Flocknote Founder and CEO Matt Warner Interviews with Matthew Kelly
Mathew Kelly:
Hi, I'm Matthew Kelly and welcome to Profoundly Human today. I'm sitting down with Matthew Warner, great to be with you.
Mathew Warner:
It's fantastic to be here, Matthew.
Mathew Kelly:
Welcome to Cincinnati.
Mathew Warner:
Thank you. Yeah, it's good to be here.
Mathew Kelly:
Important questions to start with, are you coffee drinker?
Mathew Warner:
I am a coffee drinker. I didn't grow up a coffee drinker, it actually wasn't until I was an adult that I started drinking coffee and that was mostly because of my wife. So I'm not your normal coffee drinker that has to have coffee or a certain amount of coffee every day. I'm usually fine if I don't have it but for me it's more of a ritual now so it's part of sitting down with my wife and we usually, every morning, sit down and have a cup of coffee together and it's a great way to start the day together. And so yeah, for me, it's more that ritual of slowing down and enjoying something or company or something else. Yeah.
Mathew Kelly:
So that sounds like a very ideally peaceful thing sitting down with your wife in the morning to have a cup of coffee but I know that you have six children under the age of 13 and you run a business with 40 employees. So, how's that work?
Mathew Warner:
Yeah, good question. Not very often but well, I say it works just doesn't maybe work as peacefully as it sounded when I said it but we pretty much every day do that. If we're in a good routine and we're up early before the kids get up then that's the best way to do it where we can greet them as they start the day. But more often than not probably they're the ones waking us up or they're up early running around the house so it's a little more hectic but we still manage to do it. We try to have breakfast as a family. Now that the kids are a little older, some of them can make their own breakfast and so that's nice.
Mathew Kelly:
Awesome.
Mathew Warner:
And you can sit down and enjoy yours and a cup of coffee.
Mathew Kelly:
What about food? What is your favorite food?
Mathew Warner:
Favorite food? I like a lot of different kinds of foods. I think the food I love the best is the stuff when you prepare it yourself so, whatever that is. And especially if you've grown it yourself or raised it yourself which we try to do a little bit in our house and there's just a different level of gratitude and enjoyment. It always tastes better if you grow it yourself and you put the work in, of course. And I think the cultural dimension of food is always really interesting to me. I think there's a tendency today to reduce it to just the nutrition into my body or the calories I need or something that makes my mouth happy but I think including the cultural dimension of it and the occasion you might be having it for, the preparation that goes into it inspires a really healthy gratitude and appreciation for it that I love so that's the food I love best.
Mathew Kelly:
Now you mentioned growing it yourself and I was re-reading your book last night and one of the things in your bio, your bio ends with Matthew, his wife and their children hang their hats in Texas where they aspire to be simple farmers and good neighbors. What is the extent of the farming?
Mathew Warner:
Yeah, aspires is a key word there. It's a journey for sure. We've made quite a bit of progress since then actually. So we've got lots of chickens which we'll raise for meat and for eggs. We've got ducks, we've got pigs now, we've got beehives, we're putting in a fish pond and stocking that with fish right now which is really exciting. We do a lot of vegetable gardening as well so it fits and starts sometimes like getting it going and there's seasons where it's great and there's seasons where life gets busy with the kids or work and things like that. So we're trying to gradually transition to where it's more consistent part of our life but we're doing a pretty good job now and really enjoy it.
Mathew Kelly:
What attracted you to that or what is the ethos or philosophy behind that for you?
Mathew Warner:
I guess I'm an idealist and, to me, farming is such an ideal way to work. It provides for so many needs but it's also a work that is physically healthy, done in certain ways. So you're not sitting in a desk all day and doing unhealthy activities. So it takes care of your physical activity, being healthy, you're raising healthy food, it inspires that gratitude. It's work that you can do with your family which I love. So much of what I do now, my work, is at a computer and an office. And I love getting to work with my kids and with my wife and doing that together and so farming and gardening is a really fun way to do that. You can do it across all different ages, our one year old's out toddling around chasing a chicken and the 13 year old's feeding pigs and we're digging weeds in the garden or whatever and it's something you can all do together so I love that part of it.
