Nancy Guthrie Answers Listener Questions

Nancy Guthrie: Week by week as she taught the Bible, I mean, I sat on the front row and I took it all in and week by week I was moved and changed and I just watched her and looking at her, I just felt like, “Okay. It’s not having this impact on me because of her personality or even her skills or gifts, it’s the power of the Word.” I remember sitting there and just beginning to think to myself that I couldn’t imagine investing my life in anything that would be more worthwhile than teaching the Bible.

David Guthrie: Welcome to “Help Me Teach the Bible.” I’m Nancy Guthrie’s husband, David. “Help Me Teach the Bible” is a production of the Gospel Coalition, sponsored by Crossway, a not-for-profit publisher of the ESV Bible, Christian books, and tracks. Learn more at crossway.org. [00:01:00] Welcome, everyone, to a very unusual, hopefully very special edition of the “Help Me Teach the Bible” podcast. Already people know something’s wrong because they’re hearing the wrong voice. But here’s that voice that you’re accustomed to hearing.

Nancy: Hey, Dave. Thank you for being willing to interview me for “Help Me Teach the Bible.”

David: Well, it was my pleasure to be asked to interview you.

Nancy: You mean forced.

David: Yeah. And I guess the idea was it would be very strange for you to interview yourself.

Nancy: Well, that would be unusual. Yeah.

David: Although you could do it.

Nancy: I don’t think I could.

David: I have no doubt because I’ve seen you conduct, how many of these now? Nearly 150 interviews?

Nancy: Yeah. I’ve done a lot. But see, it’s also just right that I would ask you. I mean, if you remember, I mean, the first time I met you, what caught my attention about you was your voice. Your voice, you know, you inherited that voice [00:02:00] from your dad who was a television broadcaster for all of his career. And when we met, you remember one of the things we had in common is that we both had our…what did you call it? A broadcasting license? We both had a little card that said we could, you know, be on the radio or something like that. So we’ve always had that in common. So it seems only right that you’re doing this and actually you probably should have done it a long time ago.

David: No. I’m sure I shouldn’t, but it’s good to know that somehow my voice counteracted my general creepiness when you first met me.

Nancy: There was no creepiness, Dave.

David: Well, this is a bit different, and I certainly, you know, can’t hope to uphold your standards of interviewing that you put on display over these last several years. But people would like to know a little bit about how this all came about and what your experience has been. In fact, you’ve been asking the [00:03:00] question on social media, “What would you like for me to address?” And so I know we’ve got some of those to take a look at today. Maybe just a little background. How did this start? When did it start? And what were you thinking? I mean, what did you have in mind?

Nancy: I can think of two things that really prompted it. First thing was, I was asked to consider becoming a regular co-host on another podcast, which was really tempting because I was honored to be asked and I knew the discussions would be so much fun and that it would be really challenging to me in a good way. But I also just had this feeling, even though they were saying I wouldn’t have to travel a lot to do it, to meet up with the other hosts, I thought, “Yes, I will.” And, you know, with my already heavy travel schedule, that was unappealing, but it did get me thinking about maybe doing my own thing. But I also remember, you know, we live here in Nashville and you and I are part of this group of folks [00:04:00] who bring in professors from Westminster Theological Seminary a couple of times a year to do these things we call Seminary on Saturday. And I remember back in 2014, we had Vern Poythress, was here to do a Seminary on Saturday and on that Sunday afterward, everyone from Westminster, including Dr. Poythress and his wife came over to our house. And I just remember sitting in the dining room, I was peppering Dr. Poythress with questions and just felt so honored to have him in our home and the opportunity to talk to him. And I remember thinking to myself, “I wish I could record this conversation because I bet there are some other people who would like to know the answers to these questions.”

So I guess those two things together just got me thinking about, “Hey, maybe I could do my own podcast.” And then [00:05:00] I remember you and I on a drive to the airport. I can remember the curve in the road in Interstate 40 where I thought of, “Well, how about if I just did a podcast that was especially to help Bible teachers and I talked to really excellent Bible teachers about how to teach specific books of the Bible?” And I think that’s where I said, you know, “How about ‘Help Me Teach the Bible’?” Then I went to Collin Hansen at The Gospel Coalition and asked, “Would you like to sponsor this?” And gratefully, they said, “Yeah. We’d like to do this.” They talked to Crossway about being a sponsor. And so you and I began doing interviews. Maybe we started in 2014, I think were our first ones on that trip to Columbia, South Carolina when we interviewed Derek Thomas and Dale Ralph Davis did those first interviews there.

David: Well, so you had the idea of interviewing great Bible teachers.

Nancy: Yeah.

David: Did you ever worry that you would be able to persuade great Bible teachers to sit down and [00:06:00] be grilled by you?

Nancy: That’s a good question. I think I’m pretty convincing, Dave. You’ve lived with me a long time, you know. Yeah. I think I was. Yeah, there were certain ones that were on my initial target list.

David: Because you weren’t offering them big bucks. Or…

Nancy: I was offering them zero bucks. A lot of times I felt like some of these people were very intimidated. They didn’t know what to expect. They didn’t know what to expect from me because they didn’t know me. They didn’t know who the audience was or what was going to be expected of them. So I think it got easier to do as we went along and people that I asked to be on the podcast were a little more familiar with it. Maybe they had listened to an episode or two or at least could. And maybe that helped me later on, but I think there were a few early on who were a little hesitant, but… And there were some who I asked several times who [00:07:00] never ended up saying yes.

David: Really? Do you wanna talk about them?

Nancy: No. But you know, after I got no once or twice, and maybe a third time, I stopped asking.

David: Yeah. I have some advantages that a typical interviewer might not have in that I’m privy to a lot of your behind the scenes activity. And so I got to see you interact with a lot of these theologians and Bible teachers. And I’d say, in general, it really was true that they were honored to be asked. They were maybe surprised. In general, were really delighted to be able to… I mean, I remember going to Australia with you and you had contacted this very highly regarded theologian, John Woodhouse. And I’m sure this wasn’t exactly what you said, but basically, didn’t you just tell him, “I’m going to be in Australia and could I come talk to you? Could I come to your house and talk to you?”

Nancy: Didn’t I do that the first time before we started [00:08:00] the podcast?

David: That could be.

