Hope Podcast: Featuring Michelle Millben, MTS Candidate

JORDAN AHMED: I would love if you could just start us off by letting us know where's home for you. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: So they say, I guess home is where the heart is, is the old saying I was born and raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. So that is literally home. I know every street, every highway. I can name probably most of the counties there too. But that's where I grew up from middle school, elementary school, high school, and college. And I spent my first two years of law school there. 

After that, though, I moved to Virginia to finish law school at Georgetown University. And I've been in Virginia now for, my goodness, almost 20 years. And so I usually tell people I'm from Oklahoma, but by God's grace, I'm a Virginian now. And so I consider both states home. But when I think about the counties I know, the roads I know, although I know a lot about Virginia, home is definitely Oklahoma City. 

JORDAN AHMED: I love how frequently people at HDS are able to call so many different places home. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: Yeah. 

JORDAN AHMED: And I feel there's something to being connected to many places. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: Yeah. 

JORDAN AHMED: Well, speaking of places where we both belong, what brought you to Harvard Divinity School? 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: Yeah, so I have always wanted to pursue seminary just by way of my background and how that connects. I was a youth pastor for six years while I was in college and also a few years after college too. And it was that experience. They ordained me and licensed me there and I was grateful for it. But I was like, you know, I really need to get a seminary or divinity experience. But it was through my work in juvenile detention centers, going and ministering to students who were incarcerated, going to my state capitol advocating for education issues uncovering all of these issues while I was a youth pastor. 

And so when you're going to high schools and hanging out with students, when you're having all these kids sit with you in Bible studies or when you're preaching, you get a lot of intel about what's going on in their lives. And as my care and my just concern began to deepen, I really realized I need to be more of an advocate here. 

And I felt really, really strongly, after college, I needed to go to law school. I loved preaching, I loved ministry. Marrying and burying and baptizing are hard jobs, but they were very much something I signed up for and loved doing. But I said, I really want to go effectuate change through the law. So that's why I went to law school. 

But I've always felt still this I want to go deep in my religious studies. I want to go and dive deeper into texts. And I didn't necessarily have the aspiration to be an academic, but I really wanted to deepen my own knowledge and awareness. I guess the word I can now coin academically here I've gotten from Harvard Divinity School is religious literacy. 

I would say over time, though, working as an attorney, it was really my desire to deepen my religious literacy, not just in my own faith tradition. That was the original desire. But the more you work with people and learn about cultures and you connect with folks on where they're from and what they believe and what shapes their, I guess, definition of hope really realize how incredibly complex, nuanced but amazing this world is. 

So after serving in the Obama administration when the Constitution told us we all had to leave for the next administration in 2017, I made the decision to come to Harvard Divinity School. I actually got into Harvard Divinity School in 2018, so I was actually coming here doing the exact same program. At the time, though, my mom got diagnosed with something really serious and had to have multiple surgeries. And I was going through some things personally in life. And I just knew Harvard really accepted me because they said, oh, this person will do great work in there. 

And at the time, just everything I was carrying, it didn't make sense to go into a real, serious academic institution and not being able to perform at the level I knew I could. So I took the time to build a business I was working on, take care of my mom. And now, six years later, I just said, you know what? I've always wanted this experience. I'm doing it. And I would have never imagined coming here. I think honestly too, coming here at this time, it's really been an awesome opportunity just to realize everything happens for a reason, and your life unfolds in the way it's supposed to. 

If I would have come in 2018, all the things that this campus has experienced over the last two to three years would have never happened. And I know for a fact I'm here to minister into those spaces to make sure that people feel like they belong. They know they're seen and loved by God and recognized by the universe. And I think I was meant to be here for this time. Also, too, we have the first Black woman dean at Harvard Divinity School. That's huge history. We have more women scholars and more BIPOC scholars than the history of the university's history. 

