Remaining Faithful in Difficult Times with Brian Bird

Brian Bird, a writer, producer, and media professional, discusses his journey in the entertainment industry. He emphasizes overcoming challenges and setbacks. Bird shares how he started his career as a journalist before transitioning into TV and film, thanks to the encouragement of his mentors. He also talks about his work on the Hallmark Channel original series “When Calls The Heart,” which faced significant production issues before becoming a success. Brian has encouragement for all of us as we learn to say “yes” to opportunities, put in the necessary work, and remain faithful even in difficult times.

Show Notes:

Find Brian: When Calls the Heart | Instagram | Facebook | X

Transcription:

Brian Bird:

There’s so much dysfunction, there’s so much heartbreak, there’s so much depression. People have not discovered their one thing, which really is their primal reason for being. Rick Warren called it The Purpose Driven Life. You have to find your purpose and then pursue it with a passion.

Sarah Taylor:

Welcome our guest, Brian Bird to the Passion Meets Purpose podcast. You may not be familiar with his name, but my guess is that you’re familiar with his work. Brian has a mission as a writer and producer and a media professional to create high caliber, life-affirming redemptive true stories, with uplifting entertainment projects, which is why I love everything that he does. He’s got a co-founder and a partner, Michael Landon Jr. of Believe Pictures. You may have seen some of his projects like The Heart Of Man and The Case For Christ and Captive, or perhaps the Hallmark Channel original series When Calls The Heart and it’s in it’s what, 11th season now, Brian?

Brian Bird:

Yes, and thank you for that nice introduction. We just wrapped filming of season 11 last month or last week.

Sarah Taylor:

Last week, okay.

Brian Bird:

Yes. So it’s coming in 2024.

Sarah Taylor:

One of my favorite questions to ask a guest when we first begin is take me back to toddler Brian, or grade school Brian, and tell me where a lot of the giftings that you’re already operating in today, when did that spark first show up in your life?

Brian Bird:

Well, thanks for that question, Sarah, and I’m honored to be with you today and all your listeners. I was just an average kid growing up, not really good at anything, just average at everything except for one thing. And my parents loved me, I’m the oldest kid of three boys, and my parents loved me, but I’m not sure they knew what I was good at, because we’re proud of our kids for everything they do. The bar is pretty low. When you get praised for taking a little doody, your first little doody, that’s a very low bar. So the bar for praise is pretty low with parents. But when you have other adult champions in your life who can speak into your life, that makes a big difference. And I’m a big believer in adult champions, and so I always had a slightly better facility for writing.

Everything else was hard. And I’m not going to say writing wasn’t hard, but it was a little more enjoyable, a little easier, and it came a little easier to me. And so, my mom found years and years later, a picture with a little writing on the bottom of it in my box of stuff, keepsakes, that said, “When I grow up or when I get older, I’m going to make movies and TV shows.”

Now, to be honest, I did not remember that. I did not remember making it, but I was always a consumer of story, and reading and watching films and television. We had great times in our family together watching television, which I believe is a lost thing in culture now because we all have these and we all have our little iPads or whatever, tablets, and we’re all off in different rooms watching different content in our own little silos now, which I think is a shame to be honest, because I grew up with … My dad was a radio DJ, so I grew up with my dad on the radio. And so, I think my heart and mind were always prepped for some sort of media life.

But at that time, I was just a consumer of story. And then when I was a freshman in high school, I had an adult champion pull me aside and speak into my life. Her name was Mrs. Stevens. She was my English teacher. She held me back after class one day and I thought, “I’m in trouble. What do I do? I’m busted for something.” And I went up sheepishly to her desk and she had an essay that I had written for class that had A plus on it and a few markings here and there. But she said, “I want to enter this into a contest on your behalf if you’ll allow me?” And I said, “Sure, I’m just glad I’m not in trouble.” And then she said something right in my eye, or looked me right in the eye, and she said, “You could do this for a living if you want to.”