Nancy: Yeah. It was the second time when we went back that we actually recorded an episode. Yeah. Maybe that experience is part of what both made me want to do it. It did take a little bit of courage to just say, you know, “Could I come meet you?” So it just gave me a good excuse, “Can I come over and interview you for this podcast?” And you know, in a lot of these cases I would have liked to have just invited myself over to their house or to their office to talk to them anyway, and this gave me a good excuse to do that.

David: Yeah. Who does that? Except when you’ve got a podcast, you’ve got an excuse. So those are some memorable experiences. So I know we’ve heard you state this in many of the podcast episodes, but what has been your goal? What were you shooting for?

Nancy: I’m not sure that I’ve always stated this. You’ve heard me state it to people I’ve interviewed, maybe as we’re kind of ramping up to get started recording. I don’t know that I’ve said it on the podcast so much, but I’ve had [00:09:00] a couple of goals. One goal has been to just hand the average lay Bible teacher some tools for handling the text. I’ve wanted to give them the sense, give them the courage that they really could open up a book of the Bible and teach from it. I mean, if you think about so much Bible teaching in the church, our first thought, if we’re gonna lead something is, whose materials can we use? And, you know, we wanna find someone else’s book about something to lead. And so one of my goals was just, I just wanna encourage people that they could anticipate that as they do some work in studying a book of the Bible, they could become equipped to actually just open it up and teach from it. And I felt like having conversations with people who know those books and are enthusiastic about that could inspire people to do that. So that was one aim. [00:10:00]

Another really important aim for me was that I wanted to introduce people to what I say is better mentors. And what I mean by that is I think for the average lay Bible teacher, we know a handful of commentators, maybe, that are big, popular names. Those aren’t necessarily the best resources, the best mentors for teaching the Bible, they’re just ones that we know about. And so I felt like this podcast could introduce people to what I’m gonna say, better mentors. And one specific thing that I was really looking for in the people I interviewed was I wanted people who approached the Bible with a sense of biblical theology or redemptive history that every book they approach, they see it in context of the larger [00:11:00] story of the Bible. And I suppose that was important to me because that’s not how my Bible-teaching instincts were developed. I didn’t grow up with that being the way most people I learned the Bible from, the way that they taught. So maybe part of this podcast has just been continuing my own desire to reorient myself, reset my own instincts about how to approach, and then give out the Bible. And so I wanted to talk to people who would help me and help listeners do that.

David: So based on feedback that you’ve received from listeners, do you feel like you’ve hit that target?

Nancy: Well, you assume I get feedback from listeners.

David: Well, I know you do.

Nancy: Well a little bit. I’ve always been surprised that I don’t get a little bit more. You know, it’s very fun as I go out and speak, I’m oftentimes just moved with gratitude. It’s like I can remember, was it a year or two years ago that we were in the UK [00:12:00] and we were in Ireland. And I remember these four or five young women, they came to this event at which I was speaking. They live in the southern part of Ireland and they do student ministry and they said to me, “We just cannot wait for every episode of “Help Me Teach the Bible” and we listen to it and we talk about it. It’s like our lifeline to help us learn these things. And, you know, hearing that kind of feedback has made me incredibly grateful. Recently, someone used almost those exact words to me. They said, “You’ve just introduced me to a lot of…” I don’t think she used the word mentors, but, you know, “A lot of teachers I’d never heard of before who have helped me so much.” And so inside, I was like, “Yes. Reached the goal.”

David: Many people might be surprised to learn that the vast majority of those have been face-to-face one-on-one interviews, not done over the phone or over [00:13:00] Skype, which these days is very common.

Nancy: Well, actually the only ones I haven’t done in person have been since we entered into the stay-at-home orders with COVID-19. Before that, every one of them was in person.

David: So Crossway hired a private jet, flew you around the world. Is that…?

Nancy: You know better than that, Dave.

David: You’ve conducted interviews, obviously in the States, I think maybe in Canada, in England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Australia.

Nancy: Dubai.

David: Dubai. So how in the world did you coordinate all that?

Nancy: When I was starting into this, you know, the reality of my world was that I do a lot of traveling and speaking. And so my plan was, and honestly, I didn’t know if it would really work because it’s like putting together puzzle pieces. Where am I going? Because I’m going somewhere to speak. Do I have time with the way my [00:14:00] travel schedule is, to work in an interview? Who is in that city or nearby that place that I’d like to talk to? What have they been teaching on recently? And do I wanna do an episode on that? Are they willing? Are they available? So just, you know, all of those things had to kind of line up. But what is amazing is over these 150 episodes, only one time in the last five years, have I made a trip somewhere for the sole purpose of doing interviews. And that was, I drove up to Louisville while there was a Gospel Coalition council meeting going on and I sat in a room for two days and did six or seven interviews. So it was like worth my time to make that short drive to get a whole bunch of them in the can, in a sense. But amazingly, I’ve just been able to do them kind of fitting around my own travel schedule. [00:15:00] So yeah, nobody has paid a cent for my travel, Dave, you know that.

David: Yeah. Fitting around your travel. I mean, I’ve been able to watch you and you have been so committed to this. If it were a matter of just pulling out the microphone when it was convenient, there would not have been 150 episodes of “Help Me Teach the Bible”. As you’ve traveled to these places, had a busy schedule of speaking and meeting with individuals where other folks would probably go sightseeing or relax back in the hotel room, you’re grabbing your bag of microphones and recorder and dashing across town, many times tired, exhausted. Oh. And, by the way, you know, you put in the preparation so that you can sit down with one of the top Bible teachers in the world and intelligently discuss sometimes an obscure book, the Bible. You’ve been committed to this [00:16:00] and I know that the people who have been listening on a regular basis certainly appreciate your dogged determination to keep after this.

Nancy: Well, I know there’ve been times that there’s been a part of me thinking to myself, “Why did I try to squeeze this one in? I am tired.” But I think I’d also have to say I’ve never regretted it. You know, everywhere we’ve gone, where we have done one of these, you and I get invited to lots of places and we don’t spend a lot of time being tourists. To me, the idea of going and seeing some ancient site in some country we’ve been to, versus going to see and sit down with some really excellent Bible teacher to talk about a book of the Bible, to me, that is no contest, which I would rather do.

David: Yeah. So we’re probably not the best ones to ask, “Oh, we’re going to Belfast. What are the sites we should see?” [00:17:00]

Nancy: I don’t know.