So for me, I will say, even if I'd come back in 2018, it would have been amazing. But I just feel like my life and everything here in the campus is aligned, so that's just the journey that got me here. And I'm glad I finally just bit the bullet and said, we're going to do this. 

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah, I mean, personally and selfishly, I'm very glad that we both are here at this time because it's been so meaningful to connect with you. And you've started to allude to some of this, but I would love to hear a brief spiritual autobiography just giving the audience a background in your traditions, practices. How have you developed spiritually or religiously? 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: Yeah, so [LAUGHS] if my mother ever listens to this, she'll probably laugh, but I'm just going to keep it real. So growing up, my parents were both pastors and very evangelical, charismatic ministers. So growing up, it really wasn't a choice of whether or not you were going to be a Christian. My mom was like, you're going to serve God or die. And so I was like, OK, I'll serve Jesus for 200, Alex. That was the vibe. 

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: And loved my upbringing, by the way. So growing up, spiritual practices were very much ingrained in our home. For example, all of us are musicians, so we would play in church. But growing up, some of my earliest memories are waking up as a child in my crib and hearing my mother playing the piano at 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, and just singing our heart out to God. That was a normal thing. Or waking up and seeing my mom just pace the hallways and praying over our room and praying over my brother's room and just praying over us. 

So some of those memories are really deeply impactful, because I really had a mother who used her spiritual practices to make sure we felt safe and protected and loved and known by God. And that was really, really powerful and impactful. 

As we got older, praying was very much a part of our lives. So my mother would get up in the morning at 5:00. And after she'd had her singing time, we'll lay out pillows in the middle of the floor and we had to get up at 6:00 AM and lay on the floor and pray. And so that's a family tradition, but it's also a very mean thing to do to a child and a middle schooler who's tired as hell. 

And so if we weren't praying out loud, she'd like, come over. I don't hear you. I don't hear you praying. I don't hear you praying. So looking back on it, now I can laugh, but she really was wanting us to develop a discipline. And so fast forward to today, what time does my alarm go off? At 5:00 am. Sometimes 4:30 am. But I am an early riser because of that woman. 

But as I got older, I was raised in an evangelical, charismatic church. And so young people were very much encouraged to express things publicly and individually in a way that acknowledged God's presence in their life. And that was very bewildering to me to hear people my age at 16, 13 say, you know, God told me last night. I'm like, he didn't told me anything. Or they'd say, I heard the Lord say. And that used to frustrate me as a teenager. 

So I got really serious. And I just said, you know, if this is real, I'll sign on to it as a teenager. But if it's not, I'm just going to not get in trouble, do what my mom ask, play my keyboard in this youth group and then I'm walking out and doing whatever I want to do. And I had my own spiritual encounter. 

Out of the blue, one evening, I was getting ready for bed and I just felt this presence. And I'll be honest with you. No matter what happens to me in life, I'll never be able to shake the reality of this moment. And it was just a moment where I was like, I think God's real. I think he's actually real. 

And so I started actually on my own I read the Bible cover to cover my junior year of high school. And there were some things, and I was like, ooh. And there were some things in it that really made me feel like I belonged, that made me feel like I belong on this Earth. I'm a part of something special. I am loved by God. All the things that I feel like I was told, I just had to, for my own self, investigate it. 

So I stayed in ministry since then. I went into being a youth pastor. I did this lawyer by day, minister by night. The church I attended when I was an attorney in DC hired me as an associate minister. So continuing the marrying, the baptizing but also running youth ministries. What I'd say today, though, my spiritual practices have advanced mostly because of my own natural curiosity of religion. 

So I practice yoga, I meditate, I walk through the arboretum and I let trees teach me things. I sit by the water and I just let the water sing to me. And I listen to the waves. Every Sunday—well, I won't be going in the next few Sundays. But since we got to school, I do my readings for class at the beach. But I'll take a lot of time and just listen to the waves and let them sing. And I find that those practices, although they're deeply rooted in my study of Howard Thurman and his mysticism, but they are ways that I connect with God. 

