Join Angie and her guest, Grace Fox, as they discuss the universal language of love and kindness. Through Grace’s captivating stories from her devotions, we learn how acts of kindness transcend cultural barriers and foster meaningful connections. This episode is a heartfelt exploration of how love can bridge differences and remind us of our shared humanity, punctuated by personal anecdotes that emphasize the importance of being accepting like children.
00:20:57 Cross-Cultural Connection Through Acts of Kindness
SPEAKER 02 :
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SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 06 :
Hey there, friend. Angie Austin and Jim Stovall here with The Good News. Morning, Jim. How are you?
SPEAKER 04 :
I am great, and it’s always good to be with you.
SPEAKER 06 :
I guess it’s afternoon, but whatever. It’s still great to be with you. We’re talking about minimum and maximum this week in your winner’s wisdom column. So what’s that all about?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, regular readers of my Winner’s Wisdom column or those who listen to your and my conversations on a regular basis will know that several months ago we talked about this new phenomenon throughout our society called quiet quitting. Oh, yes. Where, yeah, people just had decided that – I’m going to do the least I can on my job while I’m looking for another job, or just as a long-term strategy, I’m just not doing anything extra. I’m doing as little as I can.
SPEAKER 06 :
Which we used to call being a slacker.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it’s bad enough to be one, but let’s just don’t form a club and a group and make it like some kind of a hero worship we have. Well, now there’s a new one that’s just come out called Bare Minimum Monday. And As happens with so many people, it started out well. There was a lady who was a very successful entrepreneur, and she talked about coming to work on Mondays with just a pile of things on her desk that come in over the weekend. And that happens to me every week. And she decided, I’m going to perform what I call Bare Minimum Monday, which means… I’m going to look at all this stuff and what do I have to get done today? What are the most important things? And I’m going to do those as a bare minimum. I’m going to at least do the things I have to do and not worry about this mountain of stuff. Well, that’s a good plan. And I will admit I do something very, very similar to that. But employees from companies heard about this. And they decided that bare minimum Monday should mean, well, we should come back to work on Monday and kind of ease into the work week. So for the first two to four hours, we should be able to take naps, play games, listen to music, watch TV for the first two to four hours to kind of ease back into the work week. And I mean, this is just so absurd. You know, and these are people, Angie, they just got back from a weekend. And now you have to kind of ease into it because you’re tired or you’re whatever. And, you know, I just think, can you imagine someone coming to a job interview and saying, well, you know, hey, I want this job, but you need to know the first two to four hours on Mondays, I like to take a nap, read a little, play some games, maybe catch a TV show or two. Mm-hmm. You know, I mean, this wasn’t the arrangement. And people think, well, it’s only two to four hours. Well, that’s five to ten percent of your workload. And if you took these same people, Angie, and you just docked their pay five to ten percent without telling them, you know, you would have riots in the street. And so once again, this is it’s bad enough to have this. But then to say, hey, there’s a group and you should join us in this movement. It’s just, it’s beyond me. And we become like the people we hang around with all the time. So we need to be very, very careful who’s in our circle.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, you hear that so often. And it’s just a great reminder, you know, about the whole birds of a feather flock together. A lot of these are old concepts, you know, that they’re renaming. But, you know, slacking never gets you ahead in life. So like right now, my husband’s doing this brick walkway in front of our house. Well, it ended up being a much bigger task than he expected because we probably had to dig down like a maybe 18 inches a foot and a half. And for a whole walkway through a front yard, that’s a lot of digging for a man, a 50-year-old man and his kids. And he actually gave me a section, Jim. And I said, just so you know, at my age, I’m not taking a section. digging 18 inches in the ground in the 95 degree heat, like with my scoliosis. I’m like, bro, you are delusional. He goes, all right, fine, I’ll take your section. I said, you know, we can get, we can rent like a, you know, a tool for that, or we can rent, you know, a machine for that. This doesn’t have to be hand dug. But anyway, that’s what he did, right? So Jim, he’s been working on this for like, I’d say two or three months, but we’ve had It’s not like Colorado. We’ve had a ton of rain. So it turned into a lazy river. So we can’t finish it until we get some drier weather. So anyway, if he was a slacker, we wouldn’t have a walkway for a couple of years. If you’re a slacker at work, I believe you’re a slacker at life. I believe you’re a slacker in your relationships. I believe you’re a slacker in taking care of your home, your kids, your loved ones, making meals. I think it all dribbles over. And my husband is like the hardest worker I’ve ever met when it comes to at his job, at home. And like tonight he’s doing basketball practice and that’ll be after he does like a 10 hour day. And yesterday in between the volleyball tournament games, he’d