David: We have no idea. Well, I know that many of the people who’ve been listening, they wanna hear the inside scoop, you know. So it’s probably not fair to ask you things like who’s been your favorite, who’s been your least favorite, that kind of thing.

Nancy: That would not be fair.

David: But, you know, give us some exclusive, you know, anything that’s happened that was surprising in a good way or a bad way or anything that maybe didn’t go as planned or…

Nancy: Well, there have been those times where like, forgot to push record. Although I can’t remember a lot of them, there’ve been a couple of times when like the batteries ran out.

David: Well, I know, I know one of them was when you were interviewing John Piper and I…

Nancy: It was? I don’t remember that.

David: Yeah. And I guess I was enamored of John Piper and Nancy Guthrie in the same room, you know, and somehow I didn’t push the little red button.

Nancy: And so did we get very far in? [00:18:00]

David: About 15 minutes.

Nancy: Oh, boy.

David: He was very gracious and…

Nancy: Yeah. I can remember one where I looked down and it had stopped recording and I said, you know, you weren’t with me. And so, you know, always when I was by myself without you to be doing, I just felt like there was so much I had to think about. I’m oftentimes meeting this person for the first time and I’m trying to, you know, seem like I’ve got it together, but, you know, operate the equipment and work my way through intelligent questions. But I remember looking down and it had stopped and not that he was not gracious, but I do remember him looking a little bit annoyed, but fortunately, it had only been not recording about five minutes and we picked it up and we were okay. So and those kind of surprising unexpected things, I mean, I have really embarrassed myself.

David: No.

Nancy: Yeah. Well, a couple of times. There’s one… Okay. So I was just really looking forward to interviewing this person. Once again, you know, I’d read a bunch of his commentaries and [00:19:00] had learned so much from him, but I’d never met him. And we got in this, you know, we were in this small little room and we were just getting started and I was trying to say the word Genesis and it came out genitals…

David: That’s embarrassing.

Nancy: And he just looked at me and we both laughed and I started over again. And I’m sure he would laugh about it with me now, but at the time I felt like a…really like an idiot. It was very embarrassing.

David: Ouch.

Nancy: Ouch. Yeah.

David: You’re not only the interviewer, you’re the editor. Often you’ll come back with a recording, and we use two microphones so that, you know, we can have a little bit of control over the editing process. So I know there’ve been a few times where you sat down at your computer already to just, you know, remove a few flubs and [00:20:00] tweak it a little bit and maybe you had a bigger surprise.

Nancy: Well, there was that time, we were getting ready to go to Australia and we were gonna do a whole bunch and I had just been to a conference and done a bunch of interviews. And so I wanted to pull all of those off my little memory card, you know, and get them on the hard drive of my computer so it would be all cleaned out so we’d be all set for Australia. So I did that. I pulled them off and I, you know, kind of grouped them together, or so I thought. We got back from Australia and I went into edit these and I realized that there were two conversations that I only had saved one side of each of them. So I had a conversation with one person in which I had only saved my questions and not her answers. Well, that’s not real helpful. And then the other one, I had saved her answers, but not my questions. So the one where I had lost her answers, that was like a total loss and I just had to…[00:21:00]

David: Maybe you could have just combined the two. That would have been…

Nancy: Would have been interesting, wouldn’t it? So the one was a total loss that I had lost her answers and then the other one, you know, I listened in my headphones and I could kind of hear myself ask the questions. And so I rerecorded my questions. And I won’t tell anyone which one that is, because hopefully, they could have never told that that happened.

David: So several people you’ve interviewed more than once.

Nancy: Yeah.

David: Who has been interviewed more often than anyone else?

Nancy: Let’s see. I think there’s three people I’ve interviewed at least two or three times.

David: So either you must really like them or you pass through their city frequently.

Nancy: It’s that I really like them.

David: Okay.

Nancy: And by like them, I mean, I’ve learned a lot from them, that they are excellent conversation partners and they offer Bible teachers [00:22:00] really helpful handles for teaching the Bible. So I’ve talked to Colin Smith several times and he certainly is someone that I love listening to his preaching. To me, he is one of the very best blends of bringing out Christ in the passage as well as making thoughtful personal application. So I love talking to Colin Smith. I’ve done at least two or three with him, and then I’ve done three I know with Christopher Ash. So, you know, he’s someone that I had read his commentary on the book of Job and we were going to be in Cambridge. And so, you know, I was so tickled to get to contact him and say, “Can we come over to your house and do an interview?” And so that was very special. And then I…

David: Of course, he’s just so comforting to listen to. He has such a lovely voice and gentle and an accent. And…

Nancy: And then the third one that I have done at least three with is David Helm. And, you know, he’s the one I’ve learned a lot from, from being a part of the Simeon Trust [00:23:00] Women’s Workshops, and he’s over at the Simeon Trust. Once again, he’s an excellent conversation partner. He knows how to not only talk about the Bible, but to help other people figure out how to teach it. And so those have been my top three that I’ve at least talked to them the most.

David: Are there others who’ve been favorites?

Nancy: Well, certainly that episode I did with Christopher Ash on the book of Job, you know, which is a book of the Bible—you know, my first book was on the book of Job. And so I have a special affinity for it. But when I wrote my book on Job so many years ago, in 2002, I hadn’t even yet begun to try to learn what it means to see Christ in the Old Testament. And so to talk to Christopher Ash, who so beautifully shows the way that the book of Job points to Christ, I mean, that was very special. One of them I did early on with Dave Garner, he’s not a name necessarily people know. He’s a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary and [00:24:00] he and I talked about teaching with clarity and he talked about, you know, rehearsing your message, just all kinds of things to get clear on what you wanna say. And I just think it’s one of the most helpful episodes.

Probably the episode that I have relistened to, both by myself and with other people, because I think it was so enormously helpful, more than any other episode, is the episode with Julius Kim, where he talks about teaching for retention…let’s see for attention and retention, I think it was. And just the way he talked about how people can only take in so many ideas at a time, I mean, the episode was so personally challenging to me and my own speaking style to reconsider some ways I approach teaching, you know, little things like I wanna have an aha surprise at the end. And he talked [00:25:00] about setting out for people, kind of where you’re headed so they can track with you and know when you’re hitting those points. Those kinds of things, just really practical. And I’ve heard from a lot of other people that that was significant for them.