And they weren't a part of my upbringing. And some of those practices like sound baths and community meditations, some of my upbringing actually would say that those things were not appropriate to do as a Christian or that—and God bless those who raised me that way and taught me those things. But for me, I have found those to be deeply grounding for me as a human. And for me and my ministry to others and my connection with others, I have found those spaces to be the most impactful and healing. So I would say in my adult life, my spirituality has evolved to appreciate and include so many other practices that just ground me again in what I and what I believe. 

JORDAN AHMED: Wow, thank you so much. I feel like there are so many images that I'm sitting with. I'm seeing you and your family playing music and not being such a huge part of your spiritual upbringing. I'm seeing you by the water reading. And just all of these Michelles through time and how you've related to spirituality, to God, to prayer, it's really heartening, I think, and might be for listeners just to imagine the ways that spiritual life looks both the same and different. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: You know, you make an incredible point there. Because again, raised in an evangelical, charismatic Pentecostal church, when I go to ecstatic dance, which we used to have every Tuesday here on campus, I would stop for some minutes from my movement and look at the room and watch everyone, in their own way, expressing movement and communicating with their physical body. 

And I was like, if you were to take a video of this moment and turn off the sound and play a super gospelly song, you would think this is a bunch of young people at a Pentecostal church. And in the same way, if you were to take a video of Pentecostal church and put a really awesome, like, [VOCALIZING] beat or something like [INAUDIBLE] ecstatic dance, you would think, oh, this is ecstatic dance. 

And sound baths are the same. When we're in a moment with my dear friend Paula, who is incredible at ministering through that sound and opening our hearts and moments like that, the sounds that come from people, people will sing or hum or connect with the tune that's coming from the bowl she's playing. You go to a Pentecostal church, it's just someone on a synthesizer. And we're doing the same thing, matching the tone, making sounds. And so I just find there's so much parallel in our actual activity. 

And so I wonder, how can we find ways to get over the fractures of our beliefs and find common ground in actually what we're just doing because we're all trying to deepen our spirits and our hearts and our practices to be more present and relevant or more connected to something outside of us that's bigger. But we're doing the same thing. And so I found that to be also parts of this HDS experience that have been really awakening to go, I want to someday get some Pentecostal folks to come to a sound bath with Paula. And I want Paula come with me to a Pentecostal prayer night and bring her sound bath bowls just to see, again, where there's so many opportunities to build community. 

JORDAN AHMED: Pluralism and practice. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: Come on now. Yes, yes. 

JORDAN AHMED: I mean, you're talking about spiritual practices already. But I'm curious. Of the many ways that you practice and the many communities that you're a part of, what are some of the spiritual, religious practices that feel the most grounding in this moment? 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: That's a great question. In this moment, there's so many. So I'm a part of HDS JAM. So my undergrad degree is in violin and piano performance. I dabble in the guitar and drums and— 

JORDAN AHMED: Musician, lawyer, minister. What can't you do, Michelle? 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: OK. I told you about my mother. She was strict as hell so I had to-- it was no choice. It's like, you're going to play an instrument. And you're like, aye aye, sir. And also to my mother, when we started an instrument, we weren't allowed to quit until we left the house for college which ended up being that those instruments paid for college. So it's so funny how everything comes full circle. 

But HDS JAM, the JAM fam is definitely a part of a grounding for me. I took a class last year called The Spiritual Lives of Leaders and it's over at the business school. And what that class really did for me—because you're talking to CEOs and leaders all over the world who are doing incredible things, but what they ground themselves in spiritually to make big decisions like fire 10,000 people or expand their company or address something major that the country is dealing with and I found that a lot of times I would look at spiritual practices that I have like I'm going to stop for a minute and do some yoga, or I'm going to take a little extra time and meditate, or I'm going to go play the violin for a minute. And I would characterize those as frolics and detours and irresponsible excursions. 

