Episode 1654: Interview with Tony Stolzfus About his Book Heaven: Experience the Extraordinary

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Scott Maderer: [00:00:00] Thanks for joining us on episode 1,654 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

Tony Stolzfus: I'm Tony Stolzfus. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to recognize that God works for the good in all things is key.

And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the Inspired Stewardship podcast with my friend Scott Maderer.

You know, God speaks to us directly. He speaks to us through people, and he speaks to us through circumstances. So there are three, you know, it's sort of a three legged stool. And most Christians are familiar with the idea of God speaking directly. We're less good at God speaking to us through people because we don't cultivate [00:01:00] that.

We don't create relationships where people can say those kinds of things to us.

Scott Maderer: Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be. Then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling.

In the Inspired Stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

In this podcast episode I interview Tony stfu. I asked Tony to share with you about his book Heaven Experience, the Extraordinary. I also asked Tony to share how God works through circumstances to change us. And Tony also talks with you about how you need to rely not on self-discipline to get through things.

I have a great book that's been out [00:02:00] for a while now called Inspired Living. Assemble the puzzle of your calling by mastering your time, your talent, and your treasures. You can find out more about that book over@inspiredlivingbook.com. It'll take you to a page where there's information and you can sign up to get some mailings about it, as well as purchase a copy there.

I'd love to see you. Get a copy and share with me how it impacted your world. Today's guest has pioneered a new method of personal transformation that relies on desire, filling encounters with Jesus instead of the long, often fruitless slog of denial and self-discipline. For 25 years, Tony has been writing, coaching, and training about how to get out of your head and actually experience the change you've always longed for.

The latest of his 21 books is Heaven. Experience the Extraordinary, A Journey of Imagination into an extra dimensional heaven, where you'll meet a God who is far, [00:03:00] far better than you ever imagined. If you want to encounter the God who loves nothing better than to fill your deepest

desires, this conversation will give you a taste.

Welcome to the show, Tony. So I talked a little bit in the intro about some of the work you've done and then your, your book, uh, the latest one, heaven Experienced the Extraordinary. Why don't you take us back in time a little bit and talk a little bit about your journey and what has brought you to the point where this is the message you feel called to put out in the world?

Tony Stolzfus: My journey, I'll, I'll share one story that's sort of. Indicative of the whole thing. When I was in my twenties, I was Mr. Discipline and I had my yearly goals and my monthly goals and my Bible study plan and my hour of power and kept track of every penny I spent. And, you know, I had life all together and, uh.[00:04:00]

If you weren't living like that in my belief system, you were a wimp and you weren't really maximizing your potential. And then this moment came where it was like God turned off the spigot and I couldn't do it anymore. And I just felt so terrible about myself and so worthless. And it took me a year to get down to the bottom and, uh.

I felt like I was sliding down a grease rope in the dark and I got to the knot and the knot was trying. And if I let go, if I stopped trying to make my life work, what would happen to me? Because I can't see the bottom of this hole. And I finally just gave up and said, God, I can't live the Christian life and if you can do anything with me, you do it, but I'm done.

And. God started telling me that he loved me, and [00:05:00] I just couldn't hear it for six weeks. I couldn't go there. Uh, and finally it started to penetrate my skull, that God loved me because he loved me and not 'cause I was a good boy. And I later realized that, that when I was very young, I think we all have sort of this.

Original lie in our lives where we make a decision about something. And mine, my original lie was I was the good boy. So I don't have to feel the pain and the shame of being found wrong. And so my life journey has been the unraveling of that lie that I need to be a good boy and do things well and anticipate problems and, all those kinds of things so that I don't have this terrible feeling of not being good and a sort of culminating [00:06:00] thing. Uh, about five years ago, our house burned down. One of my kids stopped talking to me. The other one was suicidal. My wife was having some mental health problems and it turned our home upside down and all that trauma at once.

I just reached the place where I had nothing to give and I, we sold our business. I didn't work for a year and just pushed me beyond my coping skills. But the outcome of all that, it took four years to work through all that. But the outcome is I'm in a place that I've never been before of just being at peace with myself.

And that I don't have to accomplish, or we're good.

So that's kind of the story of my life,

Scott Maderer: you know, that, that's [00:07:00] interesting. When going back to you, you said, uh, you know, you were kind of striving to do all of these things because if you did it all right, you know then you would Yeah.

Earn it. Yet, so was it the doing that was the problem, or was it the feeling that that was, you know, the only way you could earn God's love and earn the place?

