00:07 – Barnabas (Host)
Hey, welcome to the Curious Curmudgeon podcast. I’m Barnabas Piper, here with my co-curmudgeon, Adam Read, and since this is a brand new podcast, yet to be launched, we thought it would make sense to tell you a little bit about ourselves, the people who, should you stick with this podcast you will be hearing from with some regularity, and then about the show, like what do we intend to do? What are we trying to accomplish? Why did we title it this weird name, those kinds of things. Yeah, so, Adam, to help listeners get to know you, I have three questions for you just to kind of cover different parts of life. First question who do you live with and where? 

00:41 – Adam (Host)
Ah, okay, well, I live in Forest, Virginia, which is right outside Lynchburg, right near Liberty University, so that’s pretty much how people landmark our area. I live there with my wife and our three kids. So we’ve been married almost 21 years here, coming up in May, and my wife’s name is Trisha. We have three kids a senior in high school, Audrey. We’ve got a freshman in high school, Maddy, and then a 12-year-old named Titus. So we’re keeping pretty busy. We got the three of them keeping us hopping. 

01:07 – Barnabas (Host)
Do you have any other living beings in your home? 

01:11 – Adam (Host)
Well, that’s yes. We have two dogs, okay, little ankle biters, one’s Penny and one’s Nickel. Penny because she has copper spots and Nickel because he has, like, silver spots. And then my wife got into this chicken thing. So, yeah, they don’t live in the house, they have their own little house, right? But yeah, we’ve got. I think we got five chickens right now. 

01:34 – Barnabas (Host)
So you spent like $800 to get cheap eggs. 

01:36 – Adam (Host)
Well, let’s not go there, because that’s-. 

01:38 – Barnabas (Host)
Is that a point of? 

01:39 – Adam (Host)
contention. It’s fun for her, it’s a hobby for her, and so I love that, because she actually enjoys it, and so it’s totally worth it but it does not pay for eggs, I’ll just tell you that much, absolutely All right. 

01:48 – Barnabas (Host)
Second question, especially given the cost of chickens and eggs, how do you pay the bills? 

01:53 – Adam (Host)
Not with the chicken eggs. Yeah, I work for Positive Alternative Radio as the Director of Digital Technology, so I oversee apps, websites, any digital infrastructure for a lot of the forward-facing stuff that people see regarding our network of stations. 

02:10 – Barnabas (Host)
All right. So, listeners, if you are aware of this podcast, Adam likely had something to do with that, with his directorship of digital technologies. Well, that sounds really special. Thank you, I know. Thank you for all of your work on this. I’m very grateful. I feel really All right. Third question for you what do you do on the weekends? 

02:26 – Adam (Host)
Well, usually Saturday I mean with the age of my kids there’s often something going on that we do with them. So, you know, do an event with them or whatever. I do like to make stuff with my hands or like build stuff, so that’s always fun. But Sunday church, it is a priority in our house, so we’re always there, provided everyone’s healthy, and I help teach the discipleship community at our church and also just love being able to go and worship through music and hearing the word and being taught. Awesome, all right. Well, now it’s your turn. All right, you wrote these questions. 

02:57
So, back to you. You got to be prepared. Who do you live with and where? 

03:02 – Barnabas (Host)
I live with my wife, lauren, and our two daughters and then one child on the way, exciting. I was going to say gender yet to be determined, but in this day and age that’s a very contentious statement. Gender yet to be seen and discovered by us. Discovered. Gender yet to be seen and discovered by us okay, yeah. 

03:17
The Lord has done what he intended. So, yes, one on the way. So I also have a senior in high school and then a freshman in high school who just got her learner’s permit. Ooh, big day. So, yeah, lots going on in our home. And then baby on the way and then three dogs, oh, wow. 

03:32
Yeah, so two little ankle biters and then one real canine. Okay, what’s the real canine? It’s a husky border collie mix. So my wife and I got married in 2020. It’s my second marriage. That’ll probably come up later in the podcast as we share various parts of our stories and so she brought with her two little dogs. I brought with me one big dog, and while we have merged our lives very, very well, the dogs still do not get claimed quite the same way as everything else, like we share everything in life and not so much the dogs. So that is, I wouldn’t say it’s a point of contention, but it is a point of difference. 

04:10 – Adam (Host)
Let’s say what are the dog’s names? 

04:12 – Barnabas (Host)
The real dog is Dolly. 

04:14 – Adam (Host)
That’s a real dog name right there. Yeah, so also dog. 