run home and shovel gravel because we’re using gravel as the base. So anyway, to make a long story short, his father is just like that. Somebody brought a salad for Christmas, right? Jim, this is so funny. And the onions were in uneven big chunks. And he goes, look at this. I go, she’s probably in a hurry. She goes, no, that shows you don’t care and you’re not willing to do a good job. And I was like, it’s a salad, right? But he interpreted the salad as a representation of her laziness. It’s somebody in our family that doesn’t live here and isn’t listening. But his dad interpreted – and that’s what my husband says all the time about the kids. He’s like, I’m not – comfortable with their C work, like when you open the dishwasher and it’s all helter skelter, you know. And so people who do a good job at work, I think, do a good job at life. And I think this is indicative of a sloppy, lazy, unfulfilled life if you’re doing minimum Monday, bare minimum Monday. And if you’re doing quiet quitting, which is just slacking, it’s stealing. It’s stealing from your employer.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s exactly right. And as you pointed out, the way we do anything is the way we do everything. And you can’t say, well, for eight hours, I’m just going to kind of sneak around at the office or at the factory or on the job and do the least I can. But then I’m going to go be a good parent, whatever. You can’t do that. And, you know, my late great friend and mentor, John Wood, always said, Before you do anything, whether it’s build a sidewalk or chop onions for the salad, you ask yourself one question. What would I do right now if I were amazing? Because if it’s worth your time and your effort and your energy, it’s worth being amazing. And if it’s not worth doing your best, don’t do it at all. You know, like you said, I’m not digging no section here. I mean, you know, the Angie section is over on the porch viewing this. That’s the Angie section.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, and Jim, I do bring him out nice cold beverages. I get him plenty of sunscreen. If it starts to get shady, I bring out his deets, his bug killer. But I knew that would cause me pain and it would actually hurt the quality of my life because I do have a serious back issue with the scoliosis. So I knew that that kind of digging at my age would not be something that would be beneficial to my life and to my body. So I try to make up for it other ways or offer other solutions where we could rent something that would dig the dirt up. There’s some kind of machine you can get at Home Depot or whatever that helps you with that.
SPEAKER 04 :
But I guess nothing better than a cheerleader with a cold beverage. I mean, they also serve who stand and wait on you. I mean, it’s a great thing. And I have no problem with this, you know. But Napoleon Hill said that, you know, we’ve got to always remember that. that those people who do the least they can and won’t do anything more than what they’re paid for will never be paid for more than they do. And the way to get ahead is start right on your job. Now, I have heard since writing this column and it has appeared throughout North America, Europe, and Asia in a lot of magazines. So I hear from a lot of people or their newspaper or whatever, and they have said, you know, Jim, my employer, no matter how hard I work, I’ll never be rewarded. They don’t take care of me. They don’t care. Okay, if you work for someone like that, give them an honest day’s work. Do your very best while you’re looking for another job. Get out of there. And I will say this to fellow employers out there, guys like me. You’ve got to create a track that people can run on, that they can do their job, excel, and be rewarded for their effort. I want everybody that works for me to meet and succeed their highest possible goal while working here with what we do.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, you said everyone that works for you is a millionaire now because you wanted them to benefit from working there, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and I mean, anybody that’s worked for me, and we create a lot of success and financial information, and they’ve seen all this, and, you know, I mean, guys, if you’re not succeeding here with this information and doing what we talk about doing, you know, you’re really just not, you’re not paying attention. And, you know, I just really don’t want you here. You know, and I mean, one of the things I do in my company that kind of separates people You know, doing payroll is time consuming and expensive. So I don’t pay every week. I don’t pay every two weeks. We pay the monthly salary once a month. And anybody that comes to me and says, oh, I can’t make it that long. I can’t make it 30 days. Well, then, you know, you need to go get your life together. I mean, please. I mean, you know, and this is, you know, we don’t have minimum wage people here. This is, you know, we do high-level TV and movie production. But, you know, it’s just, you know, it’s time to really look at the life we’re given and the time. I mean, when you’re trading your time for someone else’s money and you’re going to put in the time anyway, you may as well do your best. And barely minimal Monday doesn’t work.
SPEAKER 06 :
And don’t you think, Jim, that you’ve saved a lot of money over the years because of your lack of turnover? Like how long have your employees stayed with you?
SPEAKER 04 :
The new person is going on 20 years. I mean, people don’t leave here. I can’t get rid of them. Now, I will say I’ve had some people recently, they retire early because, you know, they’ve got, you know, million-dollar portfolios sitting over there. And that’s great. That’s what we worked for, Jim.