Tony Stolzfus: I don't know if it was so much earning for me as it was. Again, the, the belief was I can protect myself from this feeling by being good.

So I'm, I am being my own protector and determining the course of my life and I'm. Every action I'm taking is to ensure that I don't get in a situation where I am wrong or bad. Um, my wife has this little habit now [00:08:00] where, you know, if she's challenging me about something she'll say, now, Tony, you're a good boy.

It's okay. And I'm 64. I mean, but

Scott Maderer: yeah, that still works. People like to hear that. When, so it I mean, it, it at its root, there was some, some pride that you basically were in control of everything. Is that,

Tony Stolzfus: yeah, in a way the, the incident was, I think I'm like five or six and we go to pick up my dad at college, he's getting his master's degree and mom goes into the place to get him and I'm outside playing with my ball and the ball gets away from me, rolls down the hill and it's the science building.

So the window well has a row of test tubes and beakers and stuff, you know, out drying in the sun. And I don't remember anything else, but I think my ball hit the. Thing and broke something and I went and retrieved it and didn't tell anyone. [00:09:00] And so out of that came the decision, I will be good because this feels awful and I never want to feel this again.

So yeah.

Scott Maderer: So it was, it was fear driven then?

Tony Stolzfus: Yeah.

Scott Maderer: Okay. And now you say you kind of have a sense of contentment.

Tony Stolzfus: Well. A lot of that fear got translated to God and my relationship with God.

And so he's been at work in my life for 40 years, helping me to not live out of fear. And I'm still digging out from, like, I joined a gym for the first time in my life a week ago, and I found myself.

Okay. Like for all my life, my approach to exercise was I'm gonna get this done as soon as as quick as I can so I can get back to what I ought to be doing. [00:10:00] And this time I was like, okay, I'm gonna go to the gym and just enjoy the experience and not try to get through it as quick as I can. And. And I, one of the, the effects of this whole thing was I became very utilitarian in my approach to life and it sucked a lot of the joy out of it.

So God spoke to me a couple years ago when we were in Maui visiting my son, and he said, basically, you've been living for significance. There's a legacy making a difference, that kind of thing. He said, there's a whole other way to live if you're willing to try it. And I had no idea at the time what he was talking about, but I was like, okay, I'll give it a go.

And at that point I thought of it as, okay, there's something I've been doing wrong that I need to correct. [00:11:00] But I think I was just talking about this with my wife this morning. I think it's more like him saying, okay, you've squeezed all the joy out of all these areas of your life to be productive, and I'm gonna bring that back to you.

Scott Maderer: So Faith has obviously been a large part of your walk. Talk a little bit about how your life journey that you're reflecting on and your faith journey. You know, what, what's been the feedback loop between those? How's your life affected your faith and your faith has affected your life?

Tony Stolzfus: I am obsessively self-reflective, so yeah. I'm always thinking about what happened and why, and it's. My career has been as a coach trainer, I've trained life coaches for 25 years, and I am, if you know, [00:12:00] personality types, I'm an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs, the mastermind strategist, you know, and so my people skills are learned.

I don't naturally have this great suite of people skills. I've had to learn it all. But the act of having to learn it and reflect on what works and what doesn't has made it. So I don't do these things instinctively. I do them deliberately, so that makes it a lot easier to teach other people because I've had to think this through and figure it out.

So like. If I give someone a compliment, I say this as a trainer, if I give a compliment, it's because I thought, oh, this would be a good place for you to give a compliment. It's not because it's a natural thing that comes out of me. So my life journey, this whole internal refining [00:13:00] process has had huge implications for my life.

You know, my wife started displaying bipolar symptoms five or six years ago. She was bipolar two, which living with a bipolar spouse is a wild ride. And to her credit it takes most people 10 years to get a diagnosis and come to terms with it. And she did it in four. But we're still together in large part because we both have walked that journey of looking at what's happening in our lives and saying, what does this mean about me and who I am, and what can I learn from this?

And now in my sixties, I get to enjoy the fruit of [00:14:00] that.

Scott Maderer: So as a, as a trainer, as, as somebody who's done that kind of introspective work and tried to unpack things for yourself, but then, like you said, it makes it sometimes easier to share with others. I think a lot of folks have a tendency to, you know, rely on self-discipline, rely on pushing through it, willpower, you know, pull myself up by my bootstraps, whatever.