And now I look at those as my leadership. That is a part of my leadership, joining HDS [? JAMs ?] every week, Friday at 3:00 PM. Or I find going to noon service, even though I have a ton of things to do every day, because I'm still a CEO of a nonprofit in the DC area. And I travel back home every two weeks. So my classes, my reading, my financial compliance filings, I've got so much going on. But I'm like, but if I don't stop and join a new religious experience at HDS noon service or HDS JAM or just the Catholics are doing something today or my friend's giving a talk on ancestor veneration, what I found is that I've removed that stigma of irresponsibility, distraction and said, no, this is a part of my leadership, because it's grounding me. 

Or when I want to go upstairs and practice the violin or piano in the Williams Chapel by myself for an hour. When I leave those moments, my soul is so much more in tune with what I am and where I am than when I go back to that financial filing or forecasting or spreadsheet I've got to do for work or that bibliography that's due for Professor Greene-Hayes-- it's coming to you, Professor Greene-Hayes—I find a superpower is now inside of me. 

Again, I'm not saying I endorse distraction, but I am saying I have found more ways to ground myself than just prayer or scripture reading that aid me to get this stuff done. Because I'm telling you, I can't do this on my own. My own intellect is not equipped to just get me through an HDS experience. I need something greater than myself to make sure I'm grounded in following the path I'm supposed to be on. And those things have helped me immensely, And just adding more to the mix have been really valuable to my experience. 

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah, I mean, that makes me think of the ways that, for me personally, I feel like the goal is to be in a prayerful, loving attention state as often as possible. And that does mean coming to things that might otherwise be deemed a distraction in some ways. 

If I'm really investing in trying to be present in those quote, unquote "distractions," something happens and something expands. Somehow time expands and I have enough time to get all my readings done and go to noon service. And it actually, I think, is sometimes because I went to noon service, but because I decided to spend time in community with people in ways that feel meaningful and sometimes just fun. Sometimes we need play. The times that most replenish me are when I'm doing some of the things that you talked about. And so many times, that's a creative practice, that's being around other people. 

And I think I've really grown, especially here at HDS, to have a greater appreciation for those things that I might have previously thought were a distraction or too much time. And then, yeah, suddenly life is expansive, you know? 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: That's right. That's right. Now, there's a scripture in the Bible where John the Baptist talks about how if I decrease, then Christ will increase in me. And so I always tell people spiritual math is not the same math as just regular human existence math. And so regular human existence math says, do your reading and do your discussion posts and do your papers and stay up late and get up early and don't sleep well and you will be successful. 

And we all know scientifically our bodies need sleep to replenish ourselves. We need nervous systems that are calm. We need our vagus nerve to be repaired on so many different levels. And what I love about HDS and I love about Harvard-- and in general, Harvard says, take good care of yourself, practice self-care, and then the syllabuses come out. 

JORDAN AHMED: [LAUGHS] 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: And you're like, how do you expect me to do that if this is what's required? So that principle from John the Baptist really helps me go, OK, so maybe sometimes I know that being a computer and proving that you're a computer is an American way of proving you're successful. And I'm not. I'm so sorry. I am a real human that needs replenishment and so that if I just decrease maybe a little bit and go off some regular human math and go into spiritual math and realize that decreasing actually is increasing, I'm trying to follow a little more spiritual math these days. 

JORDAN AHMED: I love this idea of spiritual math and will be adopting it into my life. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: I love it. 

JORDAN AHMED: You know, Michelle, this is called The Hope Podcast and I would love to, in that way, address the elephant in the room and ask, what do you think about hope? What does hope mean to you? How does hope operate in your life? 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: Yeah. I'm going to start by saying I've gotten criticized a lot in life for how I hold hope in life. Some people have accused me of wearing rose-colored glasses. Some people have accused me of my naivete or just having too much of a schoolgirl type twinkle in my eye about the world. And I got this a lot when I was an attorney in government. 

