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Every story of redemption starts with a story of loss. Until a person recognizes his or her brokenness, there can be no story of redemption.

At some point in your life, something broke you. Maybe nobody else knows that. Maybe you’re good at hiding it. And maybe you don’t even admit it to yourself.

But somewhere along the way, we all get lost. We all get broken. Some people cover it up. Some people embrace the brokenness and claim they like living that way. Most of us live in denial about it for as long as we can.

Finding redemption is messy. It involves getting honest with ourselves and others. It means we finally stop lying and pretending. It means we give up our pride.

And this is the reason most people never find redemption for themselves. They choose to live with lies and denial rather than to face the painful truth, even though they long for something deeply transformative and they desperately wish for a way out of something they can’t quite identify.

The ones who never find redemption are tragic. The beautiful stories are of those who are deeply broken and lost, yet find hope and redemption. It‘s their stories I need to tell.

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If I tell you a secret, will you keep it just between the two of us?

OK. Here it comes. My new podcast isn’t very good yet. If you’ve already heard some of the episodes, you might be relieved to hear me say that. You might be thinking, “Well, duh. Everybody else knows this, but I’m surprised you admit it.”

I’m not just being self-denigrating when I say this. I mean it with all sincerity. But there’s something I have to add — which I think is the more important part of the story.

Roughly 98 percent of the podcasts out there — out of about 750,000 active podcasts right now — are dreadfully bad. And when I admit that my podcast isn’t very good, I’m saying that with the knowledge that my “not very good” podcast might already be in the top 25 percent in terms of quality — only because most podcasts are so incredibly awful.

This leaves me baffled at what most people are producing — and it also leaves me encouraged about my future prospects. Let me tell you what prompts this thought.

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I have horribly mixed feelings about Valentine’s Day. I grew up being told that it’s a very artificial holiday made up by companies that want to sell you something. That still makes sense to my head, but my heart strongly identifies with the things we associate with the day.

In a lot of ways, that head vs. heart struggle perfectly captures all of my lifelong struggles with loving and being loved.

Preview of new week’s show: It was about 16 years ago when I got an unexpected first-hand lesson in how motivation really works. I had wanted to make a film for something like 20 years, but I kept finding every excuse in the book not to overcome my fears. And then I met a woman who was impressed that I was going to make a film. I wanted her to love me — and I was shooting my film less than 90 days later.

Next week, we’re going to talk about how love can motivate us to do things we didn’t know we could do.

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