04:17 – Barnabas (Host)
Dolly. I didn’t mention where we live. We live in the suburbs of Nashville. We got the dog while living in the suburbs of Nashville and so named after Dolly Parton, naturally leading presidential candidate for this year in many people’s hearts, if not on the ballot. And then Imagination Library. Right, yeah, that’s right. Luna and Darcy are the two little dogs named after Luna Lovegood from Harry. 

04:39 – Adam (Host)
Potter, and then. 

04:40 – Barnabas (Host)
Mr Darcy from. Is that Pride and Prejudice? That’s Pride and Prejudice Because that tells you a little bit about my wife’s literary preferences as well and her hobbies Very good. 

04:52 – Adam (Host)
So how do you pay the bills then? 

04:54 – Barnabas (Host)
Yes, I pay the bills. I don’t have to pay for any chickens, but with three dogs the vet bills are occasionally high. Um, I’m an assistant pastor at our church, Emmanuel Church, which is just west of downtown Nashville, so I’m part of the preaching team, do some teaching there, pastoral care, overseer small groups, ministries, etc. That is my full-time day job. And you know, typical of pastoral ministry I say day job, but it’s really kind of an all-time day job. And you know, typical of pastoral ministry, I say day job, but it’s really kind of an all hours job. So you know there’s a certain amount of intentionality that has to go into carving out the times when I’m not working, because it could easily fill up many, many times. 

05:31 – Adam (Host)
Yeah, so I’m assuming, because you’re a pastor, that’s part of what you do on weekends. 

05:35 – Barnabas (Host)
It is. It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg question. Come back around to that theme, because part of the reason I am a pastor is because one of the things that I do on the weekends is participate in church. So I was a member at Emanuel for a couple of years before being called as a pastor and got very involved in teaching and leadership and small groups and the community there. Saturdays, though, are largely set aside for hopefully as little on the calendar as possible, because life is very full. But love to read, love to watch sports. 

06:02
I grew up in Minnesota, so I’m still a Minnesota sports fan which tells you a little bit about why I’m a curmudgeon, because I grew up in a place with minimal daylight for a good portion of the year, and then sports teams that are a perpetual disappointment, but yeah. So watching sports, reading, hanging out with my family currently finishing up a seminary degree, so a fair amount of my reading is that and studying. And then Sundays are, yes, largely dedicated to church, which, while it’s my job, it’s also a thing that we just prioritize as a family we love to participate in. It’s a sweet time. 

06:33 – Adam (Host)
Yeah, now we’re only seven minutes into this podcast and I’m wondering if we’re going to be able to continue it. If you’re a Vikings fan and I’m a Packers fan. 

06:42 – Barnabas (Host)
Well, I have it on good authority that you it was like a prenuptial agreement that you became a Packers fan so that your wife would accept you. Did I understand that correctly? 

06:53 – Adam (Host)
It certainly didn’t hurt anything for me to become a Packers fan. 

06:56 – Barnabas (Host)
Okay, so my take on that is that you’re a fake Packers fan. So you know, I grew up in the adjacent state to Packerdom. 

07:05 – Adam (Host)
Yes, you did. 

07:06 – Barnabas (Host)
And real Packers fans. I have to really rely on the Holy Spirit to be able to love mine enemies. But you seem like sort of a kind of a half-baked Packers fan. 

07:18 – Adam (Host)
Well, you know, I’ll take that into consideration. We’ll just see where it goes. 

07:22 – Barnabas (Host)
I don’t mean that as an insult. I would say that that is that’s generally moving you towards favorable In your eyes, yeah right. Well, be whatever you need to be to be favorable at home. In my eyes, you’re not a real Packers fan. 

07:34
So before this thing goes completely off the rails and we’re. You know it comes to fisticuffs. You know mid intro episode. Let’s stop there. So, listeners, that is a little bit about us during the course of the show. I’m sure we will share a lot more here. Podcast called the Curious Curmudgeon it tells you very little about what this is and why we’re doing it. So Simon Sinek famously said start with why in his book. That should have been a TED Talk, and so let’s pose that question first. Adam, why are we doing this podcast? What’s kind of the purpose behind it? 

08:16 – Adam (Host)
Yeah, the goal is to encourage to just share our lives with people. We’ve both talked and we both have situations that we look back on and we’re like man I could really learn from my mistakes here and hopefully have and there’s stuff coming up in life like our kids’ graduations and things like that that I look at and I’m like I don’t really know how to handle this yet, but Trying to seek out wisdom in it and trying to seek out how to live it in a way that honors God and that’s obviously loving to our families, and trying to implement the wisdom of God into our lives is our goal, and so that’s kind of the curious part of what we’re talking about here. What about the curmudgeon part? 