I love the conversation that I got to have with Colleen McFadden. She was here. We did this one at my house when we were getting ready to teach a Simeon Trust Women’s Workshop about how to make an argument from your Bible. I love the episode I did with David Murray. We were at The Gospel Coalition National Conference, and I had a whole bunch of interviews scheduled, but I hadn’t realized David was going to be there. He’s someone that I introduced myself to at a conference maybe four years before that. I just saw him, and I had seen a video with him on Christ throughout all the scriptures and my book, the one new book of “Discovering Jesus in the Old Testament” had just come out and so I knew we had this shared love for Christ through all the Scriptures, and I just introduced myself to him. And so we had become acquainted. [00:26:00] So I just pulled him and said, “Hey, let’s have a conversation about typology.”

So I mean, as you know, you’ve seen that I do…I’ve always done a lot of work to prepare for conversations. And I’ve really had to do that for books of the Bible that I’ve never taught before to have a sense of where I’m going or for really long books to try to get through them quickly. But that conversation with David Murray about typology, something that I love and that I know he has a passion for, that was so unplanned, so natural. So I think that’s one thing that made that just a really good episode because there was nothing stilted about it. We just had a great conversation about something we both love.

David: Yeah. Are there any that have been surprising to you or had unexpected impact in terms of feedback from your listeners?

Nancy: Probably it would be the episode I did with Lee Swanson here at the house over the breakfast table. Lee had launched at Reformed Theological Seminary in [00:27:00] Orlando the year before, a program called Teaching Women to Teach. It was like, you know, an 8 to 10 session series that about 150 women from all over Orlando came to and professors from RTS, Orlando taught women basics on teaching the Bible. And Lee and I had this conversation about that and it was also her own story about how she was mentored in teaching the Bible and going to seminary as an adult. And then we just talked about unique challenges for women who are up front teaching. And it’s not that I got so much feedback from the episode, but Lee was constantly texting me and forwarding me emails that she got from people literally all over the world because women were just like, “I wanna get a hold of these recordings, or I wanna offer this at our seminary or at our church.” And so, I mean that episode, [00:28:00] you know, gosh, I think that ran maybe a year and a half ago, and still, she’s constantly hearing from people. In fact, they’re launching a whole new Teaching Women to Teach series this fall at RTS Orlando, and it’s become such a thing. And, you know, since we’re in this era of things being recorded and put online, that Teaching Women to Teach program is actually going to be available online. So people can go to RTS Orlando, if they’re interested in getting in on that.

If I try to think about why was the response to that surprising, I probably shouldn’t be surprised because the reason that episode or one of the reasons that episode was so popular gets to the very need that I saw for doing a podcast in the first place. And that is that I know there are lots of laywomen Bible teachers out there. They haven’t been to seminary. They love God’s word and they want to handle it well, [00:29:00] they probably have a family. They’ve got all these other commitments. They’re probably not gonna peel away and go to seminary. But they wanna be equipped well to handle the Bible. And so I think that episode was so popular because people were like, “Oh, here’s something I could grab onto to get the kind of training I’m really hungry for.”

David: Right. Do you know the demographics of your listeners?

Nancy: No.

David: No.

Nancy: You know, me, Dave. I never keep up with any numbers. I don’t know how many people listen. I don’t know. I’m sure The Gospel Coalition keeps track of those things, but I guess I had just always felt like those things would distract me. My goal is just to get the episodes, and you know.

David: Yeah. I would think it’s an interesting patchwork because I know that there are pastors…

Nancy: I do too.

David: …there are church leaders who listen and have benefited from it. I know there are lots and lots of laypeople, men, and women, college students.

Nancy: Yeah. They tell us all the time. You hear people tell me all the time, “I’m not a teacher, but I listened to it because they’re, you know, really good conversations [00:30:00] about books of the Bible.” So.

David: Yeah. I mean, you kind of have to land somewhere and aim at something, so “Help Me Teach the Bible.” I’m sure there are some people who see that podcast title and think, “Oh, well, that’s for teachers, professional teachers.” But yeah, it’s fun to see some of the feedback you get from people who say, “I just wanna learn how to handle the Bible better.” So who made you laugh or who made you cry? Anybody?

Nancy: There’ve been both of those, haven’t there? Well I can remember really early on, you were with me, and we interviewed Robert Smith whose son worked in a convenience store and was murdered. And we talked about the Bible teaching of going from sorrow to joy and that promise, the three of us there in that hotel room with him telling the story about the death of his son. And, of course, you and I have a special heart for that because we’ve experienced the death of two of our children. And I remember [00:31:00] that being teary. Similarly with Jonny Gibson who had lost a child when we first met him.

David: Layla.

Nancy: Yeah. His daughter Layla, and just, you know, I’ve interviewed him twice and, you know, the first time we didn’t talk about that during the recording, we talked about it a long time before and afterwards and shed tears together. My last interview with him which would have been the episode just previous to this one on Obadiah, we also talked about a book he’s just written about talking to his son about the death of Layla. And I think we both shed some tears during that conversation too. So there’ve been tears.

There’s also has been laughter, I mean, one of the funniest things I remember, you were with me for this too. It was the first time I had met, I think, Rosaria Butterfield. So, you know, years ago when her book came out, “The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert,” it was just starting [00:32:00] to get talked about and I heard something about it. I went and bought a copy. I started reading it one morning and I did not get out of bed until I was finished. I loved that book. And so I actually went to TGC and said, “Can I write a review of this book?” And they said yes. So I wrote this review. I turned it in. This was back when at TGC, there used to be comments on their articles on the website. I guess now there’s just comments, you know, if it’s on a Facebook page, but anyway, there were comments on the website. And so I’m watching some of the comments come in and somebody comments, they said, “Couldn’t the writer of this review at least get the author’s name right?”

David: Uh-oh.

Nancy: And I was like, “What?” And I looked back at the article and I realized it wasn’t that I just got her first name wrong or her last name wrong, [00:33:00] it was that I got both her first name and her last name wrong. All right. So…

Nancy: Repeatedly. Exactly throughout the whole thing. I think I called her Rosemary Butterworth. And so, I mean, that was so very… Rosemary Butterworth throughout this whole article. So I’ve always been embarrassed about it and I’ve always kind of wondered, “Did she read that article and just think, what idiot is it who wrote this review?” So it was the first time I met her when I did that interview with her and she sat down. And so I brought it up actually in the midst of the interview. So you can hear this conversation with her if you’ve never listened to that episode. And I told her that I’d been looking forward to being with her in person so I could apologize to her in person, and she said to me that she never reads any reviews of her books. And I just…I kind of wanna say, “Really?” But anyway, she said she hadn’t. I’ll take your word for it. She thought it was so funny. [00:34:00] And so then I remember afterward, I asked her to sign a copy of her book for me. And so she wrote all of those names, but then you got in on it somehow because you came up with another name for her. You wanted to call her Rosalinda Butterfinger.

