Weekly Digest: June 5
Bryce Crawford joins Rick Rubin on this week's podcast, Andy Warhol depicts Jackie in the aftermath of J.F.K's assassination, and a thought piece on how experience is the foundation of virtue.
Jackie Triptych by Andy Warhol
The Virtue of Experience by Molly Hankins
Experience, unlike patience or valor, is not traditionally regarded as a virtue, and yet it is the well from which all other virtues spring. Defined as “morally good behavior, character or quality, the good that comes from something, an advantage or benefit.” Such qualities can certainly be taught, but they are developed and put into practice only through experience. To seek a variety of experiences correlates directly with cultivation of self-awareness and wisdom. How else can we come to know ourselves except by experience?
It was December 25th, 2020. Bryce Crawford was 17 years old. He walked into a Waffle House to get his last meal, because it was one of the only things open.
“I planned on taking my life because of the depression and anxiety. Not because I wanted to die, but because I thought it was the only way to get the pain to go away.”
The restaurant was packed with families. He couldn’t get a seat alone, so he grabbed a stranger — a man in his thirties — and offered to pay for his meal if they could share a booth. The man sat down and started unloading everything. Divorce. His kids getting taken away. His family’s last Christmas together. Losing his money, losing it all. Bryce was barely listening.
Then the man said: “There’s no growth in a relationship if the love isn’t mutual.”
Every Bible verse Bryce had ever half-heard in church or Vacation Bible School flooded in at once. He threw money on the table and ran to his car. He prayed for the first time in his life — broken, honest, not performing. The crippling depression and anxiety he’d carried since 8th grade lifted the moment he finished. It hasn’t come back since.
That was five years ago. He started talking about Jesus the next day, and he hasn’t stopped since.
On this week’s podcast, Bryce, a 22-year-old evangelist and founder of a street ministry based in Los Angeles, traces the full arc of what followed in his conversation with Rick— from locking himself in his room with a Bible and a systematic theology textbook on Christmas break, to losing most of his friends at his Christian school for being too openly Christian, to moving to Los Angeles at 18 on what he describes only as a calling, with nowhere to stay and no plan.
He shares what it feels like to walk up to strangers in West Hollywood and on Venice Beach and ask them when someone last told them they were loved. He talks about the Holy Spirit the way you'd talk about a close friend. And the 18 inches between his head and his heart that finally connected inside that Waffle House on Christmas night.
Throughout the conversation, Bryce returns to one thing:
He wasn’t looking for God. God was looking for him.
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