Flavor of the week, you wanna give it, you know what do you see as, you know, you mentioned kind of feeling a different way, or God inviting you to a different way. Yeah. What, what is the different way that, that well, that first story I told about being Mr. Disciplined one of the interesting outcomes of that was.

Tony Stolzfus: After that, it was very difficult for me to discipline myself in certain areas of my life [00:15:00] after that because if I, if I set a standard and I said, okay, I'm gonna do this now, I would immediately fall into this hole of beating myself up and feeling bad about it and not doing it, and I would be worse off than I was before I tried to discipline myself.

So. The upshot of all that was I had to figure out ways to change That didn't involve self-discipline because self-discipline didn't work for me. And what I discovered over the years was, and the way I say it, is the problems in your emotional brain, not your rational brain. Your rational brain is the part of you that responds to discipline goals and action steps and all those nice coaching things.

Your emotional brain learns through experiences and imagery and metaphor. And if the problem is in your emotional brain, discipline doesn't help that much. And by the problem being in your emotional brain, what I mean is [00:16:00] okay, you can't get the garage cleaned up. That's a practical issue, but something is stopping you and that's why you came to a coach.

You just can't keep your house in order. Well, there's something in your emotional brain behind that, because it was just a question of deciding and doing it. You'd have done it already. There's no reason to come to a coach for that. You came to the coach because you're stuck. And you're stuck because who knows what.

Maybe you believe that this isn't significant, maybe. Something happened in your past that traumatized you. And when you face this kind of situation, maybe there's something in your personality type that resists these things. But the problem is in your, the emotional side of you and your emotional side changes in response to different experiences.

So your experiences taught you to have these feelings. If you're gonna have different feelings, you have to have different experiences.[00:17:00]

Scott Maderer: It reminds me of you know, the metaphor that for emotional and rational brain of the elephant and the writer where your, your, your emotional side is the elephant and the rational side is the writer. And if your emotional side's out of control, there's very little the writer can do.

You know, if the elephant goes wi wild out, you know, you're pretty much just taking on for the ride. And if they work together. Great things can happen,

Tony Stolzfus: right?

Scott Maderer: But if they work against each other, you know, there's always gonna be problems. And by the way, the elephant's always gonna win kind of thing.

And it is learning sometimes to how to, how to because again, the writer doesn't control an elephant by out powering it,

Tony Stolzfus: right.

Scott Maderer: You know, or disciplining it or um you, you have to control an elephant by. Learning to work with the elephant in a way [00:18:00] that the elephant understands. I don't know about you, but I don't think screaming in an elephant's face is gonna be really effective.

Tony Stolzfus: No,

Scott Maderer: no. I'm not sure if you've ever heard that metaphor before, but that's what the image that came to mind as you were talking about that

Tony Stolzfus: Yeah. When you're, when you're triggered, your rational mind loses a lot of its ability to think straight.

Trying to do something about that rationally is a losing struggle.

Scott Maderer: Yeah I'll I'll rationalize my way out of, out of anger. Doesn't seem to work real well.

Tony Stolzfus: No, no.

Scott Maderer: So what about you know, you've been through a lot throughout your life. You know, you talked about the losing the house of the fire, your wife's mental health battles, child, you know, son that was suicidal.

All, all of these different things. What have you seen in terms of. How God [00:19:00] shows up as you go through these sorts of things and how, you know, how what if I, I think a lot of times when we have challenges, there's kind of this tension of, you know, the why me, you know, victim, right? And yet then there's also the, what lesson can I take from the, there's that tension that we have.

How have you kind of leaned into that and learned to, to work through circumstances, even ones as dramatic as what you're talking about?

Tony Stolzfus: Yeah. Well, it's really helped me, my coaching experience has really helped me 'cause I have thousands of hours of walking with people through difficult circumstances. So my basic principles are you know, God speaks to us directly.

He speaks to us through people and he speaks to us through circumstances. So there are three, you know, it's sort of a three legged stool. And most Christians are familiar with the idea of God speaking directly. We're [00:20:00] less good at God speaking to us through people because we don't cultivate that. We don't create relationships where people can say those kinds of things to us.

And our worst is God moving through circumstances because we tend to engage circumstances in endurance terms. Oh, God is teaching me patience. I just have to endure this. And what's actually happening, I believe, is God is at work in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. So he's active to get you to want the thing.