And I’d never heard that from anybody. So Mrs. Stevens dogged me all the way through high school. She said, “You got to get on the school newspaper, you got to start writing. You got to start working toward all of that.” And when I was a senior in high school, I was the managing editor of the school newspaper. Well, big deal. Lots of people do that. But Mrs. Stevens said, “Your next thing that I’m going to tell you to do and that I want you to say yes to is you got to go to journalism school.” And so, I did. I went to journalism school for college, and that really taught me how to write.

And off of my internship as a sophomore at a daily newspaper, I got hired full time. So, my first writing job really was as a journalist. And I did that for a number of years, and then I morphed into TV and film several years later. But it was Mrs. Stevens who was that adult champion.

And I’ve had two other adult champions, central figures in my life. One was my uncle Dan who … Dan Bird, who was a world-class worship pastor back in the day, not cheesy, praise music nowadays. What he would do would be a hundred piece orchestra and a hundred piece choir in Handel’s Messiah, that kind of worship. And he looked me right in the eye and he said, “Brian, this writing skill … ” and this is when I was getting ready to go into journalism school, the summer between high school and college, he said, “This writing skill you have is like an instrument.” And he said, “Don’t just get good enough to be in a garage band, get good enough to be in the symphony.” And so, he dangled that carrot in front of me, and it’s still there. In my mind, I’m still trying to get to the symphony. Now, other people will say, “Well, you’re already there.” Maybe, but I look over at the guy in first chair and I’m over here in fifth chair and I’m supposed to be in first chair.

So he teased me with the idea of excellence and not just the good enough principle, because I think for people who grow up in church or in a faith culture, the good enough principle sits there for a lot of them. You don’t have to … this is ministry, this is just … just has to be good enough. And I’ve never believed that. I believe that nobody said that to Michelangelo when he was painting the Sistine Chapel, or designing the Basilica as an architect, or making the Statue of David as a sculptor, nobody told him about the good enough principle. That was another adult champion that I had. The third adult champion I had was my wife’s great uncle, Don Ingalls.

Sarah Taylor:

I love this story.

Brian Bird:

Oh, good, good. Well, I am rambling.

Sarah Taylor:

No, that’s what you’re supposed to do here, Brian.

Brian Bird:

All right, so Uncle Don was a film and TV producer going back to the golden age of television. All the great westerns, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, Bonanza, The Virginian, Big Valley. He wrote for all of those shows. And he ended up writing on Star Trek too. And so, when I was just in my early 20s, my wife and … I was married, my wife Patty, introduced me to Uncle Don at a family party, shoved me into a corner with him and said, “Uncle Don, you should read my husband’s newspaper work and clips.” And whether Uncle Don was guilted into it or just a good guy, probably some of both. He said, “Sure, I’ll read your stuff. I started out as a journalist and worked my way into film and TV.” And so he did, and he got back to me. He said, “You’re a really good writer. Have you ever thought about writing for film and television?” And at that point I was just full-time journalist, and I said, “Well, not really, but story is food to me. I mean, I eat story.”

Sarah Taylor:

That’s right.

Brian Bird:

I’ve been a consumer my whole life. And so he said, “Well, you should give it a try.” And so, he gave me some scripts from the show he was making at that time, which you’re probably too young to even remember, but it was called Fantasy Island. And it was a show on ABC, a big hit on Saturday night back to back with the Love boat, these two big shows. And he was writing and producing on that show. So he gave me some scripts from Fantasy Island. He said, “Take a whirl.”

And so, I wrote what’s called a spec script. I watched the show, got it in my head, read those scripts. He gave me a couple books to read on script writing, and I wrote a spec episode of Fantasy Island. And then I gave it to him and he read it and he said, “This is strong. This is really good. We can’t really take episodes over the transom like this, but if you build some ideas, I’ll bring you in and you can pitch them to our writing team.” And so, he did.