SPEAKER 06 :
And you said your people are property owners as well?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, yeah. They all own their own homes, and nobody has a mortgage.
SPEAKER 06 :
Oh, my goodness. How many employees do you have?
SPEAKER 04 :
There are only, I mean, here in this little office, there are about 14 people in and around this, and then we have hundreds across the country that work at our TV affiliates and the places we deliver our programming. But my core group here is… As a blind guy, I like to work with a very small group of people that we’re a pretty tight team.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, I think when you say you mentioned that some of these employees that want to do the bare minimum Monday feel like their employers aren’t treating them well. So you’ve kind of covered that issue in your own establishment as well. And I just think that if you’re ever going to move up and make something of your life, you’ve got to give it more than the bare minimum. And the quiet quitting will get you quietly or not so quietly fired.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, absolutely. And I’ve had people, particularly when I go out to do arena events, they meet my team, the members that travel with me. And I had a guy for a Fortune 500 company tell me recently, man, that young lady, he was kind of joking, and he said, I’m going to hire her away from you. I said, if you can, go right ahead. I mean, give it a shot. See what happens. Because, I mean, if you can hire her away from me, that’s better for you and me. And he struck out pretty bad.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, you know people aren’t leaving because you take such good care of them. But teaching it to the kids, I have to be honest with you, it’s with their quote-unquote chores. And Jim, I was figuring, I’ll just be honest with you. I just got the bill for our one daughter’s club volleyball. that includes all of her travel trips as well and suffice it to say that it’s over a thousand dollars a month for a year okay so i thought to myself you know she complains about the dishes and stuff like that i’m going to start breaking it down and that every month she’s going to have to earn now i’m going to pay her well if it takes 20 minutes for the dishes i’m going to make each chore like 50 right and she’s not getting the cash but she’s getting the money applied to her bill and that we are no longer going to accept complaining about doing jobs or sea level work You know, so, you know, that’s going to be like charged to her quote unquote account. So we can get that really because we’ve got to teach them this good work ethic. And I heard somebody say recently that giving your kids chores is a surefire way to raise good kids. That was the one tip he gave. Jim Stovall dot com. We’re out of time. You’re the best friend. Thank you.
SPEAKER 03 :
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SPEAKER 05 :
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SPEAKER 06 :
Hey there, friend. Angie Austin and Grace Fox here. We are talking today about Love Speaking Every Language. Grace’s book is Fresh Hope for Today, Devotions for Joy on the Journey, the book that we’re discussing. She’s writing another one right now, and we are talking about the devotion Love Speaks Every Language. Welcome, Grace.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey, thanks for having me back, Angie.
SPEAKER 06 :
You are welcome. All right, so I love it that so many of these, I mean, I actually think I could write a devotional even though I couldn’t write a book and I’m not an author because I love that each one of these is really like a story and it just really makes you think.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, that’s it about devotions because, you know, I could write them doing heavy word studies and that’s important to be able to study God’s word and learn the what was the writer originally intending to say? What is the meaning of a key word in the original language, and what’s the context? You need to do all that, too, but when it comes to a short devotion like this, often it’s the story that connects, and then the teaching, it comes along with it. That just really helps us to apply God’s Word in the everyday situations that we face.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, and you use it when I say it’s a story. A lot of these are examples from your life. And I think back to when I’m at all these sports tournaments, people probably hear me talking about that a lot. And we had a bunch over the weekend. And I think about how I’m a peacemaker in so many of the situations and I don’t want to be in the drama and I don’t want to be the one causing the problems or the gossips. gossip and i think back to my childhood and there was domestic violence in our home alcoholism drug use you know brothers on drugs one brother’s homeless one brother he’s not right now he’s in a facility but he was homeless a bunch of his life one was murdered my dad was estranged from the family for 35 years i’m like of course i’m a peacemaker Like my stories from my childhood would be all about like how I tried to calm the waters, calm the storm, be a peacemaker. And it’s like, no wonder I’m the way I am. So I thought, wow, all these little stories that you use from your life, I love them. And I learned so much from them. And granted, I think you had a much nicer childhood and a much nicer, you know, and you raised your kids and now you’re raising your grandkids. But I have to say, Grace, I’ve caught up to you. you like through I think the Lord working on me and my life I think I am I have become more like you and then my kids will be raised more like you and how you raise your kids I don’t want to give any impression that I grew up in a perfect family or that I was a perfect parent because oh my goodness now as I’m a parent I look back I think I’ve
SPEAKER 05 :
If I could do things differently, I would do a lot of things differently. But we all do the best that we know at the time and learn as we go. And in my upbringing, I grew up in a home that was, I would say it was very religious. So we went to church every Sunday morning and we went to church every Sunday evening. Even if we had company, we ate supper early enough so that we could get back to church at 7 o’clock and then I went to midweek kids club when I was old enough to go to youth group. I did that. And I went to Christian summer camp, all of those things. But our home was not perfect. There was a lot of yelling that went on there. And so I brought that into my marriage to the yelling. And my husband looked at me when I first yelled at him as newlyweds. And he looked at me and he just said, I didn’t deserve that. And I was just, oh, broken hearted. Yeah.