Mathew Warner:
And I think I love being out in nature, there's something about... I love cities, I love technology, I have a technology company but when you're surrounded by it all the time, you have this tendency to say, "Look how clever we are as humans." And when you're out in nature, it's a different response, it's one of just gratitude and awe and wonder at God, at the creator, that's something I could never do and so it's a wonderful place to be. And I feel like spending more time out there has just been really good for our family, really good for our kids, keeps us active, use your hands to make things and do things. And so it's such a good balance, I think, to so many other parts for our lives, mine included, that you spent a lot of time on a computer or in an office or at a screen or things like that.
Mathew Kelly:
Got it. What about favorite movie?
Mathew Warner:
Gladiator.
Mathew Kelly:
Gladiator?
Mathew Warner:
Yes sir. Gladiator.
Mathew Kelly:
Russell Crowe, great Australian.
Mathew Warner:
Yeah. I still think it's the best epic style film and it's just got so many good themes to it. Of course, what we do here echoes in eternity, what we do in life echos in eternity is just a great central message to it. But it's also a story of a farmer which most people don't think about. It was the farmer who became a general and a general who became a slave and a slave who became a gladiator and a gladiator who defied an emperor. But it starts with him already in battle as a general but he was a farmer who left his life, his comfortable life, Bilbo leaving in The Hobbit where he is called out of his comfortable Shire and called to some great adventure that providence has him on.
Mathew Warner:
And it was similar here in, of course, a man of virtue and he grows in virtue throughout the movie. But just so many good themes and I like the power dynamics of government and the mob and the mob rule and you just see that full on display there but it applies to every social group, government, whatever it is, of the influence of the mob but then the power to control the mob being how you're able to gain power in so many different ways. So yeah, so many good elements of it, still my favorite.
Mathew Kelly:
Great movie. What is happening in your life at the moment that you're excited about?
Mathew Warner:
Well, Flocknote is continuing to grow really quickly so that's our software that we build for parishes and churches around the world to communicate better and manage their relationships with their members and grow their flock and evangelize and do all these meaningful things. So that continues to be a really meaningful part of my life and a challenge that God's called me to figure out how to manage the growth of that and do it continually better. But certainly right now, my kids are at those ages where you feel like time's just flying by and they're growing up so fast so continually I'm just trying to focus on being present and just not missing a moment and not wasting it. So there's a lot of emphasis on that, spending time with the family, doing projects together, doing work together with the kids during these really precious years.
Matthew Kelly:
So the children are obviously a big part of your life at this moment, how is fatherhood different to what you expected?
Mathew Warner:
That's a good question. I don't know how much I thought about it beforehand, it's so different. It's certainly hard, but I think I've grown to appreciate just how helpful marriage and children are to just becoming more virtuous, how important they are to that. As humans without it, I admire people that can do it without having those kind of challenges in your life that are just demands that you can't choose not to take care of. So in that sense, it makes it less virtuous, I guess, because I have to do it but growing and virtue through just serving your kids and taking care of them and their needs has been a great blessing.
Mathew Warner:
Very difficult and it continually forces you to reprioritize your life. You can't do everything you want to do and you realize your limits really quickly and so you have to really discern what's important and say no to the rest and that's a difficult thing.
Mathew Kelly:
What was your childhood like?
Mathew Warner:
I had a great childhood. Wonderful family, amazing parents, hardest workers I know. I remember growing up with a lot of imaginative play, imagining I was a ninja in the woods and all those things kids do. I feel like I had a really good childhood in that sense. I love music, we always had lots of music playing in the house. My parents were very musical so that was a big part of my life too and I really got into that later on. We were big, do-it-yourself family so my mom's very, very good at anything crafty. So she's always doing artistic things and making things, different crafts, and we got to do those with her and my dad always preferred do things himself and build things himself and so we were always working on some big project as a family building an addition to the house or a garage or fences or whatever the case may be.
Mathew Warner:
I really appreciated that in retrospect, the time we got to spend working together on those things and learning how to work hard, learning to appreciate the effort that goes into things.
Mathew Kelly:
When you're parenting on a day to day basis, how do your parents influence that? How do you see them in your parenting?
Mathew Warner:
My dad is I think a great example of what I want to be as a man in terms of being strong and tough but having such a soft, gentle heart. So that's something I think about a lot is trying to be both gentle and strong as a man and he's a great example of that. And my mom, the word that comes to mind most is just service. She's just such a servant, she's just always taking care of other people and volunteering. She's very active now that she doesn't have to take care of her kids directly anymore. She's taking care of nuns and elderly in the retirement homes or wherever that are lonely and don't get to get out as much and things like that, that's just how she spends her day and when they see her, they just light up.