David: Right.

Nancy: She thought that was funny too. So anyway.

David: Well, how about the ones that got away? I know you did an amazing job getting, I mean, and no small feat, getting the right person at a time that they could talk to you. And, you know, you just, by the way, had to cover 66 books plus all these other topics. But I know there were some that you really wanted to include and it just didn’t work out.

Nancy: That’s true. That’s true. Well, one of those trips we made to the UK as I was looking at the geography of where we were going, I wanted to figure out how to interview Alec Motyer. He’s written an incredible commentary on Isaiah. He had [00:35:00] written a book called Look to the Rock, that had been really challenging, helpful to me. But, you know, he lived kind of down way South of London and we couldn’t do it. And he has since died. So that interview will never happen. I wanted to interview Sinclair Ferguson. In fact, I was with him in January. I went to take a class at RTS, Orlando, and I had been thinking, “Okay. I’ll pull him aside, you know, maybe one evening or during lunch one time.” And then I just, you know, those classes are so intense, all day long and one night he was going over to do something at Ligonier. So I just decided, “Ah, I can’t do that. So I’ll just have to settle for having had some conversations with him but never recorded.”

I asked Alistair Begg a few times because I think he is such an incredible communicator. I wanted to talk to him about how to use humor because I think he does that so beautifully and the way he uses story. But I never got him to say [00:36:00] yes, never nailed him down. I would have liked to have talked to Michael Reeves, once again, another UK guy and then another UK guy, David Jackman, who was part of the Proc Trust Cornhill. He sometimes comes to the States to teach for Simeon Trust Workshops for pastors. And so I would’ve liked to have done him too. So that’s… But that’s a pretty short list, right?

David: Yeah. And compare that against the really remarkable list of contributors that you do have. So, I mentioned earlier that you asked on Twitter what are some questions people would like to… You wanna field some of these? Wanna hear some of these?

Nancy: Sure.

David: Okay. Here we go. Joy asks, “How did you decide who to interview and for what book of the Bible?”

Nancy: All right. Well, who to interview, as you can probably tell, has a lot to do with where I was going. So let’s say I agreed to speak at a conference. You know, I might [00:37:00] know nine months beforehand who are the other speakers at the conference, and I would look at that. And so then when I was planning my travel, I would take that into consideration. I would write them and say, “We’re gonna be at this conference.” You know, “Would you be willing to take an hour with me to have a conversation?” It’s always great to talk to somebody when they’re really fresh on a book. So sometimes I would look at what are they preaching through right now? What will they have just finished preaching through when I’m with them? Or what have they just written on? I would look at things they have written and I would look at what they’ve just preached on at their church in terms of what I would talk about. But, of course, that had to match up with what have I not covered yet. So that was a lot easier at the beginning, as you can imagine. Although I have to say, over this last year, trying to put together that puzzle of where am I gonna be, who can I talk to, and here are the, you know, the handful of books that I have left that I haven’t covered, I just feel like the Lord ordained it because that actually worked out very well.

And in terms of [00:38:00] deciding who to interview, I just go back to my sense of, okay, I want someone who approaches the Bible with a sense of biblical theology, because I think that’s a huge void, not just for me, but for lots of people who grew up like I did in that the typical approach to so much Bible study and especially women’s Bible study is to look at a passage and immediately jump to application, what does this mean to me? And instead, I wanted people who would help us retrain to see what is this telling us about the person and work of Christ? And then draw our implications out of that. So I was looking for really trustworthy wise people.

David: Got you.

Nancy: Not necessarily big names.

David: Yeah. So interestingly, Kirk asks, “Who was the most unknown individual that surprised you with their passion and knowledge of the Word?”

Nancy: That is so easy.

David: Really? [00:39:00]

Nancy: Yes. Last year when I was in Dubai and I sat down with five women from the Middle East… Let’s see if I can remember. You know, one was from Egypt, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Jordan. I can’t remember the other one. To sit and talk to these five young women who were there because they wanna learn to teach the Bible, their passion for Christ, their love for God’s Word, their courage, their persistence to learn, I just felt like I was on holy ground to be in their presence. And so they made a huge impression on me. I felt really honored to get to talk to them.

David: Lee asks, “I’d love to know how you prepare for each interview.”

Nancy: It really made a huge difference as to whether or not I had taught that book of the Bible before. But honestly, there’s a lot of the books of the Bible I’ve never taught. But I’d have to also say that this is one of the reasons I [00:40:00] wanted to do this. Sometimes I just look at the things I commit to. And David, since you live with me, you know what I’m talking to you about. I commit to things, I think, “Why did I commit to do that? This is so much work to do that.”

David: I’ve heard that. Yeah.

Nancy: Yeah. But committing to do it holds me accountable to then do it. And I wanna be in God’s Word regularly. And so I wanna be reading new parts and going deeper in new parts of the Word that I haven’t before. And so I suppose this should have gone upfront in terms of my goals for the podcast. You know, so much of it has been for my own learning and my own…to be pushed in my own growth in understanding the Bible. So how do I prepare? I would do things like I’d open up the ESV study Bible and I’d look at their outline and their introduction of the book, maybe open the ESV Expositor’s commentary series that if the guest had recorded a bunch of sermons on that book of the Bible, I would listen to as [00:41:00] many of those as I could because, you know, that led to the best questions that I would know how they would answer them in some ways, you know, based on how they had handled the book. So reading what they had written about the book or listening to their sermons on the book were also a really good way to get prepared.

David: Mike wants to know, “How do you develop a quick interview rapport with someone you just met?”

Nancy: Maybe I should ask you that question because you’ve observed me do it. I’m not sure if I know how I do it.

David: Yeah. I mean, honestly, the answer to that, Mike, is just that’s Nancy, you know? Yeah. That comes out in all walks of life, really. And just the way God made you, you’re inquisitive. You’re curious. You’re short in stature, and I’ve always thought maybe this helps you…

Nancy: You think?

