In this Inspirational People interview on the Share Life podcast, I'm speaking with creative entrepreneur, Ross Boone. Ross is an illustrator, founder of Raw Spoon, and maker of Creature Habits, an app for Android and Apple phones.

Ross and I were connected through our mutual friend Ivan Alfaro. We had an Italian lunch years ago, and Ross also illustrated a conversation on the issue of children's life and abortion between me and Ivan.

In this episode, we're diving into Ross' story & wisdom.

Discussion Highlights

• The ways that story drives us
• A deep desire inside of us that mirrors the heart of God
• Self-serving stories & getting the stories we want
• Problematic stories and accountability
• Changing desires
• Awareness: what's going on with fashion trends?
• Ross' fork in the road for his faith journey
• Making spiritual disciples the world's favorite distractions
• How Ross and the rest of his family respond to his mother's unexpected death
• Competing & Dangerous Realities
• Heaven and hell through the eyes of CS Lewis
• Church architecture and the evolution over time: Losing the power of community
• The complex development of belief and not taking what's told to us for granted
• Building ourselves on the memory of past generations

• Watch from the Bible Project: What's The Bible About and How to Make Sense of Heaven and Hell
• Read: Perfect Coordinates Don't Prevent Drift, Adjusting Direction Along The Way Does
• After Skool: "Hell is the place where the person you are meets the person you could have been.

The following book links are affiliate links.

• Book: Squire & Daniel: A Story About Losing Your Best Friend
• Book: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
• Book: Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything

Unedited Transcript

Jason Scott Montoya (00:01)
On this Inspirational People interview on the Share Life podcast, I'm here with Ross Boone. Ross, say hello. I'm Jason Montoya, and Ross is an illustrator. He's the founder of Ross Boone, and he is the maker of an app called Creature Habits, which is an app for smartphones, and he's gonna talk about what it does. So thank you, Ross, for joining us.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (00:07)
Hey guys, how you doing? Hi Jason.

Jason Scott Montoya (00:28)
Ross and I originally got connected through a mutual friend, Ivan Alfaro, and we had an Italian lunch years ago and caught up. We ended up doing a video with Ivan talking about the issue of abortion, and Ross illustrated the conversation. That was his work in action. But today we're here to talk about his wisdom and him sharing his story. So to start, I'm going to ask...

Ross, tell us about what real or fictional stories have shaped you as a person.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (01:06)
Yeah, thanks, Jason. And I, you know, I queued you up. You sent me the list of questions. I wanted to start with that one because I think the structure of story is what I live my life within. And I think that everything, since we were little, can be just about everything. All of our experiences can fit into this realm of story. And I think what I've tried to

do as I read and observe stories over time is figure out what makes them work. And something at the root of probably all stories is something that gives us a glimpse into the into the mind and heart of God. What I mean by that is like, I think what is at the root of story is our curiosity to watch a character go through something that

It requires them to raise to a new level of performance or development or healing of some sort. And I think in that process, we are feeling what God feels when he watches us as we grow and go through life. I think when like, why would people sit in front of a screen of moving images for two and a half hours at a time?

And I think it's because there is a desire, a deep desire within us that mirrors the heart of God. And that's what we're getting a glimpse into when we feel drawn into a story as we see a character becoming a better him or her and working through their problems and showing this new level of skill or ability that their circumstances are requiring of them.

We just love to see a human becoming more full, more themselves, more healed, and just the best them they can be. I think that's at the root of story. So all the, to go back to answer your question, I think like every story I heard from my parents as I was growing up, you know, the context was them and their lives. And then as they would talk about different people, things in the news or...

Jason Scott Montoya (03:06)
Yeah, yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (03:22)
uncles or aunts or people in their lives, I started to gain influence from what their morality prized and what it downplayed. And so I started to gain a direction, a kind of morality of what I wanted to live my life by. This is sort of like what gave me the definition of like what is what makes someone's life better. And in that process, I just realized, okay, the things I want to live for,

or I want to become the best self I can be. And when I am my best self and in that process of becoming my best self, I want to produce things because I'm creative at my core. I want to produce things that can help other people get there as well.

Jason Scott Montoya (03:56)
Hmm

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (04:08)

Jason Scott Montoya (04:08)
Yeah, yeah. So I guess a couple things to come to mind. So I agree with you, and I've been kind of learning and studying and reflecting on a lot lately just how storytelling stories are the language of humans. And we are storytelling creatures and we listen to stories and we tell ourselves stories. I think we're attracted to the stories that give us what we want, kind of like you're describing. Like in the case that you're giving the specific example of like, hey, this is a story that

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (04:31)
Oh, tell me more.

Jason Scott Montoya (04:38)
that allows me to become someone greater, right? So in that case, that's what that person wants. But I think if we kind of go a little bit deeper, I think the idea is that the stories we're attracted to are those that give us what we want. And this would be the question to have for you is, knowing that we can be attracted to both good and bad stories, but maybe even more fundamental stories that are true and stories that are either false or incomplete.

So I'd be curious what you think about that idea of the stories we tell ourselves, but also whether or not those stories are true and whether that matters.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (05:18)
It doesn't matter too much, except if it's true, we know our realm of the possible is expanded a little bit. If they're false, we still tap into the heart of the story. Like if they're fictional, we can still realize, oh, I want that for that character, and I can see how I want that for my life in a different form or not. And I can see how that character has achieved it through hard work or through...

kind of come to terms with their demons or through healing. And then that informs my life. I think that's why we have an interest in it because in that is where we see the solution for us to get what we want. We see how this character exhibited certain traits that then we model to be able to achieve something, some similar form of success in our life. Did that answer the question?

Jason Scott Montoya (06:14)
Yeah, so I guess I'd wanna kinda dive a little bit more into that in the sense of like, so it's interesting you mentioned the idea of like, there can be something redeeming in any story, even if it's not true. How would you reconcile that with the idea of like, let's say we tell our story, let's say we tell a story, a false story, about somebody else or about ourselves. Maybe it's like, my boss doesn't like me, which may not be true, but we tell ourselves that

false story.