08:56 – Barnabas (Host)
The curmudgeon part is more. I don’t think either of us can escape that. Yeah, well. So I mean like, well, if you wouldn’t have worn those suspenders today. 

09:10
Look if I can get my pants up over my navel, it’s a good day. So no, the curmudgeon part is simply that I think there’s two parts to this. One is just our personalities, and not to use those as an excuse to be cranky, but also just there’s a lot of sort of faux wisdom in the world and a lot of sort of out of touch positivity and live in your best life now and like follow these seven steps and everything’s going to come together for you. That I just sort of go at, which is a particularly curmudgeonly response. And so you get off my lawn. 

09:38
Yeah, I take that positive sunshine and roses nonsense somewhere else so this isn’t a pessimistic podcast by any means. 

09:45
I mean, we wanted to be encouraging, we wanted to be hopeful, but we wanted to be like realistic and grounded, and then also just like there are some things in this life that are just they’re just meant to be made fun of a little bit and and just sort of like snorted at, and so we need to be able to build a little bit of that in so that we’re not just sort of relentlessly annoying ourselves by being you know, by certainly by being fake, and then also by being falsely upbeat about something that we go. That’s just ridiculous. 

10:12
Like we need to be able to call a spade a spade. You know what? 

10:14 – Adam (Host)
I mean. 

10:15 – Barnabas (Host)
So a couple of things, listeners, just to kind of give you a sense of where we’re going with this. So this is an intro episode. This one doesn’t even count. This one’s for free, the bonus. 

10:23 – Adam (Host)
Yeah, pre-season. 

10:24 – Barnabas (Host)
Technically the whole thing’s for free, but this one’s for free-free, like it’s not even, it’s not even numbered, and so we plan on doing a and plan being a loose statement on doing an eight episode season, and the season we want to have a theme. So like Adam’s going to do the theme song, he’s probably going to play it on a ukulele or something. 

10:43 – Adam (Host)
Here comes Barnabas here. No, that’s a Christmas tune. 

10:46 – Barnabas (Host)
That is not acceptable this time of year. No, so there goes that curmudgeon, basically just trying to a thread that runs through all of them. And the theme for this first season is major life changes, because us, being 40 something year old men, have been through many, we anticipate many more. We talked about having seniors in high school. That’s like a pending major life change. Um, and so we just want to address major life changes that most of us you listeners us have experienced or will experience and to approach them with some wisdom, some winsomeness, some encouragement, hopefully some clear thinking. Yeah, winsomeness, some encouragement, hopefully some clear thinking. 

11:24
There’s so much in the world that just sort of takes on new things with platitudes or with kind of false bravado and we just want to come at things with level-headedness and biblical wisdom. 

11:33
Coming at it from the perspective of Proverbs, is considered wisdom literature and Ray Orland, who’s the founding pastor at the church where I now serve and a man I respect greatly, he described wisdom as living with godly skill, so the idea of having the mind of Christ, the mind of the Lord, and then applying it well in life. So we want to do as much as we can pursue that and share that and then learn from one another, because Adam and I have not talked at length about most of the subjects we’ll be talking about, so we’ll be able to glean some wisdom from one another. We’ll also have some recurring segments in each episode, so there’s going to be each episode will be a topic, a turning point in life, and then some recurring segments that allow for a little dose of curmudgeonliness and hopefully a little shot of curiosity to spark the imagination and kind of get us wondering about some things. And, you know, throw the occasional curveball in there too. You know, kind of coming out of left field, what’s happening here? 

12:24 – Adam (Host)
Yeah. 

12:28 – Barnabas (Host)
And that’s kind of the gist of the show and what we hope listeners will be encouraged and be invited to the table. 

12:31 – Adam (Host)
Yeah, pull up a chair. 

12:32 – Barnabas (Host)
Yeah, the idea of, like man, it would be great to grab a beverage and have this conversation with those guys and think through some of these things together. That’s the tone we want to strike, not lording it over anybody. 

12:43 – Adam (Host)
We are certainly not experts in any of the stuff we’re talking about, that’s for sure. 

12:46 – Barnabas (Host)
So that is the Curious Curmudgeon podcast in a nutshell. This has been the first sort of episode of this podcast. 

12:55 – Adam (Host)
Quasi-episode. 

12:56 – Barnabas (Host)
Yes, and we hope it’s been encouraging already listeners. We hope it’s been a little bit thought-provoking probably not this one so much and at least a little bit entertaining. Thanks so much for listening and we hope you will enjoy season one of this podcast. 

13:08 – Adam (Host)
Go Pack.