Mathew Warner:
And so seeing the value and gift that is to people when you can be that person, I definitely learn that from her and always inspired by that.
Mathew Kelly:
Obviously, you're a pioneer of technology for churches. When you started Flocknote, you first started going to churches and saying, "Hey, we've got this idea, you should do this." What do you remember about that?
Mathew Warner:
Well, when I first started doing this and it was something that started before Flocknote then turned into Flocknote but I was still an engineer at Lockheed Martin at the time but had gotten really passionate about my faith and entrepreneurially minded and so I was wanting to do something and started coming up with tools that I could use to help parishes better reach their people and communicate what they need to communicate. And certainly when you first approach them, this was the time, 2007, 2008, 2009. Facebook groups had just started but My Space was probably still slightly more popular than Facebook was when we first started. So it was that kind of era but everything was free so the new model was advertising based free software.
Mathew Warner:
And so the expectation too for them was that everything would be free so getting them to pay anything was very difficult. They didn't have really a software budget in those days. They might have had some database tool they used in the back end but for the most part, they spent way more on donuts each week than they do on software tools that would help them in these ways. So it was really creating a new market in a sense especially the software as a service model. It was very early and so it took a lot of work at first to just convince them that this was valuable. That it's something that is worth paying for, that you're going to get more value out of it than you're going to pay into it. And it took years to work on that and create the market almost but it was worth it and it was a problem I was really passionate about solving so I stuck with it.
Mathew Kelly:
At what point did you realize this is going to work?
Mathew Warner:
Well, there's something about the moment somebody first pays you to do something and then they keep paying you and you go, "Okay, we did something that works." Which is an important lesson for entrepreneurs. It's an important moment, I think, when you create something that's really valuable and people agreed it was valuable, it wasn't just something you thought was a good idea. So that moment and then it's just a matter of multiplying it which is another problem to solve but it's possible. So that happened very early on but for many years, we were so small that I always assumed that some big player, some big company, would come in and just copy what we were doing and then steal all the business and we wouldn't make it because we were boot strapped all the way through really and just grew at the pace we could grow based on the clients we were getting.
Mathew Warner:
And that was very slow at first and it snowballs over the years and gets more and more and more which was fantastic. But early on, we were very limited in resources. I was by myself for the first three years and my wife was still working at the time at her job. She's a writer at a marketing agency and we had had two kids. I was at home with two babies and trying to run the company and I was the programmer and the support and the sales all by myself. And it definitely was in question all those years of whether this would really work or not. But I knew that it was a problem that needed solving and I knew it was worth solving and so I figured if I stuck at it long enough that it would work and turned out that it worked, it was just a lot slower than you think.
Mathew Warner:
You expect it to go a lot faster and it's just grinding it out, year after year, a little bit more, a little bit more. Until again, 10 years later you're looking at it and it's like, "Wow, okay. We made it." It took four or five years before I was like, "Okay, I feel really good about this." But we were still very tight, we were always spending money as soon as we got it or if we knew we were going to get it next month, we were spending it now but it wasn't until probably eight, nine, 10 years into it where it was like, "Okay, this was all worth it." This was worth not saving as much money as I should have for a long time and quitting my job and not making anything for many years and all those kinds of things. It was finally worth it in that and mostly because it was really helping churches do something really significant in the world.
Mathew Kelly:
So when you decide to quit your job at Lockheed Martin, what did the people around you, what did the people in your life think about that life choice?
Mathew Warner:
I mean, I think it was something none of them would've done, not many of them would've done. It was really good job, great company, great people I was working with and I really enjoyed the people I worked with there and even a lot of the work I did was really interesting stuff and very challenging. But yeah, at the time, the idea that you would quit your job when you have that great of a job, we're just taught that that's not something you do until you got the next thing lined up or you do the responsible thing so it was definitely a leap of faith in that sense. And it was also right after I got married so that was another dynamic that was interesting because essentially I was working 50 hour a week at Lockheed Martin and then I'd come home and I'd work 30 hours a week on this other project.
Mathew Warner:
And once I got married, my wife was like, "I want to actually spend time with you so why don't you quit your job?" And luckily she was such a blessing and very supportive and she's the one that told me to do it. She's like, "You need to just do this full time and give it a shot." But it was a good lesson to think through and a lot of times I think we don't take risks because we don't define them very well and they remain these ambiguous things you just never do or that's too risky. But when you find out, "Well, what's the worst that really happened?" And when I told the people I was leaving Lockheed, they were like, "Well, if you want to come back, just let us know." I'm like, "Okay, it's good to know." Right? You can get another job one day.