The next season, the show got picked up for an eighth season. He invited me to Warner Brothers, the offices at Warner Brothers in Burbank. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I came up with four concepts for the show and I brought them in, just read them because I didn’t know what pitching meant, but I read them and they spotted one there. They said, “We’ve never done anything like that. We like that. Let’s do that. Who’s your agent?” And I said, “My wife, I don’t know.”

And so, that turned into my first episode of … produced episode of television. I was 25 I think, and the third to last episode ever aired of that show because it did get canceled the following season, but it made it on the air. And I saw my credit there on national TV. And I also made more money on that one project, one episode of TV, than I made all year in journalism. And I thought, “Okay, well this was really cool.” And I’m not in a box, like as a journalist, you’re stuck in a box with the five Ws, who, when, where, and how also, and why. And you get to play God. You get to create your own world, your terraffirming when you do stories like this, shaping the earth. And I just said to my wife, I said, “I think I’m supposed to do more of this.” And it morphed into what I’m doing now. So long answer to your question, but adult champions and finding the one thing that I was good at were part of the calculus of shaping my purpose, my role in the world.

Sarah Taylor:

Your wife’s great uncle also said a couple things to you, one that was that nepotism can open the door, but what keeps it open?

Brian Bird:

You’ve done your homework. So yes, he did. He said, “Network can open a … ” I mean, “Nepotism can open a door, but if your talent doesn’t show up, there’s nothing I can do for you.” And then he also said a second thing, he said, “I’m opening the door for you because someone did this for me. You got to pay it forward. You got to promise me you’ll do this for somebody.” And my whole career, I’ve been trying to do that.

There’s at least a half dozen to a dozen people with working careers who I mentored along the way. And it’s part of my mission now. It’s not just, okay, well I did what … I fulfilled Uncle Don’s request. It’s just leaving the door open is what I do. It’s just part of how I think God has shaped me to mentor others, to clone my values in other people, younger people, light matches under people’s butts to get them doing what they’re supposed to do.

Sarah Taylor:

How do you spot it? You meet so many people. How do you spot the one like, that one right there? I’m going to invest my time. What do you look for?

Brian Bird:

Well, it depends on what the profession is or what the craft is. For writers, it’s always going to show up on the page to me. I’m always going to see it. And I read a lot of scripts because a lot of people believe they’re supposed to do this. And I used to believe, okay, well anybody can learn this. I don’t necessarily believe that anymore. I do believe that we have certain giftings, all of us, and that’s another epiphany that I’ve had about how God gifts us.

But I can usually spot it on the page. It may not be a perfect sample that I would say, “Oh, this is professional level, this could work. We could make this.” But I’ll usually spot something a little deeper. People that are about something, writers that are about something bigger than themselves, who are not just there to try to hear themselves talk or write, to have other people love their writing. It’s not necessarily about that because that can be learned, but a sense of mission about the work, a sense of calling in the work. It’s about something. It’s about something important. It’s about something deeper and bigger and grander that the world needs. And when I spot that, I know.

I’ve come to believe that everybody … it’s been my experience personally, I had three seminal adult champions, so I just used the rule of three. The rule of three is the Trinity. It’s three jokes in a sitcom. You always want to have callbacks to your jokes. The rule of three, Woody Allen coined actually. So, the rule of three, it’s not scientific, but I believe that every young person or every new voice, no matter what their craft, what their gifting, they need three wounded warriors like me. Somebody like me who’s been to the war, we’re all scarred up. We’ve come back missing limbs from our experiences. People, veteran people that have been in the trenches of their craft, I think each of us needs three of those people to confirm our gifting because if it’s just purely subjective, we believe it. We can be deluded too.

I do see a lot of delusional people. It’s cool to do what you want to do. It’s really cool. “Oh, I want to do this or that. I want to paint, I want to write, I want to direct films.” Whatever it is. You can get caught up in delusion too. But when you have three wounded warriors who can speak into you, like I had, and confirm your gift for you say, “You could do this for a living if you want to.” I believe we all need that. And I believe every person needs to find those three adult champions to confirm what they’re supposed to do.