And the one person that helped me go—I am holding the line on hope was President Obama. And I'm not trying to be cheesy here, because obviously that was a tagline that changed the country, that people adopted as part of their own ethos of holding hope and believing in America and believing their participation in this country would actually be a part of something very meaningful and important. 

But I will say watching someone like him embody that principle in life and that spiritual principle, it is something that when you look back at the roots of my upbringing. I come from a Native American background. I come from an African-American background. My dad's side of the family, we've got lots of Irish and Canadian. And there are all these stories of people who have had to activate hope for their own survival and existence. 

And I find that hope is almost like the catalyst for innovation. It's the catalyst for building community. It's the catalyst for overcoming deficits in life. There's a scripture in the Bible that I read all the time and it says, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 

And so I find hope is my superpower. In moments where I feel like, on the inside, I may be wasting away. Hope says, nuh-uh, don't buy into that. You're actually just being renewed day by day. But your body sometimes experiences feelings that are contrary—your senses experience something that may be contrary to reality. And so loud in my life has really been trying to let my life match the reality versus letting my feelings or my impressions of myself or life bring me to a place where I'm immobile and spiritually not able to move, even at times. And so hope really can not just transform your life but bring you out of times and situations and settings that are detrimental to your own well-being. 

My dad, when he'd go to psych wards or he'd go to hospitals and minister to people, he say, Michelle, there's two things I can see that can really crush the spirit and impact the mind, a lack of love, a lack of forgiveness, and a lack of hope. He said when those things come to the body and those things come to the mind, they just crumble it. It's almost like a cancer.

And so what I found in President Obama coming into the scene, it helped me hold the line on not giving into apathy, not giving into, well, this is just the way life is and letting bitterness drive the car of my life. And really holding on to that, It has opened up ideas to where—and I'll tell you, it's almost changed my sight. 

So for example, I'll see a situation. But because hope is overlaying it now, I can see completely different. The example I'll give you. In 2017, a white nationalist rally took place two hours from my home. And people from all over the country, but there were some people in Virginia too, descended upon Charlottesville and marching around, yelling and shouting racist and anti-Semitic statements. And to see that in the 21st century was not only shocking but to see a president pacify that and almost like align with that was also even more shocking at the time. 

And what I saw, though—it was two weeks before school was supposed to start and so public parks were shut down, because there were curfews. Public pools were shut down. So your last two weeks before school supposed to start were just ruined by this instance. 

I started talking to teachers and pastors and saying, hey, how are you feeling about school starting? What's going on? We don't even how to talk about white nationalism and racism and hate. So I started an idea. I said, hey, what if we created a curriculum and content for parents and teachers that if your kid's coming home and has a tough topic, you've got some resources to be able to navigate that. And so we started a program called Explanation Kids. 

And I've presented research on this at South by Southwest a couple times. But what we found in our just kind of surveys was this is a real issue in the country. We've got four-year-olds asking about immigration. We've got kids coming home and saying, hey, daddy, are you going to get taken today? Why? Well, my friend, his dad got deported today. And parents not even knowing how to address that. 

But again, hope gives you a different lens in life. Now, that was on something on a more creative, innovative space. But I mean that in our day-to-day lives, how we even see each other, how you can see someone's faults in a person that you're like, oh, this person irks me. But hope says, but what's their need? That I can look beyond that fault and see their need and show them love, show them they still matter. They're still recognized by the universe. They're still needed on this Earth. 

So I say hope is, again, a superpower that is so important in all of our lives. And I really will say I'm very grateful for President Obama coming on the scene and saying yes to running for president, because I would have not have really been paying attention to his career. More importantly, it just cemented in my life that if I'm accused of wearing rose-colored glasses, if I'm accused of being a Pollyanna, if I'm told that I've got some naivete a school girl, I'm going to take it as a badge of honor, because that's my superpower that helps me build community, find innovation, and ways to change the world. And I just welcome anybody else on this team of hope. 