Mathew Warner:
But what's the worst that happens? It fails and I got to find another job. Luckily, I'd saved a lot of money up to that point and been smart financially and all that and didn't have any debt and my wife was working at the time. So, all those things came together as a huge blessing for us to make it possible. But when you add all that up, you go, "It's really not that risky. It seems crazy to a lot of people but it's not." And there's a bias built into what you're already doing that you think there's no risk to it just because it's the status quo. But people get laid off from jobs all the time, there's risk staying where you're at and so you got to remember that too. It's not a choice between no risk and risk, it's two different types of risks and making those decisions. It was a little challenging but I had a lot of support.
Mathew Kelly:
Some great insights there. So today Flocknote serves 10,000 churches about 40 employees. What is the most satisfying part of that?
Mathew Warner:
The people I get to work with, for sure. Definitely the core passion for me was to help the church get the message out. I mean, that was something that I realized in my generation, people falling away from the church and they didn't know what they were leaving and it hadn't been communicated to them what they were leaving. And so for me, that was just at the heart of this thing but then it was also just practical things. I was getting more and more involved at my own parish and they just couldn't tell people that stuff was happening. They were doing a lot of great things but they just weren't telling anybody about or they didn't have a means to just get the message directly to their people like they needed to. So, that seemed like a pretty straightforward problem to try to solve and that's where we tackled it from and so certainly that core passion of solving the church's problem, that continues to be very satisfying and we're continuing to make a huge impact, a bigger and bigger impact in the church, inside the Catholic church and outside the Catholic church and just helping people build their flocks, build relationships in their communities and spread the gospel and go after that lost sheep which is core to our mission at Flocknote. But secondarily to that, over time, my passion for building a great company has equaled that at least. I just get to work with the most amazing people and I think God's blessed us with this amazing mission together. And just the friendships that we build as a team, to see these people blossom into just what their potential is I think, which is just so great is just so rewarding.
Mathew Warner:
And we've continued something I got very passionate about was employee ownership. And within our market, as most software as a service markets are right now, there's a lot of investment and acquisitions and all that stuff. And there's good parts of that and there's been some negative effects to that I think too in the church space but it was just something I became more and more passionate about, I love Chesterton, I love distributism. I love the idea that society works better when property is more widely distributed in general and I love Catholic social teaching on this. The Encyclicals by Pope Leo the 13th, rerum novarum speaks a lot about the rights of labor and workers and this relationship between capital and labor, between the owners and the workers and that there's this ideal and again, I'm an idealist.
Mathew Warner:
That when the worker is the owner that all of these other synergies start to happen, that all these interests align and they're not competitive anymore. Of course you see that in the extremes where unions have served a necessary purpose in a lot of cases but you also see the worst of that when you have a body divided against itself, you have the owners fighting at the expense of employees and employees doing things sometimes that even harm the company itself to try to look out for their own interests. And that's just such an unfortunate situation, I think. And so when you bring those things together, which I'd love to just see more in general in industry, beautiful things happen. So that was one of my favorite things we've done so far at Flocknote was launch our ESOP, our Employee Stock Ownership Plan and everyone in our team becomes a part owner of the company.
Mathew Warner:
My favorite award, we give awards out in our company every year, and the team got me my favorite award yet which was co-owner of the year award. And so I went from being the full owner to being a co-owner and it is my favorite word I've gotten yet because this whole journey we've been on just to be able to go on it fully together where we're sharing the burden of this... It's a burden too, it's a responsibility that comes with ownership but of course you get the benefit of the fruits of all of that as well as you develop it. And so it's been really amazing to see our team just light up at that opportunity to become an owner, a part owner, a co-owner of the company. But the way they treat it now, it's theirs and we're doing this together and it's just an amazing thing so I'm super excited about that and where that's taken us.
Mathew Kelly:
Some of your team have one of the most innovative titles I've heard in a long time and that is, they are happiness engineers.
Mathew Warner:
That's right. Happiness engineers.
Mathew Kelly:
What is a happiness engineer?
