BONUS: If You Feel Like Giving Up (with Jeff Cavins) - 2026

**Fr. Mike Schmitz** (0:04)
Hi, my name is Fr. Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to The Bible in a Year podcast. In fact, you might even be watching The Bible in a Year podcast where we encounter God's voice and live life through the lens of scripture. The Bible in a Year podcast is brought to you by Ascension. Using The Great Adventure Bible Timeline, we'll read all the way from Genesis to Revelation, discovering how the story of salvation unfolds and how we fit into that story today. This is our first time where we're not only having the audio, obviously here, but we're also doing a video of Jeff and myself having an opportunity to sit down and just take one moment to address all of you, the community, the Bible in a Year community who have been journeying with us for so long. In fact, the journey might feel like the Israelites in the wilderness, the journey might feel like those prophets who got beat up. The journey might feel like those in exile. And so we just wanted to take a moment and just offer some words, words of encouragement to help us do that none other than Jeff Cavins is joining us to, yeah, to give us that word, that word of wisdom, that word of encouragement, that word of hope. Well, it's welcome, Jeff.

**Jeff Cavins** (1:02)
Good to be with you. Nice to see you.

**Fr. Mike Schmitz** (1:04)
Good to see you too. I love the fact that your camera is so much better than mine.
And I say, I love the fact. I love it. But Jeff, I know that I've been saying ever since the beginning that people think that Leviticus was going to be the hardest. Deuteronomy, Numbers, that was going to be the most difficult. And I was like, I think it's going to be the prophets. I think it's going to be the fact that we are going to stay for months. We are going to stay and walk for months with the prophets and their words of conviction, their words of telling people to repent, telling people to brace for what's coming. And I think it might have affected some of our hearts in some ways.

**Jeff Cavins** (1:39)
Yeah. Well, it certainly is a difficult time to read in the Bible, when you're talking about the things that Israel's doing wrong and the prophets are speaking to them and giving a warning. And there's so much of it. If you take your Bible and you hold it up on the side, a good portion of the Old Testament are the prophets. And of course, reading the Bible in chronological order, as we're doing, we're not really called to read those just one after another, but it's more important to know when that prophet speaks and who, to whom the prophet is speaking. And that's what you're doing. So first, I'd love to say, hey, congratulations to everyone for getting this far, you have already done something that very few people have done. I mean, there's a lot of people who have read the Bible, you know, straight through, and they don't understand it that well, but you've taken the time to actually go through it in chronological form.
And at first it was like, oh, this is so cool, this is amazing. And then you can fall into that confusion, you know, with the prophets where you have to back up and say, okay, I'm going to embrace the narrative, and I'm going to have other times in my life where I can go back and read these prophets in their proper place and go deeper with it. But I would encourage you not to be discouraged when you are deep in the prophets.

**Fr. Mike Schmitz** (3:06)
Well, that's, and that's too one of the things I was speaking with a student just the other day of mine, who said that the prophets have been so heavy, and not only that, but they experienced a word of conviction that turned into a word of condemnation. And it was one of the situations where they were just thinking, okay, in their prayer that they just, in their words, they said they seemed like the evil one was trying to distort God's words of conviction towards repentance and oriented towards, okay, turn back to me and turn it into something where they were feeling condemned. And it was so good because we were able to identify that fact that, I mean, we have found out even Satan can quote scripture, right? So that sense of being able to say, can I misapply God's word to my life? And the answer, of course, is yes. Can I misapply God's word to anything in life? The answer is yes, because it seems to me that as we went through or are going through the prophets, that there is a word of, I mean, think of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah that has the Book of Woe and the Book of Consolation, and yet even in the woe times, there are so many moments where God's word of hope breaks through, and God's word of comfort breaks through, and God's word of like, but this isn't because I want to destroy you. This is because I want to save you. And that always keeps coming back to me to remind me of this is why God is allowing this to happen.