How would you think about that type of situation? Or we tell ourselves a story like, I'm not good enough, which may not be true, or maybe it is. So in those cases, when it's not a true story, how do you feel about it there?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (06:53)
Yeah.

Yeah, okay, so when it's a story that I'm telling myself, it's usually, if it's a story that's self-serving, oftentimes it is appealing to my baser instincts. When I'm telling a story that's like, it allows me to be angry at my boss or my wife or my friend, it's basically giving me what I want because it's appealing to those easy, I like being angry because I'm right. I get what I want in this story I'm telling in my head. Now.

Jason Scott Montoya (07:14)
Yeah, yeah

Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (07:26)
when you're telling that story to a friend, if they recognize within you instincts that are not doing yourself any good, if they're not becoming a better person, they should recognize and hopefully they're a good friend that they can kind of like help straighten you out and say like, hey man, um I see what story you're telling to yourself, it's just making you more angry and you know, you told me what your boss did but I can kind of see from his side why he did what he did.

So your friend can tell that like, it is not the best story for your healing. It is not the best story for you becoming the best you can be.

Jason Scott Montoya (08:02)
Yeah, so getting to that idea of like, the stories we're attracted to give us what we want, which kind of infers that what we want drives it, in a lot of cases, how do we change what we want?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (08:20)
Oh man, that is the role of artists. How do you, and designers. My wife looks at some Pinterest things and she's like, let's make our house like this. It's the power to cause desire. And that is an art as well. I think that's more of a subtle art because, and it creates so much desire. Fashion, design, trends, which I think some of it is kind of like,

Jason Scott Montoya (08:31)
I want that.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (08:50)
the story of the king's clothes, you know, where everyone says the king is naked and you're left there thinking like, oh, I, sorry, everyone says the king has the best clothes on, but you see the king is naked. So you don't say anything because everyone around you, but then that just becomes the trend. So some trends can be substantial and others like this, um, the, the legend of the king's clothes can be in substantial trends, but there is some, I think value of, um, of

Jason Scott Montoya (09:03)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (09:19)
stories sorry of fashion and design that are beneficial and substantial stuff and they refer back to Reminiscent vintage. Oh, I've got balloons cool. Oh How do you do that balloons and But you know form follows function so if you can find something that in the past like let's say mid-century modern

Jason Scott Montoya (09:33)
Oh, is it your birthday? Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (09:48)
furniture and stuff did a great job of providing structural furniture with like maybe like golden ratio proportions and things in a way where it is appealing to something that works really well that placed it into our subconscious as an image from old times. And when it comes back again, it reminds us of maybe something we saw in our grandma's house. And now we see we can embrace that again.

and bring it into new fashion and new style again. Or when we have new technology that's shaping our world, we need new devices, we need new function, and new form follows that. So these things can be substantial fashion or style-driven movements in our world, and those things can actually add value to our lives. But us as designers and artists have the power to shape those things.

form those things, draw those things in a way where it makes them desirable. We can draw from reminiscent images from the past. We can draw things so that they appeal to what seems really natural to sit in or to wear or it will breathe really well if I wear it on a windy day or I don't know. But those are some of the factors which bring things into style and out of style. And us artists are kind of the...

Jason Scott Montoya (11:03)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (11:12)
purveyors of these wares and the purveyors of desire, which was drives a lot of people, what they desire to consume, what they desire to go seek out. And if you write good stories, what desire you have to live your life, how you wanna live your life.

Jason Scott Montoya (11:17)
Yeah.

Yeah. So how would you differentiate what you're describing there as maybe innovation in terms of like innovating or create or shifting desires with the story you started out with which was the king has no clothes that's a different that seems like a different type of trend than the type of trend that comes from innovative creativeness so how would you distinguish those two categorically and where maybe one is helpful and the other is harmful

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (11:57)
Yeah, I think you just have to get good at recognizing what is driving each. So like last year, my wife, as well as every other 20 to 40 female that I know wanted a Stanley Cup. And I was like, wait a minute, can you describe to me why this is better? And it was hard for my wife to kind of describe why it's much better than this. And it's sort of like, if you get back to...

ask yourself, okay, why is this popular right now? There are some things I'm blind to that why it may be more functional than I realize, but if I see something and it doesn't make sense to me why it is in vogue right now, I usually say that, okay, this is the fault of indulgent marketing. Marketing that says we're gonna earn more money if we show Brad Pitt wearing this shirt or...

Jennifer Aniston carrying this type of water, and we're going to make more money. So that's what desire we're trying to create. So it just comes with a keen sense of discernment of, OK, is that marketing providing real value, that marketing for that product providing real value, or does it look like an empty? Another really good one like this is Supreme, the brand Supreme, where they just have.

Jason Scott Montoya (13:26)
Okay.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (13:27)
T-shirts and I'm not sure what else maybe shoes and bags, but they're all inflated by three or four times the amount of what another company's product Yeah, they cost yeah value cost They could be they make I think we can we can fire for that Jason

Jason Scott Montoya (13:37)
You mean the cost? The cost is inflated? Okay, yeah. They're not like literally inflated clothes. Ha ha ha. Ha ha.

So when does something become vanity versus, because there maybe is a spectrum of vanity and function where you have something that's functional but is just ugly and atrocious, but you might have something that's completely vanity and actually loses its function. I don't know, is that a spectrum or is that something else?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (14:08)
Um, uh, yeah, and I do have a nuance here. There is a function that might not be very obvious. I think fashion functions to, to inform people that you understand the language of culture, because it is so nuanced that wearing this little freaking bandana or this, um, shirt that I got at, um, uh, Goodwill, uh, a week or go. Um,

these were influenced by me and my wife looking through Pinterest at styles that we really liked and said, okay, let's go model that. Let's go see what we can find to fit that. And what it's telling people, if we do it accurately, is that we understand the language of culture. We understand what is at the edge of fashion and what people who are influential are wearing. And it lets people know that, oh, Ross is aware of this. So maybe we can

If he is aware of what's happening in culture, demonstrated by his clothing, maybe he's aware in other ways, other nuanced ways as well. So we're gonna consider him maybe more of a thought leader in more areas, if he can demonstrate that he's got this social awareness that comes through with his choice of fashion.