So yeah, so that’s what Don Ingalls did for me. Uncle Dan Bird did for me. What Mrs. Stevens in high school did for me. They helped me find my one thing.

And then from there, your one thing has to be refined. You got to put in the hours. And I love that book by Malcolm Gladwell Outliers, if you have read that. Basically there are people, geniuses all over the place in their own way. Everybody’s got a spark of genius. Everybody’s made in the image of the creator of all things. So we each have a tiny spark of that DNA in us. Now, maybe it’s different for each of us, it’s not all the same for all of us, but there’s a lot of geniuses sitting on their couch with a bag of potato chip in their lap and they haven’t become experts. They may have genius, but they haven’t become experts. The only way to become an expert is 10,000 hours. You got to put the 10,000 hours in. And this book Outliers is fantastic from that perspective because this is how geniuses are turned into experts.

And he gives real-life examples in that book of the kind of people that put in 10,000 hours. And they’re all people you would … that we know who they are. We each have to find our one thing. If we’re made in the image of the author of everything, then we have a tiny strand of that DNA. It should be our goal in life to identify that one strand and then find three adult champions to confirm it. And once that happens, then you go, go, go.

If you don’t, if you’re on a couch with a bag of chips watching Jeopardy and you don’t go, go, go, then you are sinning, you’re short-changing God, you’re short-changing yourself and you’re short-changing the world. If that’s what you’re gifted in, then your job, your one thing in life, you’re supposed to just run a marathon with it.

And I really believe this, and I believe it’s one of the reasons why there’s so much dysfunction. There’s so much heartbreak, there’s so much depression. People have not discovered their one thing, which really is their primal reason for being Rick Warren called it The Purpose Driven Life. You have to find your purpose and then pursue it with a passion.

Sarah Taylor:

Let’s dive into some of your own 10,000 hours. Let’s just use some of these examples from your life, before we get to … I eventually want you to get to talking about When Calls The Heart, what it was originally supposed to be and how that all fell apart and then what God did with it.

Brian Bird:

Okay, absolutely.

Sarah Taylor:

But since we’re going linearly, before you got to that, one of the things where you just got a bunch of practice in was you started to do some comedy writing, which is not something you’d done before, but they asked you, can you do comedy writing? And your answer was?

Brian Bird:

Yes, absolutely. So it’s a hard business to be in radio. Anything in the media is very competitive and very hard to break into. It always has been, even with the digital revolution and YouTube and everybody and their brother thinking they can make content because they actually can now get distribution for it. It’s still competitive to break into the big leagues of all of that.

And so, I had a writing partner at the time, John Wyrick and I were writing partners. We had written a very dramatic powerful civil rights true story, drama, feature film script, which we were so proud of. And it opened a lot of doors for us, got us an agent, all of that. And we met Bill Bickley and Michael Warren, who were two of the kings of comedy in Hollywood and had built several television shows including Family Matters and Full House and Perfect Strangers. They had started on Happy Days. So these guys were comedy writers.

And so, we had a chance to meet with them, and they were very kind to us and said, “What can we read?” And so all we had was this Civil Rights era script. And so we gave them the script, they read it and they said, “This is fantastic. We don’t do this. We have no idea how to help you with this. This is awesome, but we write half hour comedy. Can you do that?” And so, John and I just looked at each other and said, “Yes, absolutely, we can do that.” And then we walked out of the room saying, “What did we just say? How could you say yes to that? We’ve never done this our lives,” but I’ve always believed good writers should be able to do anything, should be. It’s a theory, and I’ve yet to be proven wrong on this, but we should be able to write bubblegum wrappers, comics, grading cards, presidential speeches, radio copy, TV scripts, novels, whatever, journalism. Good writers should be able to figure out how to do anything. It’s called homework, putting in the hours.