SPEAKER 06 :
Oh, that’s so interesting because we yell too much. I’ve always said that we yelled. Everyone, the kid, my mother, you know, who’s lived on and off. She’s here right now, but she’s lived with us for on and off for 20 years, but not living here now. And the kids, but they learned it from us. And I grew up around that. So that is one thing that I haven’t been very good at fixing. So you yelled at your husband. So did you start to do that less?
SPEAKER 05 :
I did start to do that less because he talked to me about it. His mom never yelled. And I thought, how is that possible? How can a mother or a wife never yell? I don’t think she’s real. Something must be wrong with her if she doesn’t yell. That’s kind of how I thought. And the more I got to know my mother-in-law, the more I realized she’s just not that kind of person who yells. And my husband… Nobody else. He’s just got this thing about controlling his anger and doing it in a healthy way because that’s how we grew up.
SPEAKER 06 :
I love that.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, yeah. So I am, you know, I grew up in a, like I say, a religious home, but wow, I think we were all a piece of work back then.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, that’s a good reminder for me. And I love it that he just said to you, like, I don’t deserve that. One of my friend’s husbands was never hugged, so he didn’t really hug. But now he does. So when I met him, I’m like, I’m giving you a hug, right? That’s okay, right? Because you do that now, right? And she’s laughing, he’s laughing, and he gave me a big hug. But I think it’s neat the way we can change people. some of our behavior, especially if God matches us up with somebody that is so opposite of us, although I married a bigger yeller than I am. But that’s a good reminder for me to work on that. So when we talk about your devotion, Love Speaks Every Language, let’s talk about, you call your husband Sailor Man because you guys live on a boat. And so that’s how you refer to him in your book. So what was the story here in Love Speaks Every Language?
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, this is a fun one. See, we had to go to Egypt, and I trained some young adults that were interested in full-time missionary work, so young Middle Eastern adults. And we were on our way back from that, and we sat down in our plane. The woman who sat by the window was an Egyptian woman, probably my age is what I would guess, maybe a little bit younger, but then I was in the middle seat and she was in the aisle. And so… And we sat there for a long 45 minutes, something like that, before the plane ever took off. And she was busy talking on her phone the whole time. And this is 3.30 in the morning over there. But I’ve realized that people don’t go to sleep at the same time there that we go to sleep. And so she’s just talking on the phone, making one call after another after another at 3.30 a.m. And finally, when the plane took off, of course, she had to turn her phone off, and then she turned her attention to me. And we couldn’t speak a word of each other’s language. I couldn’t speak a word of Arabic, and she couldn’t speak a word of English. And, you know, I’m a Christian woman, and she was a woman of… I knew that she was a Muslim woman. And so it was just interesting. She reached down underneath the seat in front of her, and she pulls out this container like a tupperware type of container and she cracks it open and inside she’s got all kinds of homemade snacks and so she rips a little off she you know she offers it to me and then she reaches across me and offers it to gene and gene politely declined because he’s just not an adventurer when it comes to food but i am and so i helped myself and i thanked her and she smiled she was so pleased then she pulls out some little packets of And juice. I don’t even know how she got them on the plane, but she did. And she offered me one of those. And again, no words. We couldn’t speak any language, but it’s just a lot of nodding and smiling. And then I realized, you know what? I could just show her some pictures of my family. And maybe she’s got pictures on her phone. And that’s what we did. So the flight was about an hour, hour and a quarter long. And we spent the rest of that flight just flipping through our camera, the pictures and showing each other these pictures and just to hand actions and whatnot, we could kind of explain this as a child of ours, this is a grandchild. And at the end, I was able to take a selfie of the two of us. And, you know, gave each other a little hug. And I thought this is incredible, incredible that love speaks any language couldn’t speak each other’s language at all. But we had a wonderful time together. And that’s what love does. It just breaks down the walls.