Mathew Warner:
So our happiness engineer is our version of customer support but we see it as a role much bigger than just solving some technical problem that somebody's having or a support question to fix an issue that a customer's having. We really see ourselves and have become great partners with all the churches that we work with. And so a happiness engineer is there to look beyond just the technical problem they might be helping a customer with and really try to understand their goals, what they're trying to achieve, to look for ways that maybe there's things they're not taking advantage of that we could help them do better just through our experience working with 10,000 churches. There's a lot of accumulated wisdom and best practices we've been able to share and so just taking that opportunity to go deeper in the relationship with each person. So that just deserved a title more than just customer service, this was a bigger vision for that relationship.
Mathew Kelly:
When you have a job as a happiness engineer, I mean, the title itself creates an expectation, right? And do you have trouble sometimes? The customers have an expectation of the happiness engineers that is unrealistic or impossible to meet?
Mathew Warner:
I mean, every once in a while, you get really grumpy people that you just can't make happy. But I don't know, our happiness engineers are amazing. I mean, they're the kind of people that they're really special people but they take that, you get someone that's just having a terrible day, maybe they're really angry... You get a lot of people in customer service that think the only way to get attention is to complain or escalate the issue or make threats or you'll be angry. And so they're just used to that and so I love... Our happiness engineers take that as a chance to completely disarm them, I think, and be something very different than what they're used to hearing and they find somebody. I mean, 99.9% of the time that person is won over by the end and we have incredible ratings in terms of our customer service because of that. But yeah, they're very special people in that but it takes a certain personality that enjoys that and has the energy to do that and do it all day long.
Mathew Kelly:
So, when you think about this mission you have around communication, you think about the church whose primary mission is communication, why are we so bad at it?
Mathew Warner:
That's a good question. So, you're right, communication is intimately tied up to communion, to community. You can't have communion and community without communication and I think that's at the heart of the crisis in the church today is a breakdown in communication. Like I mentioned already, I think that there's so many people leaving the church. Many times, maybe most of the time, it just has not been communicated to them what they're leaving and that's on us. I think that we need to figure out why that's not happening. I think some of the things at the core is we've forgotten what's at stake and there's something big at stake but it doesn't always feel that way.
Mathew Warner:
When you walk into a church and the kinds of things we send out don't always feel like there's a lot at stake. And so I think people's commitment level, I think there's something human in us. We want to be challenged, people engage with all kinds of things, we see it everywhere. When there's something big at stake, I mean, politics is your perfect example of it. You see how engaged people get when they believe something important is at stake. They will spend hours a day watching videos, forwarding things with their friends, showing up and protesting, getting out to the ballot boxes, giving their money, all those things when they think something important is at stake. And we have something huge at stake, way more at stake than what's at politics.
Mathew Warner:
But we haven't managed to convey that and I think that's at the heart of it, we have to get back to reminding people that something big is at stake and I think we've gotten scared of it because we think it's going to push people away and along with that, you stop talking about the demands of the faith and what it costs because you can't communicate the cost if there's nothing big at stake, it's not worth it. So I'm not going to give up or sacrifice a lot if there's nothing really that big at stake. And so it really starts with understanding that there's something really meaningful in our work in the church. It's the most important thing in the world and I think the other lesson that the church really needs to learn is that it is our actions that communicate way more than what we say.
Mathew Warner:
And when you look at someone who's a Christian, what we communicate through our actions is way more powerful than what we're going to say to somebody, the right answer to a question, any of those kind of things. And I think that what's missing so often is the willingness to completely reorder our life around this important thing. Because when you see people who do that, that inspires people. When you see someone who's willing to reorder their whole life around it, not just an hour on Sunday, not just some classes here or there, not just a prayer here or there out of tradition or habit. But that your whole life is reordered around that thing, that communicates something that gets people's attention. That communicates there's something big at stake, that communicates there's something worth sacrificing for.
Mathew Warner:
That gets my attention to say, "You're strange, tell me why you're acting so strangely?" And I think we're missing that a lot. Not that we don't have inspiring individuals in the church, I feel like somehow we've lost that posture as an institution. And I think partially because we've gotten scared, we've gotten insecure. We feel like we don't want to share stuff as confidently because we don't want to scare people off. We don't want to talk about the demands because we feel like it's going to scare people off. And what we've ended up doing is just making it, "I guess there's nothing that big at stake right there."
Mathew Kelly:
It's great insight also. Let's talk about the book, Messy & Foolish. I read it when you first released it, I read it again over the last week. Incredibly impactful, what does it mean to be messy and foolish?