And so, at the time that this happened, Murphy Brown was a big hit on CBS. We got a handful of scripts, Murphy Brown to see how they did it, how the format was different from say, a drama. And then watched, just binged, a bunch of Murphy Brown. And we wrote a spec episode of Murphy Brown. Again, a spec, which is just a sample of somebody else’s product. It’s like fan fiction, I guess, that’s a good way to say it. And we turned that into Michael and Bill and they said, “Hey, we love this. We’re getting a new show on CBS called The Family Man. Would you guys be open to coming aboard as story editors on the show?” And we said yes, and we were thrown into the deep end of the pool, because it’s like … Comedy rooms are like shark tanks. I mean, it’s competitive. Everybody’s pitching their ideas, their lines, their humor, their jokes. It’s a food fight around a big conference table.

Well, we had never done this before, but again, you say yes and then figure it out. And I’m a big believer in the yes principle. Now, I’m not saying say yes to everything because some things may not be healthy for you or might break your moral center, but say yes to opportunity if you have no ethical concerns about it. Say yes to opportunity and then figure it out. And that, thrown in the deep end of the pool, turned into 10 years of swimming laps in that pool. That show only went for one season, but then we got over on Evening Shade and we had an agent representing us. And so, we got our stuff circulated around town.

And every year, when shows were being staffed, we got pitched by our agents like, “You need to meet these guys.” And writing teams are helpful around a writing table because they only have to pay you one check and you split it so you get two brains for the price of one. And so usually, every television show I’ve ever been on has had writing teams associated with it because it’s just a way to pay people less.

But anyway, but that led to years on Step By Step and writing a comedy movie that got produced with Whoopi Goldberg playing the new Santa. And so, I learned how to write comedy. I was more of a drama guy, but I learned how to write comedy, which proved my point that it’s just really about the homework.

And so yeah, the 10,000 hours came with a paycheck. I didn’t have 10,000 hours in when it started, but I got it fairly quickly and I’m working on 50 now, or something, I don’t know. But that’s my point about being a yes person. There’s too many ways to say no, but. Because of our fear of our lack of confidence, well, trust me, I didn’t have a lack. I didn’t have a super amount of confidence when I said yes to writing comedy. But what I had was confidence in my ability to do the homework. And that’s different.

Doing the homework is different than actually performing. Ultimately, you have to perform too. That’s what leaves the door open when the talent shows up. But I can’t tell you, I write more drama now than I do comedy. But all drama’s infused with humor and all humor is infused with drama. The best kinds are. So, the muscles that I gained, creative muscles that I gained doing comedy, didn’t necessarily apply. But because I said yes to The Family Man, or yes to Michael and Bill, and got onto The Family Man, I met Martha Williamson on that show. She was a comedy writer on that show. And she would go on to create Touched By An Angel. Well, when my years on Step By Step were done, when that show got canceled, Martha called and said, “Would you come over and work for me here?”

So I immediately left for five years of writing and producing on Touched By An Angel. My yes, I can write comedy, turned into now you get to write drama on a big network show. You never know where a yes is going to take you. It’s an adventure. You got to say yes to the adventure. Even if you fail, it’s okay. Say yes to the adventure because God has amazing things waiting for you out there.

Sarah Taylor:

Well, speaking of failure, because you and I both know that every good story has the conflict. Let’s talk about when it all goes wrong. You think you know the way it’s about to go, and then you get that record scratch, that …

Brian Bird:

Yep, yep, yeah. So in 2008, Michael and I embarked on an adventure to create a movie called When Calls The Heart, based on the bestselling books by Janette Oke. Michael had already made several of her previous books into movies for the Hallmark Channel. The Love Comes Softly series, which were very successful. So, we had a natural in with Janette Oke, and we embarked on a four and a half million dollars feature film in 2008. Not our money, but we had investors in California that invested in it. And about halfway into the movie was when the sky fell on all of us. Remember September of 2008, when everybody was worried that the whole economy was going to collapse and there would be an international depression? And the president was meeting with bankers behind closed doors saying, “We got to rescue our economy somehow, some way.”