SPEAKER 06 :
Isn’t that true? And you know who I see it with the most, Grace, is kids. I mean, that’s a wonderful example that I think actually is fairly rare, especially on a plane with people who speak different languages and that when she broke open all those snacks and everything that it kind of got going and you’re like, oh, well, what can I do? How can I communicate with her? And I’m sure you were getting a few good laughs out of it, too, because you can’t speak the same language. But I see it all the time with kids like on a like a playground so like younger well you know you’ve got grandkids so they’re all there and they’re from completely different backgrounds like I remember once well a couple of times when we volunteered at like a homeless shelter for families and just the kids start coming out of their kind of more like kind of a like a motel room you know facility like you know like they each have their own little room the families and So they come out and meet like in the middle and start playing on the playground equipment. And no one cared how much money you had or didn’t have or how bad your outfit was or, you know, what color your skin was or, you know, if you had a disability or, you know, no hand or whatever. They just play and became friends like friends. automatically, you know, like all of a sudden they were friends and then sharing snacks or whatever would just come automatically after that. And I think we so grow out of that, that we become so isolated from others who don’t look or sound like ourselves. I think many of us just travel in that little group, you know, in the neighborhood where everybody, you know, drives similar cars and lives in similar houses and from similar backgrounds and their kids go to the same school. But kids couldn’t care less. They just wanted to have a friend. They just want to share their love and their laughter.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s right. We can learn a lot from our children on how they can just be so accepting. That’s the word. As you were talking, that’s the word that came to my mind, that children are so accepting.
SPEAKER 06 :
When you talk about in your devotions, you have, you know, your scripture and you’ve got a ponder and a pray section. And in the ponder section, you say, identify someone different from yourself. How can you demonstrate love to that person? And it’s like, oh, that’s so interesting because my daughter plays basketball with kids from very different backgrounds. And she loves them all. In fact, she’ll say, Mom, the kids, like, we love each other. It’s the parents who have the problems. She’s like, we all get along great. We don’t complain about who gets put in or who gets more playing time. She said, it’s the parents. And she was going to invite one of the friends from her school to use my ticket at Cirque du Soleil because they were in Vegas this weekend. And I’d gotten a great deal on these front row seats. And I love Cirque du Soleil. So anyway, she invited a friend from school to go. Well, she couldn’t go. So she invited a friend from a single-parent family who hadn’t ever gone to Cirque du Soleil and brought her. And she just loved it. My kid at 14, and that’s when they kind of start isolating a little more and hanging out with kids that maybe they live in the same neighborhood or whatever. That’s what I love about some of these sports. My kid, Faith is her name, she couldn’t care less what you have. And one of the parents actually said to her on this trip, well, not everybody’s rich, Faith. And Faith said, well, I’m not rich. She said, my parents are. And I’m like, first of all, that’s not how I describe us, but I guess we are comfortable. Let’s put it that way. But it’s just funny that they perceive her differently than some of the other kids. But my daughter does not perceive herself to be different than the other kids.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s right. And kids are so, they can be so innocent in that way. I just think, again, you know, as Scripture says, unless we have faith like a child. Yes. And I think that as we get older, we get very complicated as people, I think. Yes. We just get very complicated, and we start developing opinions and perspectives that are based on what we see on social media or on the news or in the newspaper or whatever. But I think sometimes we just need to dial it back a bit and learn to see others and to see life through… a child’s eyes, we can learn a lot through a child.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, and I think that that’s what I do really. One of the things I love about the Christian faith is that we do kind of just love brothers and sisters in Christ. And I do see a lot of the backgrounds and wealth and lack thereof and race. Like a lot of that just kind of falls by the wayside because you really do have that commonality of faith. My, my, my, my, My husband’s aunt, they were never that close to this particular family, but I am. I love this aunt and the girls. And I’m like, I don’t know why. I just bonded with them. I always want to see them when I come into town, even when they’re not invited to anything at my husband’s family’s house. And it’s his dad’s sister. And I’m like, I don’t know. Why do I love them so much? He goes, it’s because you’re Christians. That’s why, because you’re into your faith and they’re into their faith. And I’m like, he’s right. You know, that’s it. Oh, we’re out of time. Gracefox.com. Fresh hope for today. Devotions for joy on the journey. And we just talked about the devotion. Love speaks every language. And it does. Thank you, Grace.
SPEAKER 05 :
You bet. We’ll talk to you next week.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
Join Angie and her guest, Grace Fox, as they discuss the universal language of love and kindness. Through Grace’s captivating stories from her devotions, we learn how acts of kindness transcend cultural barriers and foster meaningful connections. This episode is a heartfelt exploration of how love can bridge differences and remind us of our shared humanity, punctuated by personal anecdotes that emphasize the importance of being accepting like children.
