did have a beginning, and if that's the case, then I think we assume that it had a creator. Nothing doesn't come from nothing. If we can get to the intellectual side, there is plenty of good resources out there that, if you will investigate, there is a lot of smart people who have come to the conclusion that it makes logical sense that there was a creator of all that we see and experience.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that that creator is mindful of each of us individually. And that's where individual experience is critical to our well-being, our mental health. Explore and seek. Smart people smarter than me have come to the conclusion that the claims of Christianity and a personal God make the most sense.

So I would say, don't turn off your brain. Investigate. Stay with it. But then, at some point, there is almost—I don't know, I want to call it a leap—but there is a point where you have to just kind of invite whoever that is, that creator of the universe, to engage with you in your life. I believe that if you make that, provide that opening, that being will take you up on it.

Dog-gone it, there are just things that I can't explain outside of a loving, personal God doing things in my life that are inexplicable. My wife, Shanti, and I have been doing a study on mental health issues: are there things that people who have been particularly resilient, are there certain practices that they have in their lives that appear to strengthen their mental health and their sense of happiness and hope?

From the research that we've been doing, it absolutely does look like it. One that we were just talking about today is that people who have high hope—we had low, average, and high hope people in our surveys—the high hope people had characteristics and practices that were considerably different from the average and the low hope people.

I think all of us in life want to find peace and happiness and hopefulness. One of the things that we were just talking about today was the ability of connecting the dots of seeing a purpose in my life and of seeing a higher power, and particularly a personal God that's aware of who I am and is orchestrating events.

For example, one person we interviewed, who struggles with schizophrenia and is on medication, told this story. One day it was a particularly awful, awful day. She was in her car, stuck in slow traffic, super frustrating, and can't get where she wants to get on time. It's just adding to the hard day. As she stops at the supermarket, she encounters an old friend that she hadn't seen in years. This old friend shared some stories and things with her that altered the trajectory of that day for her. She said, "If I had not been stuck in traffic, I would have arrived at the supermarket 30 minutes earlier. I would never have seen that person."

She was willing to look back, even in those moments of frustration, and connect dots of perhaps how God was intervening in her life, even though it was a hard day. She says, "When I now face some of these hard things, I choose to wonder how God is using this." He's got a purpose and a plan. For me, that has been the cornerstone in my life. I look back at these things and go, "Okay, I don't really care for where I'm at right now, but I'm going to try that there's part of this purpose."

Jason Montoya (31:03)

Yeah, there's a lot of things that we can do, like whether it's telling the truth or choosing to do good things when it's not popular, but where there may actually be a negative consequence for doing those things. The idea of trusting God. The Sabbath is another one that comes to mind: trusting God, taking a day away of rest and release, and trusting that God's going to fill that day for us, He's going to work that day for us, so to speak. When we go the opposite direction, we're working every day all the time, and we're trying to control everything, we're essentially not trusting God in that behavior, which also doesn't let us see His ability to deliver on that trust, right?

Jeff Feldhahn (31:55)

That's correct. That's absolutely right. It is one of these that we all want a story of our lives to be kind of admirable or inspiring. The truth of the matter is without the struggle, we don't have the story. Yeah, I'd like things to be easy, but it's the struggle. Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own: "It's supposed to be hard. It's the hard that makes it great."

Jason Montoya (32:38)

So you're a Harvard graduate, a lawyer. Did you meet any women along the way here?

Jeff Feldhahn (32:44)

I've alluded to Shanti. We were in graduate school together. She wasn't at the law school at Harvard, but she was getting her master's, and we encountered one another in a Christian a cappella singing group. At Harvard Law School, there was an a cappella singing group. Now, I'm not particularly great at singing; Shanti, my wife, is. We got to know each other and spent a year kind of just hanging out and becoming friends.

Jason Montoya (33:30)

Do you stay in that area or do you guys leave?