Jason Scott Montoya (15:30)
But that is tribe specific, right? So you're speaking to a particular tribe, but another tribe would look at you, and they might even look down upon you because of that signal, right?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (15:42)
That's a good point. It sure is. So, so it's a what are you trying to accomplish with which with which tribe and dress.

Jason Scott Montoya (15:43)
Yeah.

Yeah, and in the case of fashion, I think age is a big part of that. In terms of, I'd imagine you're gonna have more younger audiences with attire, but it's not always. I mean, we had that whole snafu in the Senate about wearing suits, right? So that's a signal to a different type of audience. My son, well, I'll use myself first. I wear pretty casual. I wear clothes.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (15:53)
Yep.

Jason Scott Montoya (16:19)
casually, you know, t-shirts and pants and whatnot. The one thing I do that's unique is I wear toe shoes, Vibram Five Fingers. And so I'm like the only one that does that. In terms of like out of a thousand people, I'm like one of 10 in a given group. But my son, he's the opposite in the sense that all he wears is suits. He started wearing a suit. He's...

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (16:25)
Oh yeah, yeah. Fun to hear.

Jason Scott Montoya (16:47)
He's gonna be 13 this year, so he's 12. And for probably two years now, he's just worn suits. So he wears suits to church, to school, everywhere. And he gets a lot of attention and he gets a lot of, he has a lot of influence, to your point. So with those that notice him. And so, yeah, and so I think that's an interesting dynamic because there's one,

the signal, but there's also the, if the difference is actually seen as a positive, like maybe I don't wear suits, but someone sees someone wearing a suit and they see them as a positive. And I'll give you one example, like you were kind of describing the nostalgia of looking back and remembering grandma. And one of the guys at my church that was talking about my son wearing a suit, he was talking about, oh yeah, when I was growing up and we went to church, everyone wore a suit.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (17:36)
Yeah, I was about to say that.

Jason Scott Montoya (17:46)
It was kind of these memories, right? Because that had changed, and now I see someone that's wearing this, that was like when he was at church at a young kid. Even so, that was an interesting, you know, parlay's into everything you're saying.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (17:56)
See ya.

Huh.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And, you know, it is such a nuanced industry that someone's choice to wear a suit to everything is weighed in people's eyes and behind people's eyes in their minds like, oh, is this the right time to bring it back? Or is he wearing it with a nut enough awareness that it's fitted?

Is he wearing it with enough? And it's like all these little tiny factors, I think that inform us in our decision of, okay, is that avant-garde and cool, or is that he doesn't know enough to do it any better? Like we make these little subtle decisions.

Jason Scott Montoya (18:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, I kind of think of it when you describe it that way, I think of as we get older, our hearing diminishes and we can't hear higher pitched frequencies are harder to hear and you can't even hear them after you hit a certain age. And so I've heard stories of kids like at the middle school where they use high frequency sounds to communicate and the teacher doesn't know because he can't hear them. So that's...

What you're describing is like, that's what's happening in the fashion arena, right? Ha ha.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (19:18)
Yeah, so interesting. Yeah. Huh. They're having a communication that the older generation just doesn't understand. So they're able to like communicate something to the younger, their peers. Fascinating.

Jason Scott Montoya (19:27)
Uh huh. Yeah.

So how long have you been on this earth?

 

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (19:35)
44 years.

Jason Scott Montoya (19:37)
So how did you get to where, so let's rewind a bit and tell us how you got to this person that you now are, figuring these things out and sharing the things that you share.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (19:45)
Yeah. My mom had a soft heart. My dad was an engineer. And so I kind of fit within this dialectic of like having a soft heart, but being sort of encouraged to use this analytical side of their brain. I was always creative as well. My dad's creative, but he built stuff. Like he and his twin brother built a submarine for their high school shop class, like amazing stuff.

So I was always super creative and it would come out a lot of the times in writing, art, and inventing. I would keep notebooks of all these things as I was growing up. Now I remember when I was maybe early high school, I would just get depressed every night when the sun would go down and I realized that all of my dreams of things I wanted to draw,

like didn't get done, I would feel this depression that planted in me this desire to make my life so efficient that I could do all these things really fast and really well and get them done and accomplish them. So those were the ingredients that then were planted as a seed as I went to engineering college. I learned the basics of engineering.

thinking and I was doing writing and art the whole time, working on novels and doing art whenever I had a chance and then applying some of my engineering stuff to different inventions I was thinking of. I graduated, saw that all my friends were getting jobs doing really what seemed to be boring things like engineers at water plants and cement factories and I thought that just doesn't feel like me. So I found a new career.

called industrial design. And I thought, oh, wait a minute. Okay, these things are related. So it won't be like my engineering is totally wasted, but I'm gonna parlay that into industrial design, which now brings in the invention aspect of it. You're basically inventing things and making them ergonomic, stylistic, and make them a manufacturer, manufacturable and reproducible at an efficient price. So all these things in my brain are starting.

Jason Scott Montoya (21:42)
Hmm

Hmm.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (22:07)
to get triggered again, I'm like, I can do this. I want to invent things that look good and have a story behind them. And like all these things that involve the marketing of a good, well-made product. So right about in there, as I was getting close to finishing that industrial design degree, my mom passed away. She, we were doing construction on our house, adding a second floor. We think she went up to the roof, which was gone at the time to try to pull the tarps over.

Jason Scott Montoya (22:13)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (22:37)
and it was raining and we think she slipped off of the roof and fell into this pit where they were getting ready to lay a foundation for a porch, broke a rib, punctured her lung, broke her wrist. She was out before the ambulance got there and that was 15 years ago I think. It was when I was 25 so maybe a little bit more, you know 19 years ago. And uh

Jason Scott Montoya (22:53)
How long ago was that?