That you need. So when I'm a coach, the way I find God's agenda in your life is I start asking you what you want to do and where's the pressure on your life, and where are you motivated for something. Because my underlying belief is that God is well able to motivate you to do the kinda things he wants you to do.

So like in my life right now, one of the big agendas is dealing with [00:21:00] this utilitarian. View of life. And so he started, he said something to me that got my attention. There's a whole nother way of living if you want it. I didn't know what it meant. I was in Israel and you know, doing research for a book.

And God spoke to me and said, next week is your 64th birthday and I want you to retire. And I was like, I don't know what that means. I'm a self-employed author. And so for the first six months I was, I was in this mode of like, oh, I'm not supposed to work, but I've spent 30 years motivating myself because I was self-employed to get up every day and get at it.

How do I not do that? And then I started to figure out that it was less about what I did than my attitude toward it, and this whole utilitarian view of life. So like I started building furniture again. I spent 15 years as a [00:22:00] furniture designer. And when our house burned down the table I made as an engagement present for my wife disappeared and the carved poster bed and the everything I made was gone.

And I last built furniture, what, 30 years ago. I said I'd never do it again because I had access to this 20,000 square foot shop with all the modern Italian woodworking machines. And to do it in my garage felt so inefficient. You know, this is gonna take me four times as long, and I couldn't bring myself to do it because of that utilitarian aspect.

And then one day, a couple years ago, I realized if I build furniture, I'm doing it to have fun. And if it takes longer. That just means I'm having more fun. Oh, so I started building furniture again and enjoying it and not thinking about how [00:23:00] long it takes or how strategic it is, or how it's making a contribution to society, which is what governed all my actions before.

So. I'm, things happen in my life and I pay attention to them. Like going to the health club and realizing I can have fun at this. It's like, oh, this is another piece of what God's doing. And when two or three of those stack on top of each other, I'm like, okay, he's got an agenda here. So then my job is not to say, oh, I figured out what you're doing.

God, I'll take it from here. That's what we almost always do. God spends three years getting our attention and he's doing all the work. 'cause we aren't even aware what's going on. But the moment we figure it out, then we've got our action steps and our goals and our, because we think the idea is for me to change myself.

And that's [00:24:00] not the idea. The idea is God is the change agent. So when I figure it out, I stop and say, okay, God, I see what you're doing here. How do I lean into what you are doing as opposed to taking over the process. Yeah, but that's much less comfortable.

Yeah. You learn to do things like, one of my favorite prayers is God do in me the things I can't do for myself.

Or I'll say, okay, God, I know I don't get this, so send me the circumstances. I need to get this. And most people are terrified of that prayer.

Scott Maderer: My, my breath prayer is Your will not mine.

Tony Stolzfus: Yeah.

Scott Maderer: Another version of that. Yeah.

Tony Stolzfus: But I've learned that if I open myself up to God and say, do the thing I need, not the thing I want, that he's good to me.

Scott Maderer: Yeah. Even if it doesn't feel like it in the moment, it comes back [00:25:00] later. You understand where the good came from.

Tony Stolzfus: Yeah. And even in the moment, like saying yes to this thing of there's a whole different life you could lead. I thought that was something about. That I was doing it wrong. But he's actually saying there's this grace I want to give you.

You sort of got yourself stuck in this little corner. If you can just say, you went outta the corner, then

Scott Maderer: I'll let you outta the corner.

Tony Stolzfus: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Maderer: So talk a little bit about the book. I know you've written a lot of books over the years, but your latest one having experienced the extraordinary Tell, tell us a little bit about where did that come from?

Why is. Why is this the book you felt called to put out?

Tony Stolzfus: Okay, well, there's two places. One is, it's sort of the compendium of everything I've learned about the goodness of God as opposed to the the God who makes [00:26:00] rules. For instance, one of the issues they deal with in the book is that the children of light do not obey God in heaven.

Because there is no rules in heaven, and loving people is hardwired into the fabric of the universe in the same way that gravity is hardwired into the universe here. You can't just violate the law of gravity. It can't be done in heaven. You. Can't hate you can't mistreat someone. It's hardwired into the universe.

It can't be done. So one place is the, the dealings of God in my own life. The other place is in my twenties. I had a dream where I went to heaven, you know, a night dream. And I'm walking down the hall of my elementary school. All of a sudden the floor disappears and the walls disappear. And I'm standing on the edge of this, you know, ragged edge of a building cliff, and down below me is heaven.