Jeff Feldhahn (33:35)

After law school, I moved to New York. She still had another year to go at Harvard. I went to a big law firm, worked 100 hours a week at least. We ended up getting married when she graduated and spent the next four years really being ships that passed in the night. We had $135,000 of student loan debt between us. I was focused on, "Let's get this paid down," and I was afraid that I'd lose my job if I didn't work all those hours. Shanti and I would see each other honestly at church on Sunday. I mean, I would be gone before she got up, and I would be coming home after she went to bed. She worked on Wall Street, so she had a busy life too. It wasn't what we wanted for the rest of our lives.

Jason Montoya (34:42)

Didn't that dynamic kind of shift you guys to writing her first book?

Jeff Feldhahn (34:48)

What ended up happening is we both kind of developed some good analytic skills. After we decided that we were going to leave New York, we moved to Atlanta in 1998, where we currently are. She didn't have a job when we got down here. She had this strange experience that she felt God was asking her to write a book. She's a pretty sensible person and decided, "Okay, I'll do this, but I have no idea how to get something published. You're going to have to do that, Lord."

That was on a Monday, and this was going to be kind of a research-based book. On Wednesday, she had a job interview at a Christian-founded financial services firm here in Atlanta. The HR person said, "If we were to make you an offer, when could you start?"

Shanti answered by saying, "Well, you know, it's hard to say when I'd be able to start because I'm in the middle of a project right now," hoping that the woman thought that it was a consulting project. The woman asked, "Well, what's the project?" And Shanti goes, "I'm writing a book." The woman says, "Oh, what's the book about?" Shanti gives her the synopsis. The woman says, "Do you have anyone advising you on the publishing process?" Shanti says, "No, but I've been praying about that."

She says, "Well, one of our senior executives used to be in Christian publishing. Wait, I hear his voice outside my door." She grabs this guy, brings him in, introduces him to Shanti. He asks what the book is about, and she tells him, and he starts to laugh. She's thinking, "My gosh, this is awful." He says, "You're not going to believe this, but four days ago, I was sitting across at a breakfast with one of the largest Christian publishers. And they told me they wanted to write a book, publish a book on this exact topic. And if I were to run across someone doing that, would I let them know?"

Two weeks later, she has a book contract, writes the book, it becomes a best seller, and then that just kind of led into the other.

Jason Montoya (38:28)

So tell people what the name of the book is if they're interested.

Jeff Feldhahn (38:32)

It's not in print anymore. It was very time-specific. It was on, believe it or not, the Y2K issue. All the hype. Unfortunately, some of the hype was that as believers, we had to head for the hills, buy property up in the mountains, and all that. Shanti had this feeling that that just doesn't look like Jesus. If things are challenging in our world, aren't we as believers to be salt and light and not pull ourselves away? She wasn't making a prediction one way or another; she was using the research of, "If something bad happens, how can the church be a blessing?"

Jason Montoya (39:36)

Now, does that exist in another form now? If there's a crisis, here's how the church should respond?

Jeff Feldhahn (39:41)

Yeah, it's a great question. The very thing that we're talking about, I was talking about with mental health. There's a mental health crisis. That's what we've been researching. She just released a book three or four weeks ago. Essentially, it surveyed 2,000 pastors and pulled together best practices and what the church could do to step into the gap here.

As of right now, there's a need for 109,000 more counselors and therapists than currently exist in the United States. We're not going to graduate that many anytime soon. There is a huge need for people to receive some sort of care in this area. And couldn't the church, shouldn't the church be able to step in and not necessarily to deal with the truly difficult mental health issues, but for probably 80% of the people?

A lot of the people in therapists' practices don't really need to be there. They need a friend. They need someone who will love them and listen to them. And instead, because the therapists are crowded with lots of people who could otherwise be served by what the church does best, which is love. That is Shanti's idea: that the church should be the answer to these things that we truly believe is the answer.

Jason Montoya (41:40)

So do you feel like this book is kind of full circle from that first one?

Jeff Feldhahn (41:43)

Yeah, honestly, I hadn't thought of it until you just mentioned it, Jason. But it feels that way. All of the other books that we have written and researched were on kind of individual levels. "Me as a man, how do I understand women?" "She as a woman, how does she understand men?" "What are the things that the happiest couples do different than most married people?" Those types of research projects were always personal and individually focused. This one is more kind of macro, at a 30,000-foot view.