David: …because you are not intimidating, you know, when you walk up to someone. One of my [00:42:00] images of you that’s firm in my mind from the first days we met is just watching you in some business setting walk up to some 6’4 guy and just tilt your head back and lift your hand up there to shake their hand, look them in the eye. And yeah, God made you this way. Now, I do think I’ve been in enough of these interviews to see the folks that you’re interviewing, they appreciate that you have done your homework, that you’ve spent time reading what they’ve written or listening to them.

Nancy: Sometimes I think they’ve been surprised.

David: They’ve been very surprised. Yeah. They don’t often get that. And I also think for someone who can effectively string together a lot of words, you don’t make these interviews about yourself.

Nancy: This interview is about myself.

David: That’s true. I’m trying to follow your example and not make it about me.

Nancy: Okay.

David: “Which interview had the deepest impact on you personally and why?” Heather wants to know.

Nancy: I would have to say my interview [00:43:00] with Paul Tripp. I talked with him about his book, “Dangerous Calling,” which is a book really about the heart, and life, and integrity of the pastor or in our conversation, the Bible teacher. And I found it really personally challenging, you know, because it gets at the heart of habit, and motive, and consistency. And I think all of those things are challenging for anyone who stands up and teaches the Bible. So I’d have to say that one with Paul David Tripp.

David: Kofi says, “I loved the episode with Kay and David Arthur. Did my heart good to hear that episode for a number of reasons. What prompted that, especially since Precept isn’t quite in Reformed circles?”

Nancy: Yeah. Good question. What prompted this life given over to teaching the Bible in terms of Kay Arthur? I worked with her a long time ago as a publicist, [00:44:00] so we had a relationship. I wanted to honor her in some ways by including her in my podcast. And it gave me the opportunity to look her in the eyes and tell her how much I appreciate her lifetime investment in teaching the Bible. I think there are a handful of people in this world, handful of living people whose impact as a Bible teacher has been almost unfathomable, and Kay would be one of those. There are so many people who point to their experience in a Precept Bible study that awakened their love for the Bible. So I appreciate and admire that.

Also, I have a good friendship, not only with her, but with her son, kind of…the friendship with her son came about separately. If you remember David, he came and preached at our church. That had to have been, you know, 15 years ago and we took he and [00:45:00] his wife out to lunch and got to know them a little bit. And from the very first of my podcast, he was a listener to the podcast and I would hear from him that he loved certain episodes. You said that they’re a little bit outside the reformed Crossway realm. Well, David is a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson. So anyway, it was a joy to sit down with a couple of friends that I know love the Bible and two people who have given their whole lives to it. So that’s why I did it.

David: Yeah. And a mother and son also.

Nancy: And a mother and son. It was very sweet. It was very special.

David: Chris asks, “What was your favorite moment of seeing Jesus in the Old Testament that you hadn’t seen before recording the podcast?”

Nancy: Well, one of the people that I was so excited to get to interview because I had listened to a lot of his sermons and read some of his commentaries was Ian Duguid. And my first interview with him, I’ve done a couple, but the first one [00:46:00] was on the book of Judges. And gosh, isn’t the book of Judges dark? It’s dark. And in some ways, you could say, “Wow. It’s really hard to find Christ in this book,” but I’ll just never forget how that conversation ended. Really, the book gets increasingly gruesome and darker up to the very end. And I just remember Ian at the end of that interview saying something about the ugliness and the violence at the end of the book of Judges. And he said something like, “This is why we need a savior. This is why we need the cross.” That when you get to the end of the book of Judges, you say, “If someone is going to pay for this level of sin, it’s going to be costly [00:47:00] and it’s going to be ugly. It’s going to be devastating.” And that’s exactly what we see at the cross. And I remember it just taking my breath away. I re-listened to that episode recently and I realized that I edited out sitting there in silence and I kind of wish I hadn’t after that statement because it deserved some silence.

David: A number of people have had questions about your own Bible teaching. For example, what are some of the things that have helped you the most in teaching the Bible? Good question.

Nancy: Well, first of all, I’m just grateful that I grew up in the church. You know, having that foundational Bible knowledge that comes from as a child person in the youth group, you know, in the Bible, I studied Bible in college, worked in Christian publishing right out of college. When we moved to Nashville in 1993, I started into Bible Study Fellowship. I remember it seemed like this huge [00:48:00] commitment at the time, like they would actually expect me to do my lesson every week. The beautiful thing about that was sitting week to week under the teaching of someone you and I had known for a long time, but I’d never seen this side of her. And week by week as she taught the Bible, I mean, I sat on the front row and I took it all in and week by week I was moved and changed and I just watched her and looking at her, I just felt like, “Okay. It’s not having this impact on me because of her personality or even her skills or gifts, it’s the power of the Word.” I remember sitting there and just beginning to think to myself that I couldn’t imagine investing my life in anything that would be more worthwhile than teaching the Bible, just by watching her example and sitting under her ministry. So that was very significant.

I think just the [00:49:00] way God made me, you know, kind of a lifelong learner, I’m curious, I see things and I want to figure them out. I think that serves me well in my Bible teaching because usually, the questions that I have are questions other people have too. And so in my teaching, when I answer those questions, other people get their questions answered. And so it connects with them. I think in terms of just very practical things that have helped me improve as a Bible teacher, being forced to watch myself on video or listen to myself on audio, let me tell you, I hate it. The hardest thing about this podcast has been the editing process. And I listen to myself talking, I hear my cackling laugh, or just my tone of voice and it annoys me and I’m embarrassed by it. Most of what’s gotten left on the editing room floor is my own long stumbling questions or [00:50:00] comments that I’m embarrassed by. And so I’ve cut a lot of those out, but, you know, in my teaching, you can’t cut those out, but, you know, forcing myself to watch video or listen to myself teach has had a refining impact.

Since 2009, I have been taking seminary classes as you well know, since two days ago, I took a final on the most recent class. Those have been great. And, you know, I appreciate your encouragement about that, David, because I remember at one point I was maybe four or five years in, you know, just taking a class occasionally and I was really questioning, should I keep going with this? And I can remember you and I standing in the kitchen having that conversation. And I was like, “So it’s not like I’m doing this to try to get a job or that if I do this there’s something I can do because I have this degree that I’m not getting to do now.” And I remember you saying, “Well, you don’t know what’s out there in the future that you might be glad you’ve done it.” That’s been really true. [00:51:00] But I think the most significant thing about the seminary classes I’ve taken, there’ve been so many classes that heading into them, I’ve thought to myself, “I’m not really interested in this. I’m really only taking this class because I have to because, you know, I don’t think I need to know this.” And I would just get a little ways into the class and begin to learn and think to myself, “I did need to know this.” I didn’t know enough to know that I needed to know this.