I don’t think any of us knew how precarious it was until some of those stories came out later, but I knew how precarious it was because when you’re making a movie and in the middle of that production, the money falls apart, it’s actually a death sentence. There’s no fixing that.

A half-finished movie means nothing. It’s a bunch of films sitting on a shelf collecting dust. You can’t sell it. You can’t do anything with it. And we were in the middle of making the movie when the sky fell on us, the money melted down, left us high and dry in Alberta, Canada, closing down production, firing everybody, owing about a million and a half dollars, by the way, because you always produce and shoot ahead of payroll. You work this week and you get paid next week. So, we had a whole week and a half worth of payroll and vendor payments and so forth. And it wasn’t our money, but our names were on the company, so it was on our heads.

And so, we came home with a half finished movie, worth nothing. Left on the table, probably six to nine months of life, of living. Because we’re the last ones that are going to be paid when you have to shut down a production, so we never saw our producer monies on that movie. And that’s not something too many people can do. Something you’ve been working on for a year and you don’t get paid for it, essentially. And now you have to figure out how to cover your life. So, it was a dark time for us.

I had been working in the business for 25 years by that point and had a decent track record of success. And so, this was beyond me. And so, I brought my dudes around me, my posse of men friends and spiritual mentors around me. And I said, “Guys, I have no idea how to fix this. This is way above my pay grade,” and all of your judgment skills come into question like, how did you leave yourself high and dry like this. How could you walk into something like this and be left hanging like this? All that self-doubt was swirling around me. The imposter syndrome was hitting, those old tapes that come up. And my guys said, “Dude, here’s the thing. Nothing has changed about your talents. You still have the same talents. Your family and friends, they have no different opinion about you, there’s just a … you have doubt and deceit swirling around you right now. And so, take 30 days, get some perspective, go into the Bible and read all the promises of God, because none of those things have changed either. You got to hang on to what’s true when you’re in the middle of this.”

And so, I did. And somehow, some way, we made it through. And my pastor at the time was Rick Warren from Saddleback Church, The Purpose Driven Life guy. And he said to me, he called me, he heard through the grapevine what happened to me. He heard we got hosed. Give me the five-minute version. So I told him what happened, and he said, “Well, Brian, what made you think it was going to be easy?” And I thought, “Wow, that’s harsh bedside manner for a doctor to have.” And I said, “Well, it’s never been easy, Rick. I just didn’t think it was going to be this hard.”

And he said, “Well, look what you and Michael are trying to do with this kind of content, nobody is asking for, but they desperately need it. So you’re swimming upstream no matter what. If I go and try to open up a health clinic in Rwanda and the tribal chieftains burn it to the ground, or the government steals you blind …” he said, “Well, this happens to everybody, this is your … you’re swimming upstream.” So he was basically saying, “This is your cross to bear it. Pick it up, pick it up. No pity parties here.” And he said, “When the children of Israel were wandering around for 40 years, the desert, like dummies, and they had to go find food and water and all these things, they came back to a brook, a well that had given them water in the past. And when they got there the second time, and they’d even put memorial stones there to commemorate the provision of God there. When they got there the second time, the well was dry.” And he said, “What did they do? Did they sit on the ground and have a little pity party and whine and be snowflakes, or what’d they do? Did they pick up and go somewhere else and find a new brook?” So he said, “You got to go find a new brook. This well is dry, so go find a new brook.”

Well, three years later, we figured out a way to survive, but when everybody else was not spending money on anything, we had this half finished movie. Three years later, in the parking lot at the Hallmark Channel where we did get some action on some other projects and made a couple of movies for them. So it kept us, strung us out on the drug a little more, we got … we met a guy. We met a guy, a producer named Brad Krevoy, who had never met before. And he heard our story, heard our sob story, and he goes, “Why didn’t you guys find me earlier? I eat these kind of albatross projects for lunch.” He said, “I love salvage operations.”