And it was, you know, it [00:27:00] was way down below me. So in the dream, I picked up a stone and I tossed it off the edge to see what would happen, and the stone turned into a butterfly and flew away. So then I jumped. I just floated down into this landscape. I just remember a giant green lawn going out forever with an oak tree in the middle of it, and under the oak tree is a picnic table.

There's a group of guys just chatting and they welcome me and I sit down and the thing about the dream that so captured me was there was this sense of timelessness. Like there was nowhere I needed to be. There was nothing I needed to do or accomplish. We could sit there and talk for a hundred years and barely even realized time had passed and that was just a.

Grip my heart that, that sense of, of freedom, of timelessness. [00:28:00] And then someone came and tapped me on the shoulder and said it was time to go back and we all said goodbye and the dream was over. But ever since then, I've thought a lot about heaven. I've studied it. When I started training, I built heaven experiences into everything that we did.

So if you came to one of our workshops the first morning you'd spend, we built a heaven room with staging and lighting and actors and original music. The goal is to bless people to the point of embarrassment. And then I did, started doing a workshop where I told everybody who, who was coming, that I would interview them beforehand about their worst experience in life and rewrite their story from Heaven's perspective.

So there were 30 people coming to this workshop. So in a six week period. I [00:29:00] heard 30 people's worst stories of abuse and death and financial crashes and every kind of loss imaginable, and I would do the interview for an hour and then I would give myself an hour and a half. And I would just start writing and believe that God would direct me as I wrote how this looked from Jesus in heaven and by the, and I got to the place where I felt like I could ask God any question I could think of about heaven and I'd get an answer.

So I ended up that time with 80 pages of notes about heaven, and that's where the genesis of the book was. So this has sort of been a lifelong thing.

Scott Maderer: So tell, talk a little bit about, um, you know, who, who's the book for or what, who should pick up a copy?

Tony Stolzfus: It's a lot about who God is and so anybody who's [00:30:00] interested in who God is will benefit from it.

I specifically, I'm targeting, I got some friends and we bought 2000 copies to give away, and we're giving them to two categories, people who are spiritual seekers. Because the book doesn't just hit you over the head with Jesus on page one. Jesus is the man of light and God is the one. And and it addresses a lot of the questions people have about suffering and hell and in a story.

So the other category of people is people who are grieving or have suffered loss because heaven. Heaven has the power to make all things well. So you see stories in there of autistic parents and what happens to them or parents of an autistic child and what happens to them in heaven, and people who have been betrayed and what happens to them in heaven and all that kind of [00:31:00] stuff.

Um, so those are the categories that I'm. I most want to touch. You can, by the way, if you read the book and you like it, you can go to heaven experience.net, the website and just fill out a simple form that takes two minutes and we will send you free books to give away to the people in your life who are seekers or suffering.

So any of you can participate in that plan. Awesome. But I think. We don't realize how our viewpoint is from this world, and we don't realize how that has skewed our view of God. And it's not until you start thinking about heaven and how heaven really works that you get more of a true picture of what God is really like.

Like the idea that Heaven doesn't have rules. Most [00:32:00] Christians are, the Christian life is about obedience, and the goal is to become the most obedient person that I can. But in heaven, the law is written on your heart and written into the universe and. We don't obey rules in heaven. So why would God create an earth where the whole goal is to be obedient when we never do that in heaven?

That's stupid. And in fact, much of the stuff in scripture that we're commanded to do is to live like you're in heaven. So when you get here, you'll feel at home. For instance, I think in heaven. Revelation has a ton of images of heaven being bright and transparent. The streets of the city, pure gold, transparent, is glass, the shining crystal sea.

Everything is bright and transparent. The way I interpret that is on earth, when you meet someone, the first thing you see is the outside. You see their hair color. You see the color [00:33:00] of their eyes. You see what they're wearing. And you can't get to know the inner person except through the physical. The other person has to talk and make sound waves that come in your ear, or they have to act, you know, and send you a birthday card or something.

But you can't reach into their heart and see who they really are except through the physical. So there's this physical barrier in between our souls. I think in heaven, the physical is transparent to the inner. You, the streets of the city are transparent as glass. I think we're transparent to each other.

So in heaven, if one person rejoices, all rejoice. If one person is, how do I say it in scripture? The it, the, it literally says if one is glorified, I'll rejoice with him. But your emotion comes out of you into me. And so I [00:34:00] immediately feel it in heaven on earth. That's more of a choice. It's a discipline in heaven.