The beauty of what the church can do in this is that the church can do things that licensed therapists and counselors can't do. You might be in counseling, but the therapist isn't allowed to come over and have dinner with you on Thursday night and be your friend. They have ethical boundaries. But people in your church, you can go and have dinner, invite people over all the time. For most people, just being listened to and heard and seen comes back to what we talked about earlier: we all want to be known. We all want to know that God's aware of me. The prophetic man in my life told me that God was aware, saw me in that restaurant and saw something that, "Trust him, Jeff, he's with you." And that unlocked tremendous opportunities.

I watched a short little clip of Tim Keller. When we lived in New York, we went to his church, early days of Redeemer Presbyterian. I was always kind of non-denominational after coming to faith, but I loved the man. He was an amazing individual. A month ago I was watching a little clip of him. It was probably filmed in the last year or so of his life. He said, "You know, if the claims of the resurrection are true, if Jesus Christ came back to life and walked out of that tomb, it's going to be okay. I don't know what you're going through, but if that claim of the resurrection is true, it's going to be okay." Honestly, Jason, for me, that just boils it all down. Yeah, I might not like where I am right now. I might feel anxious. I might feel stressed. But it's going to be okay.

Jason Montoya (45:17)

Yeah, I agree. That's that foundational piece that carries us through the ups and the downs that are inevitable in this life.

Jeff Feldhahn (45:26)

Yeah, and we need it. To the person who doesn't have that faith perspective, it is harder. Our research showed, as far as the hopefulness, the demographic differences between the high hope and the low hope people. Of the high hope, I think it was somewhere in the 80% of those had a personal relationship with a being, a creator God that they viewed as being personal. Not a significant portion of the low hope people had that same belief.

Jason Montoya (46:13)

Yeah, and I think even as Christians who say we believe that Jesus resurrected, you kind of look around and you're like, "But do we really believe that?" That level of belief is maybe based on just how dark we've gone, how deep we've gone into the abyss.

Jeff Feldhahn (46:43)

Yeah, the new book that's being written right now is called The Habits of Hope. Those things that people who have shown themselves resilient through trauma and difficulty—what are their practices? Those are all just things that we begin to connect dots. We begin to remind ourselves of what we saw in the past. Therefore, I'm going to trust that going forward in the future, I can expect a good outcome. Again, it may not be the outcome that I'm exactly hoping for, but because God is good, I believe it'll be a good outcome.

Jason Montoya (47:30)

Yeah. So she writes her first book and starts the book in '98. She has to get it done before the turn of the millennia. Five years later after the millennium, you end up at First Baptist Atlanta, which is where we first meet. You and your wife are sharing your books. So how did you get roped into writing a book?

Jeff Feldhahn (47:50)

My goodness. I always love the research part of it. She wrote a book in 2004 called, For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men. It exploded. It became a best seller. It was helping women understand what's going on inside of men. As Shanti would say, "I thought I understood after 10 years of marriage, but I really didn't. There were things that I thought Jeff believed or thought this way, and I was just off." We found most women fall into that same category.

That book became a best seller, and the publisher ends up going, "This one is ripe for a sequel. We need to help men understand what's going on inside of women. And Jeff, it needs to be in your voice. You need to write it with Shanti." I was resistant, didn't want to do it. But that's how it started.

From there, after the book came out, I thought I was one and done. Instead, it turned out that people wanted to hear us in person together. That was honestly the second time I'd spoken in public with Shanti. Now we probably do together somewhere between 10 and 20 conferences a year. Shanti does a lot of women's conferences without me, but I would have never planned it, never had any desire for it, but it seems to be what the Lord said: "What do you have in your hand?" I guess I have a skill set of being able to ask questions and analyze things. That's what He's used.

Jason Montoya (50:12)

So, I'm a student of yours at this event. Then about 10 years later, we end up in a leadership program together called Lifework Leadership. And then just this year, we were both hiking this mountain called Yona Mountain. Unbeknownst to each other, you come down, I come up, and here we are intersecting once again.