So we cut together the first … Well, basically the middle of the movie. We didn’t have the beginning or the end shot. We had the middle of the movie. We cut it together, beautiful footage. We brought it in with Brad to the Hallmark Channel, showed it to them, and they said, “We love this. This is great. Can you finish it for a million bucks?” And we just saluted and said, “How high? Sure, yes sir.”

And we had to go to Romania to do it and match production in Romania because the costs of production are more economical there. And we finished the movie and we brought it to Hallmark and they loved it. They focus grouped it. They tested it and it aired. They aired it in January of 2014. And it did good numbers for them, really good numbers for them. And they said to us, “Hey, we’re thinking about getting into TV, to TV series work. Would you guys be open to doing six episodes of this?” And again, we just saluted and said, “How high?”

A decade later, we have 11 seasons shot and there’s more to come, trust me. But for me, the point of humility and grace that has a intersection for me is had we finished the movie in 2008, it would’ve been a movie. There was no talk of series, none of that. There’s a worldwide fan movement that has come for When Calls The Heart and they call themselves the Hearties. There would be no Hearties. There would be no 120 episodes of a television show. It would’ve been a one-off.

And what that says to me is, God knew. He had a better plan because it’s not because we’re geniuses that the success of this show has taken off like this. It’s because we were faithful and we didn’t give up. That’s the big lesson. We got through our wilderness experience in the Promised Land we never knew was there in the beginning of a television series based on this busted movie that had to be patched together over several years.

And I have the best testimony of a production problem of anybody I’ve ever talked to. Nobody beats this, this story. I’ve never heard anybody beat this to go from that to this. And not because of us. We were faithful. We said yes. We said yes, we saluted and said yes, but we did the hard work, but it wasn’t … we didn’t provide our own miracle.

And when the Israelites got to the Jordan River and were about to cross over, they had a callback experience to the parting of the Red Sea, 40 years earlier. The Jordan River was at flood stage. The Promised Land was on the other side. They had to get to the other side to get to their Promised Land, which is now modern day Israel. So what do they have to do?

The river’s at fledge stage. Well, the last time it just parted and they got to walk through it, and escape the Egyptians. This time, it wasn’t doing anything. It didn’t part on its own. They had to get in first. And that’s what God calls for people of purpose, you got to put your foot in the water first. That’s called obedience. That’s called faith, faithfulness.

We do faithful, we do obedience. God does amazing. That’s how it works. And that’s what happened to us. That’s what happened to us. It’s not because we’re amazing people. It’s because we worked hard. We put in our hours. We said yes. We waited through. We waited through the desert time when it all seemed lost, but we kept walking forward. And that applies to every one of us. Stories like this are not about people making movie and TV. These spiritual principles apply to all of us, no matter what our context, no matter what our one piece of DNA is.

So, I love telling that story. I don’t tell it all the time, but I love telling it because I do it with all humility. I pinch myself every time we get picked up for another season of this show. I just pinch myself because people have loved it and they want to live there. I mean, the Hearties love the show so much, they want to go live there. And that wasn’t what we had in mind. I mean, we didn’t know that was coming. We were just trying to do a good show. And it’s been hard. It’s been hard, even with the success. It’s been hard to keep it going. We’ve been through many challenges with it.

So God doesn’t promise easy, but when you step … put your toe in the water, He promises that he will be there for you and He will take care of you. And that’s that story. And I want to bless people with it whenever I can because I think it applies to all of us.

Sarah Taylor:

Brian, what a gift. Thank you so much for making redemptive art, for sharing your faith through the way that you story tell. For, as you mentioned earlier, it’s content that people weren’t necessarily asking for, but they desperately needed. And so, I’m just very, very thankful that this is the space that you occupy and you do it very well.

Brian Bird:

Thank you. Thank you so much. My privilege and honor.