Mathew Warner:
Well, for me, I wrote the book at a time in my life where I was very passionate about the church. A lot of my friends, my peers, leaving the church and just feeling like the maintenance mode of everything going on and was not going to change anybody's mind, the status quo was not changing anybody's mind. And then all of the energy that was spent toward it, I felt like, was very insular. It was within this group of people that all believed and thought alike and was not really breaking outside of that bubble very successfully. And so it was just in a lot of my work, a lot of my blogging at the time and things like that was very much that. It was within this audience and it's my people and I love them. But when it comes to these efforts to reach outside that, I just was really motivated to figure out, how do we do that?
Mathew Warner:
And how do we fix some of these bigger problems in the church? And it was a pep talk to myself, the book, to remind myself that some of the things I've been saying. That we need to be doing something worthy of dropping your nets and going, we should look more like people in love. I think the Elvis song that says, "Wise men say only fools rush in but I can help falling in love with you." I feel like we should look more like fools rushing in and we're not. And St. Paul says the foolishness of God is wiser than men. There's a logic that transcends the world, the wisdom of the world, that we don't understand and that is about something much bigger than anything in this world and in this life and our lives need to reflect that. And so I think the mess part is we need to rethink how we're doing things now, that the status quo is not working.
Mathew Warner:
It's in many ways working against us and so we need to be willing to rethink it. And the foolishness is really tapping back into that, just deeper, wisdom that God gives us that the stuff that doesn't make sense to the world, that death is a doorway to the next world not something that we're supposed to just avoid at all costs forever. That we're supposed to love our enemies, that we forgive people over and over and over and over again, that we care for the least among us, the most vulnerable, the tiniest people. I mean, all of those things that I think are the things that are most attractive about the church and that offer really the most appealing, valuable thing. This way out of this world that Jesus has overcome death, it just felt like it was missing from so much of what we talked about.
Mathew Warner:
But again, I think a lot of what I realized through that work because I came in my adulthood as I claimed the faith as my own was very... Being an engineer, I love the apologetics. I love the reasoning of the faith, it's beautiful and deep and rich. And so that was very attractive to me and at that time, that's what I thought the answer was. I just need to go explain this to everybody because if you explain it, it just makes sense, right? And that works for me at that point in my life, the way it all came together, that was what I needed. But we all talk past each other and nobody seems to agree that it's that straightforward when you look at it. Well, why is that? And so much of it is that the way we communicate things is so much more than just those words I'm saying.
Mathew Warner:
It's, have I earned their attention yet? Have I earned their respect yet? Have I earned their trust yet? Have I established myself as a stable and worthy place of getting important information from? Do I have a relationship with you where you even care to listen to me? I think that first step of even giving you the time of day starts with just loving people and not to some end so that you can tell them something but just because you love them. And I think that emphasis on that part of it, I know for me, was lacking and needed a pep talk.
Mathew Kelly:
What are we afraid of? What is the fear that stops us from sharing the good news do you think?
Mathew Warner:
I think sometimes we feel like we need to have all the answers and if we don't that we can't engage in some of those topics which I think is one of the wonderful things about our faith is that it's true. You don't have to know it all, I just need to show it to you. I don't need to fully understand it, I can just share my experience of it. So we shouldn't feel like we need to know all the answers or fully understand because we never will. But that's what's great about something true and good and beautiful, you just show it to somebody, you share your experience of it and hopefully it moves them closer to it. But I think definitely a fear of looking silly, not knowing the answers. I think a lot of us too, and this was the case for me, is really focusing on me first and not in a selfish way but fixing what's wrong with me.
Mathew Warner:
Because I think when we start to do that, a lot of other things start to take care of themselves. We start to live a life that's more compelling. That was a Chesterton's famous letter that they asked, what's wrong with the world? And he wrote in and said, "Dear sirs, I am. Sincerely, GK Chesterton." And I think that's a great reminder for all of us and I think it was easy. I became very zealous and I was like, "I know all the right answers. I just need to tell everybody the right answers." And what I needed to do was become a saint myself. I needed to work on myself, I needed to sanctify myself. I needed to grow a lot in how I was loving people and what that meant. And so I think if we realize that, that's one of the main ways we're going to share the faith is filling ourselves up first and then we overflow from that. It's the overflowing of our own hearts, I think, that are going to change the world.
Mathew Kelly:
Yeah. In the book you quote CS Lewis, we are halfhearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition. When infinite joy is offered us like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea, we are far too easily pleased. When you feel yourself becoming half-hearted in somet