Okay. 19, yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (23:06)
Um, at that point I was like, okay, um, God, I have this choice here. Oh, throughout this whole time, I was struggling with the faith of my youth. It just, my analytical brain reading the Bible and seeing what church was preaching just cause a lot of cognitive dissonance. And so I was, that was one of my motivations along the path the whole way. Like, how do I help? How do I survive this process of this? Like.

finding faith for myself. And when my mom passed away, I was like, okay, wow, I have a choice here. I can either believe that there is no God and that this is all part of a universe built on accidents, or I can say, and step in the direction of belief that says it's for a purpose, and now we take her legacy, carry it forward so that...

the way she lived her life, we can use as a purpose to help other people heal and live their lives better too. So that marked my life in a way. And so then finished my degree, got my first job in Kansas doing patio furniture, designing outdoor decor and patio furniture, everything from garden gnomes to pots to bird feeders.

It was a lot of fun. But that moved me to Atlanta. And then I did that for years in Atlanta, got let go, partly because I think I'm not great at a 9 to 5 job, worked a couple other things in between there, then went out as a freelancer on my own doing illustration and a little bit of product design as a freelancer. And

Jason Scott Montoya (24:44)
haha

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (25:00)
at the same time finally coming to maturity in writing and drawing. So I started building my platform as a writer, wrote several books, and was doing a lot of art, started a blog where I could finally put together all of these solutions to this faith problem that I had been working on. I could put those into some creative form to deliver a message to help people who were struggling with that.

that struggle that I had gone through with their faith. And now this kind of gets us close to today. I started working for a company that, I'm still a freelancer, but they're my main contract. I do visual note taking. So I get to go to all these corporate events and hear the inside scoop of what's going on with these big companies while I'm taking notes. I take visual notes for them.

And so seeing all this movement of the industry and the world and technology, I'm now in my free time, which is about four days a week, taking my art, my writing, my product design experience and all of the trends I've seen going on in the world as far as like where culture is leaning, where technology with AI and stuff is giving us new capabilities.

And I'm funneling it all now into this app that I'm building called Creature Habits app to try to harness the kind of magic that Instagram and TikTok and YouTube harness within, using the dopamine in your brain. I'm trying to make spiritual disciplines, the world's favorite distractions using this product design capabilities that I have, the art that I've made to make the scriptures engaging.

and stories in order to engage the heart and set that vision of what we really can be and kind of set into people the heart of God and what he hopes that we can become.

Jason Scott Montoya (27:04)
Yeah, so yeah, that's interesting. A lot there, I wanna pull out a couple thoughts for you to kind of expand on. So I wanna start, I'd be curious, because you talked a little bit about with your mom's death, how kind of the fork in the road that you faced and how you responded. And this, obviously that was your story to tell, and you can go into whatever degree of depth you want on this next question. But I'm curious, how did the rest of your family

handle that and how did your response affect them or differ from them? We'll start there.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (27:44)
Yeah, we had a really atypical response actually. We all left on good terms with my mother. She loved us well, we knew it, she knew, we loved her. And it was almost like her prayer as she died was that we would all be okay because we all just kind of took it in stride. We had our moments where we cried really hard, but most...

of the time, my dad and my brothers and I were able to just honor her life and mourn in those moments that it came to us, but move forward with the tools and love that she had equipped us with.

Jason Scott Montoya (28:29)
Yeah. So if someone is going through that now or has gone, has experienced that type of death in the near past in the last month or two, what would you tell them?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (28:44)
I'm gonna show you something. I wrote a book on this. This is a kid's book I wrote about two best friend donkeys and one of them gets taken away at some point. And I actually wrote this one after my uncle, my dad's twin brother died. I wrote it for my aunt and they had two donkeys named Squire and Daniel. So I wrote it in terms of that. But the moral of the story, the takeaway is that

Jason Scott Montoya (29:05)
Hmm

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (29:14)
Um, like losing someone is, can be extremely sad and really difficult, but there is a way that you can turn such a tragedy into good. And this I think is going to be a solution that can help a lot of people move from tragedy into making their lives and the lives around them better. It's this, it's basically like, all right, we no longer have that person on this world, but I can take the best parts of their lives, the lessons that they've taught me.

the love they poured into me, the stories in their life that are redemptive and amazing, and I can deliver that to other people in ways. I can take their legacy and all the love they gave me and start to pour into other people to make people around me feel my mom or feel that loved one in the ways that they gave to me. I can give that to other people.

Jason Scott Montoya (30:07)
Yeah, yeah, that's cool. You mentioned cognitive dissonance. Tell us, one, what that is, and two, if someone's feeling that now, what would you tell them?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (30:23)
Okay, now I have to give a modifier to this. Recently, in the past five years or so, I've realized I have diagnosable OCD. And whenever I would feel doubt, OCD is triggered when there's this deep, when a deep fear is in your mind and you have a powerful brain or an analytical brain.

Jason Scott Montoya (30:33)
Okay.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (30:49)
your brain has found that it is able to solve a lot of the problems in your life just by working harder. So when there's a real powerful fear in your life, your brain says, I can solve this. And so you become, you start doing these obsessive cycles where when doubt would hit me, for better or for worse, my brain would go to work and say like, wait, how can I solve this dissonance between what I read in the Bible and what I see in culture?

Cognitive dissonance is basically, as I understand it, when two things in your mind just are dangerous to each other. Like two realities can't be both true in your world. And what you want to do is to try to make them friends. So what I'm seeing is that, okay, here's an example of one.

Jason Scott Montoya (31:41)
Yeah

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (31:49)
Church was telling me hell is real. I look in the Bible and there's a lot of references to hell. It maybe isn't as black and white as a lot of like my conservative church culture growing up told me it was black and white. So maybe there's some leeway there that our culture has sort of interpreted as only one specific interpretation. And so my mind started going to work. Like what could hell be like? What does it mean if some people don't go there?