Jeff Feldhahn (50:30)

Exactly. I'd followed you. We'd corresponded every now and again, but as far as face-to-face interaction, it had been a long time. It was remarkable. So then it's kind of like, "Huh, okay, well, is there some dots to connect, Lord? What do you want? This seems unusual. So let's just investigate." And so that's where we've been since then.

Jason Montoya (51:01)

The gravitational pull of the orbiting. When you kind of look back at all this, what is it telling you? What have you learned about living better, working smarter? How has this story you've been on shaped how you've kind of embraced and lived your life today?

Jeff Feldhahn (51:19)

I am an uber planner. I want to control all that I can control, particularly of me. What I've learned, I guess, through it is sometimes you can't aim it. Sometimes the last known kind of instruction you have from God, you kind of keep on that path until something changes or intersects.

I liken it to hiking. On sections of the Appalachian Trail, there are blazes that are painted on trees every certain distance apart that help you as a hiker realize that you're still on the right path. Every once in a while, I'll have my head down when I pass the blaze, and so I don't see it. And then maybe it's faded off of the next tree. I go a quarter of a mile and I'm going, "Am I still on the right path?"

I have to be regularly checking in with God. I don't make dramatic changes in my life. What ends up happening is I try to keep checking in. If I don't hear something that says, "Take a 90-degree turn here and do something different," I stick with the path that I'm on until I really feel that God is intersecting it in a meaningful way with a different sort of direction. I don't know where that goes other than, you got to be checking in. You got to be asking for guidance. Even in the silence, I'm assuming there's guidance.

Jason Montoya (53:37)

You have done a lot of research on these book projects. There's a lot of research that y'all do that costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. But stories are what people connect to. So how do you connect the dynamic between stories and data?

Jeff Feldhahn (54:02)

This is the part of it that Shanti is a little annoyed with, particularly in our conferences, because Shanti's brain works in these statistical models. She has a gift for it. But that can also cause people to think, "Oof, that's a little beyond me."

My brain works in stories. I learn from stories. I learn from the stories of the people that we interview before we conduct the surveys and the research that all inform that. So I get to, at the conferences, tell stories, which tend to be those things that people remember. You might remember one statistic; you're not going to remember 10. But you could remember three or four stories that you've heard. To me, it's the stories because numbers are numbers, but until I have something that kind of lodges it into my brain, it's just numbers.

Jason Montoya (55:18)

I kind of think of epoxy. Epoxy has the two components, the resin, and then you mix them together. I think of data and story as the two pieces, and you fuse them.

Jeff Feldhahn (55:25)

That's great! Totally stealing that, Jason.

Jason Montoya (55:31)

So it works, though. That's how, I've taken the course, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and that's one of the things. They teach you memorization techniques, and a lot of them are based on these visuals and stories because you can remember them, but if it's just random facts, they'll just fade away in seconds.

Jeff Feldhahn (56:01)

Yeah. So how does systems play a role in all this? You're a technology guy.

Jeff Feldhahn (56:10)

You know, I think there are systems that we can build in our own personal lives. When you're talking technology, think kind of user experience type stuff. When we're building software, we have to see how the person is going to engage with this and anticipate what they need, their next steps, all of that sort of stuff. You walk through it, and you create the systems for that. In our personal lives, I do think of them more as kind of our rhythms, but they're systems.

Jason Montoya (56:40)

Do you think there's a difference between a habit and a system, or are they pretty much intertwined?

Jeff Feldhahn (57:03)

I kind of lump them together. Whatever end point I want, getting there isn't just based on my want. I have to put into place the various things that help me get to that.

For example, physical fitness. I had this absolutely insane thought, and Shanti affirms me in this, that it really is insane. I wanted to do 100,000 pushups in 2025. How do you get to do 100,000 pushups? You have to have a certain number that you do every day to make it there. For me, that number was 300 pushups so that I had enough cushion.

I didn't do 300 pushups at one time, but what I did was I linked doing pushups to other things that I automatically always did in my day. This is from James Clear's Atomic Habits or Charles Duhigg's Power of Habit, and BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits. What I came to was, "Okay, I need to anchor this new behavior in something I'm automatically already doing."