And so seminary classes. And not just the lectures, the reading for seminary classes has been very significant to me. And it has been better for me to do it, you know, for credit and working toward a degree than just, you know, I think somebody would just want to audit, you know, if you think, “Okay. If I’m motivated to learn,” but the fact is when I know I’ve got to take a test on it or when I’ve got to write a paper on it, it just pushes you to get a firmer grip on it. So all of that has been good for me.

David: Awesome. Someone wants to know, what are some of the [00:52:00] strangest things that have happened to you while teaching the Bible? I can think of a few, but…

Nancy: What are you thinking of, Dave?

David: Well, I’ll…

Nancy: I mean, you and I have had some great adventures, probably the best adventures we’ve had with this have been in South America on a couple of trips that we have made to Colombia. I think of that first night in Colombia when we were on the edge of the jungles, really, you know, and we were in this outdoor…you remember this?

David: Oh, yeah.

Nancy: Outdoor kind of, I don’t even know like pavilion and they’ve got a generator that’s running lights and microphone and the microphone and the lights are cutting in and out. And I’ve got a translator. That was a nightmare. I think the guy who invited us down, I think after that night he wondered if he’d made a huge mistake because it did not go very well. And then the next morning I was speaking at this church and a dog walked across the [00:53:00] stage while I was speaking, because it’s kind of an open-air place too, not real typical.

David: Not in our culture.

Nancy: Not typical. And then later that week I was speaking at a military hospital in Colombia and all of a sudden there’s a huge roar. I mean, so I’m speaking to about 500 17 and 18-year-old injured soldiers, you know, and they’ve got broken arms and burns and I’m thinking to myself, “What am I doing?” And so I’ve just started into my talk. In fact…

David: With a translator.

Nancy: With a translator. Yeah. So I’d had a talk that was planned. And when I walked in and saw they were all 17 and 18-year-olds and I thought most of them were probably nominally Catholic and the talk I thought I was going to give presupposes way too much biblical literacy for this group. And so I can’t give that talk and literally walking up on the stage, I said to the translator, “I’m not giving that talk.” And I said, “I don’t know what I’m going to say. You’re just going to have to go with me.” It was a good experience for me, actually, to [00:54:00] learn that the Holy Spirit would bring things to my remembrance to be able to say, but I’d just started in a little bit and there’s this huge roar and I look up and there’s this guy charging the stage. He’s got his crutch and he’s holding it up and he’s like going to take me out with that crutch.

And the roar was because the guys in the back were calling to the guys in the front, telling them to jump on him before he got to me, which they did. And so then this guy comes up to the stage, he’s kind of trying to tell me in broken English, you know, he’s not right in the head. And I said, “That’s okay.” And so I remember you had stepped out, you walked back in and the whole place has erupted and I’m standing there saying, “Okay. Okay. Be quiet now, let’s go on. Be quiet now. Let’s go on.” But, you know, I think that actually ended up good. I love the picture that we have from that of, you know, me with all of these young guys. I think that made them actually then more willing to listen to me because [00:55:00] I wasn’t intimidated by it.

David: Yeah. You were the commanding officer at the moment. “Quiet down. Quiet down.”

Nancy: That’s right.

David: What does teaching the Bible look like for you now?

Nancy: Well, it’s been really different during this time of staying at home because of COVID-19. You know, I came home in the middle of March from Chicago and haven’t left since. You know, last fall, I started the Biblical Theology Workshops for women, doing those around the country, and that has been so much fun. It comes out of a desire to help women understand the Bible as one story out of a conviction that as we know the central themes of the Bible and learn to trace those, we are better able to understand the message that the divine author intends for us to get from the Bible. So I launched those around the country. I’d done maybe 12, 13, and women were enjoying [00:56:00] them ,and I was loving it and then they just came to this abrupt halt in March. So there were four this spring that had been postponed and now all the ones for fall have been postponed.

So it means that my 2021 calendar for the spring and the fall, I mean, there’s like eight weeks in a row, both spring, and fall where I’m somewhere every weekend, Lord willing, to do these workshops in 2021. So I’m very excited about that. But it’s also meant that like so many people, I just had to try to figure out, “Okay, so both, what am I going to do with this time?” And, you know, over these months, I’ve been hearing from people who couldn’t get to one of the cities where there was a workshop and they were like, “Are you going to offer this online?” And I was just really resistant to it because I would tell people, “There’s two reasons I’m not going to do it. It’s very interactive and I want people to be all in.” To me all in means they’re there in person. But I pretty quickly figured out, this time period is actually a great opportunity for me to [00:57:00] offer these, especially to people who will never be in one of the cities where I’m offering them or, you know, simply can’t afford to travel to one of them or just want to use this time that way.

And I did figure out how to do them in the way that we could still be interactive. So doing them via Zoom meeting, where I’m interacting with people on the chat, which has been really fun. I’ve been offering them biblical theology workshops online. I also developed kind of a step two for people from all around the country and outside of the country who’ve been to a workshop, kind of taking a next step to kind of build on what they learned. So I’ve been offering tutorials where it’s just these three-hour, Saturday morning kind of things where we take three different themes and trace them from beginning to end in the Bible. And that’s been really fun. Right when the virus hit in April, I had a book releasing from Crossway called “Saints and Scoundrels in the Story of Jesus.” [00:58:00] And I had been thinking, “Yeah, I need to create a video series on that.” But my spring travel schedule had been so full. I had thought, “I’m not going to be able to do that for months after the book is out.” But you and I did it.

David: Suddenly had a little time on our hands.

Nancy: Suddenly had little time on our hands. And so you and I, there in the kitchen, created a video series for that. And then I’m usually traveling during the year, and so I’ve always reserved June and July to be at home teaching at my own church. But as it got closer to summer, you know, our church had set up for doing live stream. I don’t know the idea of standing in front of our church with people socially distanced in the congregation over eight weeks to do Bible study that way when usually it’s, you know, every summer and all these women from all these different churches are packed in. I don’t know, it just sounded kind of depressing to me.