Could all people go there eventually somehow through some purification process? The person, the writer that has helped me most in this was C.S. Lewis. One of his creative solutions is this brilliant, he put it down in this brilliant book called The Great Divorce, where he painted this picture of, kind of a whimsical picture of a bunch of people arriving to heaven in a bus. And it is so real.

compared to our flimsy human souls, like that haven't, we know we are thrown by every wave of influence, by fashion, by our desires. That makes us not very solid, but the things of heaven are so solid that when these people stepped out of the bus and the grass touched their feet, it poked them like nails because it was so real in comparison to them. And a lot of them said,

Jason Scott Montoya (32:56)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (33:13)
I don't want to go through this process that's going to hurt, even if it makes me harder and more firm and more solid, which is I think the aim of heaven and the aim of God for us, which is what we're seeing when we see people becoming their truest selves in movies and stuff and are most healed and holy selves. And I think the process will just continue when we're in heaven. But people say, wait, I don't want to go through this hard process. I'm going to go where it's easiest and I'm going to go take the bus back down.

to what C.S. Lewis kind of painted as hell, which is basically you can go wherever you want and appease any of your desires to the fullest extent that you would want to. And it just, it creates this expansive landscape of people creating the biggest houses they can, but being farther away from anybody in, that they far away from anybody because whenever you're gonna have...

interaction with people, there's gonna be differences which lead to conflict. And so the best easiest way in hell to get away from that is to move away from everyone. So what this creates is people who are extremely unhappy because they want, they take, but they're never satisfied with the things that truly give life because they're too hard to get. And they're alienated from other people because they push themselves away because it causes conflict. And so them,

running towards their most surface level desires has taken them away from the growth to become their most solid, pure, heavenly, admirable, noble selves. And that is like one creative answer that I think it solves that cognitive dissonance that there is still in that model a heaven and a hell. Some people go to hell, but it's by their choice. And they're deciding that they don't wanna go through the hard process of becoming worthy of heaven.

Jason Scott Montoya (34:49)
Yeah.

Yeah, so in that sense, it's really the resistance towards the idea of hell is a resistance towards a particular conception of hell. And what C.S. Lewis is saying is he's bringing a conception of hell that makes a lot of sense and also is not in conflict with, but in harmony with a loving God, right? Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (35:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and I think it takes a bending of the way that we've heard hell. And I think maybe when we had a young faith, fear was enough to motivate us towards doing good, like the fear of hell. And maybe, as we grew as a culture, there was a time where the fear of hell was the right tactic to motivate us to doing good. Just like you were probably telling your kids, like,

Jason Scott Montoya (35:41)
the

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (35:54)
Hey, I can't explain to you why you don't want to be on social media at this age. You just got to trust me guys. There's predators out there. You're going to get stolen and kidnapped if you don't like, you know, something, you got to say something maybe that simplifies it enough that they understand. Stay away. But as they get older, you can be like, okay, well, I told you that cause I needed you to stay off of it. It's not completely true. Let me add some nuance.

Jason Scott Montoya (36:08)
Heh heh.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (36:21)
and maybe us as a culture, as we've grown, we're now at this stage where we're looking for those more nuanced, real adult answers and we're ready to have.

Jason Scott Montoya (36:30)
Yeah, yeah. And I think...

Yeah, the whole educational thing, I mean, part of that is to your point, like I think if it's good faith, you're trying to convey something where they grasp it enough to respond. But I think at the same time, it can also be exploited for manipulative purposes. And sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two. And sometimes we might experience good faith and someone else might experience bad faith. The story might be the same. But that spirit drives different behaviors as well.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (36:49)
Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, well said.

Jason Scott Montoya (37:03)
So the third thing I wanted to bring out from your story, because you talk about the design and the creative solutions. In America, when it comes to our churches, they don't particularly seem to prioritize design, they prioritize function. And you don't have, like in Europe, you had these beautiful cathedrals and church designs and architectural marvels in many cases.

And at least, I don't know if this is the case with America since its inception, but a large portion of church architecture seems to be the opposite of that. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that and how you feel about it.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (37:46)
Yeah, I think communities of older generations were more of a tribe together. We have gotten to this place, I'm guessing since maybe the 60s and 70s, 1960s and 70s, where we've really prized the self and like what I want is supreme and it's okay, as long as everyone else gets what they want.

But you know, families have gotten further and further away, kind of like that hell picture. You know, we no longer live with the people that are difficult to live with, even though it's good to be with people who are ready to like help you become that better person. Hopefully they're healthy enough to do it in a good way. So back then, what was communicated to the community was we have spent the most time on this one building in the center of your community, because we want to show God

and everyone else that this is what we prize most of all. A cathedral that is beautiful, it's got the ornate paintings and carvings and stuff like that. And this is what we value as a community. And we just assume all you guys are coming around as in solidarity here. You all are just assumed that you're Christians. Now we've moved into this age where it is much more about like my independent.

Decision making is prized above all and we each need to have like our own reasons for what we believe in and in fact It's really encouraged. I think that we think independently and that we have views that are ours and only ours Or you know have the story of how we came to it and can back it up Unfortunately, what's that what that's done is we've lost the like community power together

And now it's like what functions for me as a self, as a person. So when they used to, you know, sit in these congregations of, you know, in these old cathedrals and it was like when I go sit in those things, I'm like, there is so much echo, maybe the stone walls helped project further, but it is dang hard to understand the articulation of the, of the, of the preacher or the priest. And especially if they're doing it in Latin.

Jason Scott Montoya (39:53)
Yeah

Hahaha.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (40:04)
Like a lot of those old, you know, European communities especially did. So back then, basically, they didn't need to know all the nuances of, you know, like the reason hell is the way it is because all they needed to do needed to know was just this is what you got to do. And that as a community, they have this agreed upon ethic. Now though.

We are each looking for our reasons for doing what we feel like is right to do. And so a big echoey church isn't as helpful because we need to have that curiosity in our head appeased where we can go seek out the answers of like why the pastor said this about this scripture. Do I actually think that's how it should be treated? I'm gonna go to,

Biblegateway.com, let's look up the background to it. What I wanna do with the app is basically put all of that at your fingertips. And I even give some notable speakers on the topic, but I don't want it to all be one message. I want this app to be you communicating with God and hearing from him your personal directions of what he wants you to do. It's informed by Bible project videos, by...

Jason Scott Montoya (41:02)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (41:27)
the Baymaw, the Baymaw podcast, which is another great perspective. And it has David Gushy's, I think that's his name, commentary, he pulls together a lot of different ancient commentaries and his own for different scriptures and stuff like that. And I wanna equip you to make your own decisions because I feel like that's where we're at as a culture. It is all about relationship, right?