It's the way the thing is built.

Scott Maderer: Mm-hmm.

Tony Stolzfus: So the principle there is God directs us to act on earth in ways that will make heaven feel really familiar. Um, and it's not about that. He has some arbitrary thing for us to do. It makes sense.

Scott Maderer: So before I ask you a few questions that I'd like to ask all of my guests, okay.

Is there anything else about your journey, your work or the book that you'd like to share with the listener?

Tony Stolzfus: I'll throw in another tidbit. I spent four years full-time studying how to visualize scenes in the New Testament. Spent four months in Israel. I built two bookcases just for the book, obscure books I got for this project.

You know, diseases of the Ancient World and [00:35:00] Sabbath, synagogue and whatever. I've got a whole book on dining practices in the first century. But what I found in that project was we read the Bible with our heads, not with our emotional brain. And so what that does is it skews us toward Jesus' divinity and it pulls us away from his humanity.

So when I lead Bible studies and we get to the passage of. The woman with the issue of blood and she touches Jesus and is healed, and he turns around and says, who touched me if I ask groups? Okay, did Jesus, so Jesus didn't know who touched him, and they're like, no. He knew who touched him. He was just testing her faith.

That's not what it says. Says he turned around and he said, who he didn't know, but we have this impulse to cover up his humanity. [00:36:00] Because we don't engage scripture with the most human part of us. So I've spent five years now, I have groups that have been going on for five years, and we're only halfway through the Book of Mark.

But it's all about experiencing what Jesus experienced feeling, what he's feeling, understanding. You'll, for instance, when you see portrayals of the disciples in art. With Jesus. Like at the Last Supper, what you'll see is a bunch of bearded men. Some are graying, some are bald. These guys were in their teens and early twenties.

They were a college basketball team on a road trip. Um, and we don't see 'em that way because our art has deified them into these old men. So, yeah,

Scott Maderer: that's because most of that's 'cause most of that art was commissioned by old men.

Tony Stolzfus: Yeah, yeah. Old white men.

Scott Maderer: Exactly. I said, make it look like me. [00:37:00]

Tony Stolzfus: Yeah.

Interestingly, most of our images of Jesus are based on a 14th century forgery.

Scott Maderer: Mm-hmm.

Tony Stolzfus: Um, it's called the letter of Len Lists and it purports to describe Jesus, but go and find it online and then look up. Just search for images of Jesus and it's amazing. All the top images look exactly like this forgery.

Scott Maderer: Yeah.

Tony Stolzfus: So anyway, the point of all that was visualizing Jesus in his world took me out of this rational based, limited perspective on scripture and activated my imagination in ways that allowed me to write the Heaven book. I think.

Scott Maderer: So my brand is inspired stewardship, and I run things okay. Through that lens of stewardship.

Tony Stolzfus: Okay.

Scott Maderer: But at the end of the day, I've discovered that stewardship is one of those words that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of [00:38:00] different people. So for you, when you hear the word stewardship, what does that word mean to you?

Tony Stolzfus: It has a lot to do with heaven. Like a year or two ago, my wife ran across this lady in the parking lot at Walgreens and she saw her walking with her kids to church and then saw her go back and get in this vehicle and not leave it. And it turned out that this lady ha wa had. Escaped from her controlling an abusive husband with their three children, two of whom were autistic.

And her car broke down at Walgreens and she was living in the parking lot in her car. And Kathy said, why don't you come and meet her and bring the dog? I think it'll make her more comfortable. 'cause we have this nice, lovable dog. So we come there and. She says, you know, can I drive my car? I'm not sure.

And the [00:39:00] the back wheel is like this. I mean, it was on a 20 degree angle off the vertical. There's no way you're driving your car. And I'm like, okay, tell you what, my mechanic is right around the corner and we'll go over to him and I'll pay for fixing your car. And she was like all the objections we have.

And I said, wait a minute. I've never had the opportunity to fix Jesus's car before, and I would be so honored if you would give me that chance to do this for him. And you know, the, whatever you do to the least of these you've done, to me, that's stewardship. Um, stewardship to me is. I look at some of the dreams that I've had I want to go visit this place.

I want to go do this thing. And I think, you know, Jesus, I'm content doing that in heaven. We can use that money for something [00:40:00] else that's stewardship. Another thing I think about heaven is, you know, Jesus makes these statements about the least and the greatest, that make no worldly sense. He was the greatest of of you as the servant of all.