And so I said, “Hey, how about if we videotape it on our back patio and just invite like six people to come for each session?” Because I have another book coming out in September called [00:59:00] “God Does His Best Work with Empty.” And that’s what I was going to be teaching throughout the summer. So I already had the material ready. And I also figured, you know, there’s a lot of people who can’t be meeting for a Bible study. And so we videotaped that eight episodes of “God Does His Best Work with Empty” on the back patio and I put together a personal Bible study for that. And so it was really fun this summer to hear from individuals and groups of women, once again, all around the world. Like there were like 400 women in Ireland who worked their way all the way through that series this summer and some other places around the world and they would send me pictures of the groups. So I called it Backyard Bible Study because we videotaped it in our backyard. But what was really fun was a lot of these women’s groups wanting to take the step of being outdoors, where it’s a little safer in regard to precautions regarding the virus. So lots of groups did their study outside in their backyards. And so [01:00:00] that was really fun.

David: So what does somebody need to do if they want to get a hold of your books, the two new ones that you talked about, your online workshops, tutorials, Backyard Bible Study?

Nancy: It’s very easy, Dave. You just go to…

David: I thought it might be.

Nancy: You just go to nancyguthrie.com and yeah, there you can purchase any of the video series. You can purchase a registration for being a part of one of the live workshops or you can purchase the access to one of the recorded ones. So pretty much everything there at nancyguthrie.com.

David: So Maria says, “I love this series and I’ve learned so much. Thank you for all your hard work. What is next for the podcast?”

Nancy: Well, I have loved doing this podcast.

David: That’s true. I can…

Nancy: You can vouch for that, right? I’m not just saying that. The people I’ve gotten to meet, the study I’ve been forced to do and had the joy to do, all that I have learned, good grief, from all of these [01:01:00] conversations, from the preparation, having the conversation, editing the conversation, and then listening to it again, sometimes, sometimes I’ve just learned something at every step. So all of that’s been great. I’ve been so grateful that God has used it even in the last few months as I interact with people and they say to me, “Please don’t stop.” And I’m thinking in the back of my mind, “But I’ve been doing this, a new episode, every two weeks for five years.” And, you know, honestly, that’s been a lot with my other travel, and writing, and teaching. And I have loved it, but I’m just feeling like it’s pretty much done. You know, when I… I mean, my goal had always been to cover every book of the Bible. You know, my goal has been to kind of create this bank of episodes because maybe you don’t want to listen to the episode on Obadiah or 1st Chronicles because you’re not teaching the book, but when you get to, you’re going to be teaching first Chronicles and [01:02:00] Obadiah, you’re going to be so glad that that episode is there. So that’s always been my goal, has been to create this vault full of these fabulous resources. And so I think the vault is full.

So in terms of what’s ahead for the podcast, I think, occasionally, I may add a new episode. You know, all of the episodes are all available online at the Gospel Coalition website. But if you use some other podcast apps, so, for example, if you use Apple Podcasts, you’re only going to get the last maybe 99 episodes. And so if you only recently discovered the podcast, there’s lots of older episodes that you’d perhaps never hear, especially if you’ve never gone to the website to download it from there, if you’ve just used a podcast app, which I would imagine most people do. So I think you can expect that two weeks from now, yes, there will be an episode of “Help Me Teach the Bible,” but that we will begin at the very beginning again. And as I [01:03:00] remember, the first episode was a pretty good one with John Piper on the book of Philippians. And so we’ll begin again at the very beginning. And so, especially if, you know, you are a late arriver to “Help Me Teach the Bible,” there will be some real gold there for you to listen to as we just get started over again, putting them onto the podcast.

David: It’s kind of unique or unusual, you actually bringing this venture to a conclusion. “Help Me Teach the Bible” has been going for about five years and you’re actually tying a bow on it and it’s finished. And, by the way, I just want to say personally how proud I am of the work that you’ve done on “Help Me Teach the Bible.” It would have been easy to quit along the way somewhere or to adjust the expectations down or, yeah, I don’t think anyone expected that 150 episodes, not [01:04:00] only all 66 books of the Bible, but all these topics that are of great interest to Bible teachers and Bible learners could be assembled by one girl in Nashville, Tennessee, with a little bit of help from her husband and some other people, but you’ve done a remarkable thing and you’ve kept at it and you’ve really provided so many people with such a helpful resource. So way to go. We’re really proud of you.

Nancy: Thank you, honey. I am really grateful to Collin Hansen and D.A. Carson for initially saying yes and being so supportive all the way along. You know, when I think about Crossway’s generous support to help make it possible and The Gospel Coalition, they’ve never been anything but supportive. I think one of the questions that was submitted that we didn’t get to, someone asked if I want to do interview some authors outside the Crossway Reformed realm. And what’s been great to me about working with Crossway, [01:05:00] you know, first of all, they are one of my publishers and I admire and enjoy them tremendously. And they would have had every right to kind of, you know, nudge me to interview their authors or, you know, promote some new books that they had coming out. There was only one time they checked with me about whether or not I wanted to do an interview with somebody because I was going to be at the same place with this author.

And I didn’t feel like it was a good fit for the show and I said, no, but I mean, over five years, they’ve never put any pressure. I mean, instead, it’s been more like me coming to them and saying, “Okay. Well, here’s the books I haven’t covered, what have you guys got in the works and by who, because they might be someone that I’d like to talk to about it?” So I feel really grateful that Crossway has always a resource to me, but never put any pressure on me that have been completely autonomous.

I’m really grateful to Collin Hansen, to Betsy Childs Howard who’s been the editor over the podcast for the last few years, [01:06:00] for a couple of different guys who have helped with editing, putting the music on, helping things sound halfway decent. Caleb Stallings and Brandon Bennett. I’m grateful, specifically at Crossway to Andrew Tebbe and Amy Kruis. And I’m grateful to you, David.

And I remember when I came up with this idea and you helped me work on the proposal and then I needed to figure out what equipment to buy and you helped me put it all together and you have done a lot of lugging around equipment and putting up with some early morning and late nights when we were both tired, to get an interview done. And so thank you for that.

David: Well, Nancy, want to say it one more time?

Nancy: You’ve been listening to “Help Me Teach the Bible” with Nancy Guthrie, a production of the Gospel Coalition sponsored by Crossway. Crossway is a not-for-profit publisher of the ESV Bible, Christian books, and tracks. Learn more about [01:07:00] Crossway’s gospel-centered resources at crossway.org.