Jason Scott Montoya (41:29)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (41:55)
We are in right standing with God if we have a relationship with Him, we've been told in our generation. And so the best way to do that is to hear from God what He is telling you to do, not just necessarily taking what the pastor says for granted.

Jason Scott Montoya (42:09)
Yeah, yeah, that's

interesting. So, let's move forward to the next set of questions. When we talk about, I think it kinda ties into some of the things you're saying here. But what do you think about when you think about living better and working smarter? And how does that play a role in for you?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (42:12)
As granted, yeah.

Yeah, okay, so remember when I was talking about, this is probably what you're referring to, when I would watch the sun go down and I would just feel a depression that I didn't get everything done that I wanted to. I think I had a glimpse of my potential back then. And since then, even till today, I'm on this process of refining it. You and I, before we started recording, we're talking about doing retreats. So every week in the app, there's a cadence where you answer three questions.

what went well in the last week, what do you want to work on in the coming week, or what went wrong that you want to fix. And then the third column is how do you want to solve it, what things do you need to work into your life to solve it. There's another section in the app where you can write down your habits and the prompts which will lead to you doing these habits. So all what we're talking about here is that same instinct that we wanted to see in other characters.

and we want for ourselves becoming that best self, that best self, like reaching that full potential that we have within us, whether it be emotional healing or our capabilities being maximized or the product of influence that we have in this world being maximized. It comes down to us being able to manage this amazing tool that we have been given. The most powerful tool in the world is the human body with the brain, the hands, the mouth, the feet to accomplish these things in this world.

And it's just a matter of like sharpening your tool over time so that you can have the biggest greatest effect. And so I've been getting big into habits lately. It started out a few years ago with Atomic Habits, this book by James Clear and where he laid out.

Jason Scott Montoya (43:59)
Yeah.

Okay, yeah. I read another one that's along the lines called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (44:17)
Oh man, okay, that's a new one for my reading list. I just finished.

Jason Scott Montoya (44:19)
Yeah, it was written before Atomic Habits, and I think Atomic Habits has some stuff that it borrows from it, so yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (44:26)
Oh man, super cool. Okay, I have a new one for you. The one I read recently is Tiny Habits, I think by VJ Fogg. And it took Atomic Habits to the next level and these are actually working. Yeah, Tiny Habits. So basically what I learned in Atomic Habits is you can set big goals for yourself. But if you set a big goal for yourself at the beginning of the year,

Jason Scott Montoya (44:28)
Yeah. Okay.

Cool.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (44:52)

there's no systems in place to make you accomplish it. So you need to set habits in place that you do every day, or a cadence of every week or every month, because once you get this, the reoccurring, what do you call that in finances, when you invest a little bit and it starts to just, yeah, so you get this compounding interest. My buddy, Kim Young Kim is doing a podcast on this and he relates it to compound interest that if you put your mind towards something consistently for 365 days,

Jason Scott Montoya (44:58)
Yeah.

Oh, compounding interest.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (45:22)
you build up this great accomplishment because you stuck to doing the little steps every day. And so the app has a place for you to drop in this actions that you wanna take into a matrix of how you're gonna get it done. And it basically comes down to two main things. You gotta make your habit doable. Like if you wanna work out and it...

Jason Scott Montoya (45:29)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (45:51)
requires that you change your clothes, drive 30 minutes, pay $40 a month, and I'm not gonna work out if there's just all these things in your day. So finding things that are easy enough that I actually do them every day. And the habit, a series of habits doesn't get interrupted because that's death of a habit as soon as it stops being done because it's just too hard. The second important element to creating good habits is you have to have a good prompt.

Jason Scott Montoya (46:00)
Hehehe

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (46:19)
because even if something is really easy to do, if you don't have that thing in your day that reminds you now is when you do your habit, you're not gonna do it likely. So BJ Fogg basically says like, pick a habit that's doable and then pick that thing that happens right before it that you do in your day anyways, that makes you think like, oh, now I'm gonna do the habit. He uses this example that he wanted to do, he wanted to become stronger. So he said, every time I go to the bathroom, I'm gonna...

Jason Scott Montoya (46:25)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (46:49)
get down and do 10 push-ups. And so at the end of his day, I don't know, he's done 70 push-ups or something, which is more than he'd ever done before. So for me right now, I've tried to set up this series of habits that I get done first thing in the morning. So as soon as I wake up, I go and do 10 push-ups, or sorry, 20 push-ups, 40 sit-ups, and 10 pull-ups. In the meantime, I've started tea for my wife. Maybe by the time I'm done with my...

Jason Scott Montoya (46:54)
Yeah, yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (47:18)
push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups. The tea is ready. I pour the tea, take it into my wife, go climb back in bed with her, do my quiet time on the app, try to get through four of the screens, four spiritual disciplines. And then from there, I'm gonna try to go on a run. And in the run, I'm trying to listen to the basically Bible in a year. It's the Bible recap thing that she has encouraged me to do. We're doing it together.

Jason Scott Montoya (47:42)
Hmm.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (47:47)
And so I'm accomplishing a couple of things at once. The run is easy. Like I'm going to have to shower anyways. So I basically put pants on in order to do this so easy. And everything's working together. So the ability is there. The prompt is there. It's like when I wake up, I do this, and this leads to this, and this leads to this. And I get my morning started right. And so, oh, and another thing I've worked in is that as I'm using my app,

Jason Scott Montoya (48:00)
Hehehe

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (48:17)
I just note like, oh, actually, this could be refined or, oh, hey, this little button isn't working the way I want it to. That's right. Yeah. So that I'm working that refinement cycle into the habits as well. So I'm just, I'm just trying to create these systems, which makes me operate at my best possible level.

Jason Scott Montoya (48:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, you're making you're using it to make it better

Yeah. So talking about systems, is there anything more you would add to that when you think about the idea of systems and how that works and how that plays out throughout the rest of your day and your work as well?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (48:48)
Hmm. So the retreats are super cool. Like, um, cause I can be moving, I can have my habits in place and doing them like a little hamster on a hamster wheel. Um, until I lift my head up from it, look back at it from afar and say like, okay, all that work I did this week, it was pretty good, but what could be improved and I make these little adjustments throughout the year.