I'm not wired to want to do pushups. I hate pushups. But for some reason, I had this goal. Every time I get up in the morning, I spend my quiet time reading the Bible. I'll read for five minutes, and then I go and do 50 pushups. I come back to my Bible, read for another period of time, do another 50 or so pushups, put the water on for my coffee. When the water boils in the kettle, I go and do another 50. It's this rhythm. It's a system, it's a habit, but as of right now, it's now become just kind of automatic.

If I want a better relationship with my wife, I need to talk to her. I need to spend time with her. We need to set aside time that we're just going to be together. We can't just want something unexpected to happen.

Jason Montoya (1:00:20)

That's interesting, because I think when people think of a big goal like that, it's overwhelming. The idea of breaking it into the smallest piece possible, a daily thing, is just transformative in terms of actually making progress.

Jeff Feldhahn (1:00:26)

Yep, it is for me. When you're doing software, you've got to have all of those small little pieces that this piece builds on this piece. You just need to do it that way. It can apply to all sorts of our personal relationships, our individual goals. But again, I have plenty of other goals that I haven't yet been able to crack the code on as far as the habit for it. I have some bad habits that I wish I could, even though I've read all those habit books, the bad habits sometimes still persist.

Jason Montoya (1:01:13)

So what other words of wisdom or insights would you like to share with us that you haven't yet had a chance to?

Jeff Feldhahn (1:01:22)

I don't feel like I ever have really any original thoughts. I pull them from others. I would love to share one. When I worked in New York, and going to Tim Keller's church, I was not happy. I was not excited with going to the office every day and struggling.

One of the things that in our early days of our marriage, Shanti and I, I made her listen to me as I read to her, The Lord of the Rings. That's how we spent our first year of marriage when we were in the same room together. There was a section in The Lord of the Rings that just stuck out to me. She knew how meaningful it was to me. So she typed it out, and I stuck it on the little bulletin board beside my computer monitor and would read it every day.

Our last Sunday in New York before we moved to Atlanta, the last sermon that I heard Tim Keller give in person, he was talking about The Lord of the Rings. He's a big fan, and he said, "And here's my favorite passage." It was the same passage that I'd been looking at by my computer monitor for the past four years.

This is the scene where Frodo and Sam are trudging through Mordor. They are trying to make their way, and they're trying to go to destroy the ring, and everything is conspiring against them.

The passage says:

At last Frodo could go no further. They had climbed up a narrow shelving ravine, but they still had a long way to go before they could even come in sight of the last craggy ridge. "I must rest now, Sam, and sleep if I can," said Frodo. He looked about, but there seemed nowhere, even for an animal to crawl in this dismal country. At length, tired out, they slunk under a curtain of brambles that hung down like a mat over a low rock face. There they sat and made such a meal as they could, keeping back the precious lembas for the evil days ahead. They ate half of what remained in Sam's bag of Faramir's provision, some dried fruit and a small slip of cured meat, and they sipped some water. They had drunk again from the pools in the valley, but they were thirsty again. There was a bitter tang in the air of Mordor that dried the mouth. When Sam thought of water, even his hopeful spirit quailed. Beyond the Morghai, this portion of Mordor, there was the dreadful plain of Gorgoroth, the Cross. "Now you go to sleep first, Mr. Frodo," he said. "It's getting dark. I reckon this day is nearly over." Frodo sighed and was asleep almost before the words were spoken. Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo's hand. And there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or a foot. Far above the Ephel Dúath, that's a mountain range, far above the Ephel Dúath in the west, the night sky was still dim and pale. There, peeking among the cloud rack above a dark tour, high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart as he looked up out of the forsaken land and hope returned to him. For like a shaft clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end, the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever beyond his reach.

To me, that is the Tim Keller quote: It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. This present darkness, this present struggle. It's going to be okay.

Jason Montoya (1:05:49)

Well, thank you, Jeff, so much for sharing your life with us today.

Jeff Feldhahn (1:05:52)

Thank you, Jason. I hope it was helpful to someone.

Jason Montoya (1:05:56)

I'm Jason Scott Montoya, and this has been an episode of the Share Life Podcast. We'll see you on the next one.