The way it works in heaven is he who receives a prophet, receives a prophet's reward, and the word receive in that context has to do with hospitality. So if I, if the traveling missionary stays in my house, I receive a missionary's reward, and it doesn't say the reward for what they did while they were in your house.

It says a missionary's reward. I share in the reward of their whole life. So everyone I serve and contribute to and bless in heaven, I share in the reward of what they do in their life, and that just makes me terribly excited about. Contributing to things and serving in the background and doing all [00:41:00] that kind of stuff, because then in heaven we have this relationship where we've been bound together in this great mission, and I like that idea.

So, yeah.

Scott Maderer: I like that definition. So this is my favorite question that I like to ask everybody. Okay. Uh, imagine for a moment that I invented this magic machine. And with this machine, I was able to take you from where you are today and transport you into the future, maybe 150, maybe 250 years, and you were able to look back and see your entire life and see all of the, all of the ripples, all of the connections, all of the impacts you've left.

What impact do you hope you've left in the world?

Tony Stolzfus: I think when I was young. I dreamed about scale. I'm [00:42:00] going to be, go to Africa and preach in front of 10,000 people, or I'm gonna be known as a songwriter or, and I think in the middle of my life I've pursued a lot of that too. But I've, I've, as I get older and I look at the world around me, I see.

That Christians trying to change the world has actually created a lot of damage. And we take responsibility for things that aren't ours. And we, you know, the magic box that sits in our living room lets us think that we're engaged with these problems all over the world. Um. So as someone who wrote two books on how to discover your destiny, I've changed my thinking in the last 20 years.

My job is not to change the world, it's to change my world, the people that come across my path, the, and so I would [00:43:00] hope that my legacy is that.

You know, at one point when my son was really struggling, he said, I want to give God a chance again because all the best people I know are Christians. That's the kind of thing I think of now in terms of legacy. It's less about how many people read my books than it is, um. This person who's in front of me in the coaching call, I'm doing all my coaching for free now, that's another stewardship thing.

My needs are met in my retirement and I could charge you $300 an hour. But hey so when I sit across the per from the person in the coaching call, give them the gift of everything that [00:44:00] God has put in me, that I made a difference in that life. So I think it's part of our culture that we value scale and mass production, and we glorify the people that have the biggest churches and the leaders that have the biggest companies.

And we think that they're special in some way. Yeah. In some way they are, but your assignment as a Christian is the people that are in front of you.

Scott Maderer: So what's on the roadmap? What's next as you continue on your journey?

Tony Stolzfus: I'm finishing this audio book and it's the last project that I sort of, you know, of something I started before the quote unquote retirement date. Mm-hmm. So I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. I think I'm gonna write a sequel to the Heaven book.

If there's an ought, it's, [00:45:00] I ought to make a second editions of a couple of my books that have sold well, but I've been putting that off for five or six years already 'cause it feels like work. I wanna have more time for family, more time for taking care of myself, the things that I do. Having more of a direct contribution to people as opposed to a big strategic thing.

And I don't have the energy I used to have. I don't have the ambition I used to have. So I think a lot of these years are gonna be about God being good to me and me having the grace to accept it. And not trying to justify my existence by accomplishing something. So that probably sounds out of step with what most people are saying, but

Scott Maderer: Nope.

Believe it or not, you're not the only one that says something similar, so, okay. But [00:46:00] it's, it's, uh, it doesn't need to be in or out of step of anybody. It's just what do you feel called to do?

Tony Stolzfus: Yeah.

Scott Maderer: So you can find out more about Tony and his book Heaven Experience, the Extraordinary over@heavenexperience.net.

Uh, remember he mentioned that you could get some free books over there if you've read the book and wanna give out some copies to friends or family or others that you feel would be impacted. Of course, I'll have a link to that over in the show notes as well. Tony, is there anything else you'd like to share with the listener?

Tony Stolzfus: Well, you can also I have a site like a human being.com that has all the Bible study information that I collected. There's a. State volume study curriculum that you can go through and the website has videos that go with it and all kinds of stuff, but it's all about seeing Jesus' human side and you will find when you start studying the Bible this way, that you've [00:47:00] never studied the Bible this way before and you're seeing things that you never saw.

So like a human being.com. Yeah. Awesome. I don't know if there's anything else you want me to,

Scott Maderer: I'll add that in the show notes as well and make sure that folks can get that over and, and find that that's like a human being.com.

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