The goal is every week for me. I used to do it every month. I would take I would rent an Airbnb At least an hour outside of the city go stay for a night and just reflect on how the whole How the last month went now? I just realized that like I want to do it every week just to adjust every week and so that's it that's a huge one because If you're doing a habit you can get a lot done, but if it's not in the right direction You can be moving

Jason Scott Montoya (49:16)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (49:44)
but if you don't get it to the right spot, then not much good is done.

Jason Scott Montoya (49:47)
Yeah, you gotta realign along the way or you don't end up in the right place, right? I mean, that's what an airplane does is it, you could be one degree off and it's constant because of the winds and everything, it has to constantly recalibrate. And if it didn't recalibrate along the way, then it wouldn't get, even if it had the right destination from the beginning, if it didn't recalibrate to that destination every step of the way, then it would never get there. So, yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (49:55)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And you know, something about making a product for people, you need constant feedback. And with new technologies, you need to see if you're using the right technology for the job. And just learning how to use this tool that is my body, there's going to be room for improvement. So just this constant assessment just takes into account

Jason Scott Montoya (50:28)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (50:41)
the realities that we need feedback on this journey because the original goal that we set our heart on at the very beginning probably isn't gonna look exactly like the final best goal once we're moving towards it. We need to adjust along the way.

Jason Scott Montoya (50:55)
Yeah.

Yeah. So how does mentoring play a part in this whole picture that we're, this whole story we're describing?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (51:06)
Yeah, I'm not super good at involving mentoring in my life. I, a few weeks ago, maybe a month or two ago, called an old friend of my dad's who I really like and respect what he's done and said, hey, can we do mentoring? And it's been great so far. I try to call him every other week and he'll usually give me a sound bite that in our talk at some point, he'll give me a sound bite where I'm like...

I refer to that several times throughout my week and I'm like, okay, yeah, let's lean into this. This seems good and it'll help make those little mini adjustments to stay on track or to make me move towards my best self. I used to have a mentor who was a navigator years ago too. We met for five, seven years, something like that, weekly or bi-weekly or every other week. The method of the navigators are a lot of like...

really like what do they call it? Like a routine of Bible studies, like I think deductive Bible studies and discipleship. So like they say, I'm doing this for you, it's just this cut and dry method, this method, and you we expect will do it for other people. And it just was not my style to read the Bible with such a black and white sort of method. Thus, this my app, you know, takes into

Jason Scott Montoya (52:22)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (52:32)
the Bible in creative ways. But having a man pour into me who had been through life ahead of me and was able to give me that like outside perspective, like Ross, I think the stories you're telling yourself aren't the best ones, let me speak into that. I think about what my takeaways are from my time with him. And again, it was like sound bites that work themselves into my mental processes to correct it at certain stages. One example of a great image that he gave me,

was if you're really stressing about something, this may be what's really happening. Picture a man hanging by his fingertips off the edge of a cliff, and he's screaming for his life because he thinks if he lets go, he's gonna plummet to his death. Now, imagine someone comes up to him and says, hey, look down, you're only a foot off the ground. All that stress goes away. So sometimes when we're stressing, we need to like back up and say like, okay,

Jason Scott Montoya (53:26)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (53:31)
what really is at stake here? Let me look down and see if what I'm scared of is really, really that bad. And so it's like things like that, which short circuit my bad thinking and replace it with like more healthy thinking. And I think, you know how we've talked about the development of society over ages, how we started kind of as children and we thought as a community and we've grown into these like really high, more nuanced individuals for good or bad.

Jason Scott Montoya (54:01)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (54:01)
I think that we build ourselves on the wisdom of the past generations. Unfortunately, we have a short memory. Two generations ago probably had a lot of wisdom that didn't get carried through to me today. Because, you know, we also have a tendency to swing so far to one side that we no longer value what was the opposing side, which we are rebelling from.

Jason Scott Montoya (54:27)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (54:29)
But I think it's really important that we see that every wisdom came from some nugget of truth. And I wish we had a better way to package and deliver these wisdoms through the ages. But the best we have right now is like these sound bites where our stories that I guess are... What's that? Memes! Yeah, kinda like memes. Yeah, sort of like mind memes.

Jason Scott Montoya (54:50)
Memes, right? Memes, really, right? Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (54:58)
that were passed on, that we have worked themselves into our thinking and hopefully over time, the good ones have stuck and have brought us to a higher stage. So if you can tap a previous generation in order to help you give those stepping stones, those mental reroutes to make you become the best person you can be, that's great. And bringing it back to story, in the hero's journey, the Joseph Campbell model or the...

Donald Miller leans a lot into the hero's journey. A large component of that is the mentor that helps insert some wisdom into the hero's journey, which gives them just enough wisdom to get over the hump of the resistance they're feeling and find that final victory or that redemption or that healing. And I think that's basically because that is part of our, how this thing works.

We need that extra bit of information, which will take us to the next stage and work into our thinking to make us that better person. And whether we take it hook, line and sinker, or we take it and analyze it to apply to our situation, so that we understand a more nuanced version of that advice, it's meant to make us bigger. I think that's the key to unlock us to the next level a lot of times, so that we don't have to experience it the hard way on our own.

Jason Scott Montoya (56:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (56:21)

Jason Scott Montoya (56:21)
Yeah, well, and I guess in a lot of ways, you're taking that idea and you're now mentoring others through your Instagram, through your app, in a systematic way, right?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (56:30)
Mm-hmm. Hopefully.

Yeah, that's what I really want to do. I want to get to this place and it's a continual process. I have all these mini story loops going on where I have a struggle, I work hard and come to some conclusion that can be helpful to others and I try to deliver it and at the same time in the background other struggles and other areas are happening. Hopefully I come to a nugget of truth that I can deliver and I try to deliver that through the art story memes. Yeah. Yep.

Jason Scott Montoya (57:03)
Yeah, yeah. What else did you want to share with us that you didn't get a chance to share so far?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (57:10)
Man, I feel like we've covered a lot of stuff. I would love for people to check out the app. I think it has the potential to innovate people's prayer lives and interactions, relationship with scripture and with God. So.

Jason Scott Montoya (57:12)
We have.

Tell us who would be a good fit and then where they can find it if they're interested.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (57:31)
Sure, yeah, totally. Okay, so people like me are a good fit. People who have struggled through their faith and they feel like simply taking an answer from one pastor on stage isn't the depths that they wanna go. They wanna go deeper. They wanna go take advice from pastors. They wanna look at the, they wanna have access to like word studies and Bible project videos, which give you that interactive contact and everything.

while engaging with God in a personal level, inviting him to speak into the process at every stage. People who want to take their addiction to Instagram and redirect it to be an addiction to spiritual disciplines. Like that's my goal. I don't know if it'll ever be that good because Instagram gives us all those surface level wins, all those surface level endorphins. But I hope that instead of scrolling

Jason Scott Montoya (58:20)
Hehehe

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (58:31)
on Instagram and feeling this general malaise of doing nothing for the past half hour. You get done with the app and you've gotten pulled in and gotten stuck scrolling on things, but every one of those pages embraces this growth mindset. It encourages you to take in this bit of wisdom from God or this way to harness your habits and find the prompts to trigger those habits, those retreat moments, and to make your life better, more connected with God.

Jason Scott Montoya (58:50)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (59:00)
more loving of others and using even AI and chat GBT to bring in modern technology to give you new angles that you can think of things and give you background studies and context, given with the like, okay, hey, take AI for what it's worth right here. And if it adds something to your life, use it. Otherwise, dismiss it. But it sure does add a lot of interesting things to the Bible study, I think.

Jason Scott Montoya (59:20)
Yeah.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (59:26)
And it's just in a little window on its own so that you can click it and then you go into that world of AI. Otherwise it's just all these other resources that I've mentioned in the app.

Jason Scott Montoya (59:26)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Okay, cool. So that's on iPhone and Android. People can download those from the Google store or the iPhone app, Apple store.

What else? Go ahead.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (59:44)
Yep, and it also has its own webpage, creaturehabits.org.

Jason Scott Montoya (59:50)
Okay.

creaturehabits.org. And that is how to access the app or that's separate from the app.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (59:54)
Yeah.

It's actually a web version of the app. Yeah.

Jason Scott Montoya (01:00:03)
Okay, okay. So someone could get it on their desktop computer or some device that may not have the app store.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (01:00:10)
That's right. And so if you do your quiet time and you have your journal and stuff on your phone, it carries over when you log in on the on the web page on your desktop. It doesn't work as good as not optimized for desktop, but it's functional.

Jason Scott Montoya (01:00:19)
Okay.

Yeah, yeah. How else can people connect with you?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (01:00:28)
Man, I would love anybody to reach out if they have any engagement with any of the stuff we've talked about. Instagram is where I communicate with the most number of people. I'm just at RossBoon.com, R-O- But if anything comes up that says Raw Spoon, I have several other accounts, like my Sketch Notes account or the Creature Habits account. That's my pen name, that's my artist name, Raw Spoon.

those might be as might be me as well. So look me up on Instagram but I have a webpage that's RawSpoon.com and you could also email me Ross.Boone with an E at the end at RawSpoon.com

Jason Scott Montoya (01:01:14)
Awesome. Well, I'll put those links in the notes so people can check those out and access those. Anything, any final words that you'd like to share with us before we close out here?

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (01:01:24)
Um, you know, I would love to hear any thoughts of yours, Jason, um, in reflection to the stuff we've talked about today, any, anything you're taking away.

Jason Scott Montoya (01:01:31)
Yeah, I think, yeah, there's a lot of interesting tidbits that those memes that you sort of dropped along the way. I think the language thing, kind of speaking a language that's not with words to a target audience in a way that meets them where they are, but doesn't necessarily

isn't necessarily obvious to everyone who's not looking for that language, which is an interesting kind of parallel to the idea of Christianity with God is this Trinity creature and the Spirit being one part of God, and the Spirit of God communicates to us. Often the Spirit of God is speaking to us in a way that we have to be in tune to hear what he's saying when

There's so much noise and distraction, like you said, that if we want to tune him out, it's easy enough to do.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (01:02:40)
I like it, I like it. Yeah, may we each get better at speaking this language that influences the people who are open to hear it in good ways, to be in their best selves and be that hero that God sees us in our story as.

Jason Scott Montoya (01:02:55)
Yeah, I saw a graphic that was similar to what you were saying on Instagram. I think it was from after school. And it was like a, I think it was a Lion King metaphor, but a picture of Scar and Mufasa. And it said something to speak about hell. It said, hell is discovering the potential you could have become in the face of who you actually became or something like that. And it had a picture of Scar and Mufasa,

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (01:03:21)
Whoa.

Jason Scott Montoya (01:03:23)
so.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (01:03:23)
Oh man, I think that goes back to the heaven journey that God knows what we can become. We move towards it in this life, but in heaven we'll have the potential to fully eventually get closer and closer to that self that he's made us to be. One real quick thing, I went to seminary, I forgot that part of my journey, but my thesis was why does suffering exist here? You know, why do bad things happen to good people? The study of.

Jason Scott Montoya (01:03:49)
Bye.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (01:03:53)
theodicy. And one of my reasons was this world provides something to help us grow that heaven doesn't have. It has opposition, resistance, rebellion. It has all these things which have this great power to strengthen the soul, to teach perseverance, to teach resistance to evil, to teach strength in the face of resistance.

So that's what makes an amazing story. I don't know what the stories of heaven are gonna be like, but the stories of earth are us being confronted with resistance. We are growing into that type of person that can overcome those things. And I think that is the heart of God for us in this earth. And that's why we resonate so much when we see people doing that in movies and in books.

Jason Scott Montoya (01:04:47)
Yeah, well that's a great place to end it. So thank you so much for sharing your life with us today, Ross.

Ross Boone (Raw Spoon) (01:04:52)
Jason, this was so fun. Thanks so much for having me.