JORDAN AHMED: I think that hope sometimes gets a bad rap in being tied up in this Pollyanna perception. And what I'm really inspired by, what you're saying is how often hope is tied to action. It's tied to challenging how we can see people differently, see what's around us differently. And that's a transformative act in a world where it's really easy to just see the tragedy of things. 

And hope, for me, I think, as I continue to develop a relationship with this idea, it's not looking away from the tragedy. It's seeing the tragedy. and what else is happening in that moment. You talked about this moment of facing white nationalism in your community. And your response was, let's talk to the teachers. Let's talk to the pastors. What conversations can we have? What difficult conversations are we avoiding? 

And to me, that's not Pollyanna. That's community organizing. That's action. That is grounding in human connection, reminding each other of what really matters. And that's not Pollyanna. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: Thank you for saying that. Everyone who's called me Pollyanna, you will hear from my friend Jordan. 

JORDAN AHMED: [LAUGHS] I mean, I think some of what you just shared really makes me think about this idea that I ground myself in where if I'm really struggling with somebody or something, I have a mantra in my head. This person is also a reflection of the divine. This instance, the situation is, in some ways, connected to things that are much greater than me. I have a limited human understanding, how can I move in a way that maintains my integrity, my dignity, and also the other person's integrity, dignity? 

And I think it's so beautiful how you tap into that idea and you've applied it across the board, your spiritual life, your professional life, your political life, your interpersonal, relational community life. And I think that's how change happens. Sometimes we have to be idealists. That doesn't mean that we're not thinking about the spiritual math of it all. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: That's exactly right. But think about if we had lost idealists like Thomas Edison or Harriet Tubman. Imagine if the first United States congressmen and senators who were African American after the Emancipation, chose not to be idealists. Or imagine if Martin Luther King said, you know what? To him and Coretta Scott after they finished their degrees up here in Boston, let's just stay up here. It's just easier. It's just going to s safer. It's just going to be more—and you need idealists who can see through those moments so I deeply appreciate you recognizing that. 

JORDAN AHMED: You know, as we look to wrap up, I'm curious if there are any parting words or media recommendations or scriptures or prayers that you would love to leave the audience with. What is your parting gift? 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: Oh. Well, I will say this. One of the things that I found that I've had introduced to my life, thanks to Harvard, I was a class on reading Howard Thurman today taught by Professor Brown and Professor Hallisey—shout out to both—who just had the genius to say this university needs a deeper level of engagement with his texts and his theology. 

Howard Thurman, just for everyone's quick awareness, was a professor at Howard University in the '30s and '40s and a professor at Boston University in the '50s and '60s. He's credited, known as bringing a lot of theology around nonviolence to young African Americans who were under his instruction at the time and who've gone on to do civil rights work. I mean, Thurgood Marshall was in school at Howard when he was Dean of Rankin Chapel and Dean of the School of Religion, a really famous lawyer called Samuel Tucker, who did a lot of work in civil rights, and then of course, most notably, Martin Luther King was a student of his at Boston University. 

And so his engagement with pluralism, he flew to India in the '30s and met with Gandhi and learned about nonviolence. And he would engage all across the world in so many different settings to the UN in bringing pluralism to impact democracy and humanity. 

So I would say one recommendation I would give to any listener is to pick up the Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman. They're little, tiny just paragraphs you can read each day that give such strength to my day of how to maintain my spirit life, my actual professional life and then really just, where does hope fit into that? 

Another thing I would just want to encourage people listening. There's an author named Rick Warren, and he wrote a book called The Purpose Driven Life. And it's a 40-day devotional you read for 40 days. And it's really there to answer the question, what am I here for on this Earth? Why am I here? What was I created for? Questions everyone—no matter your skin color, no matter your ethnicity, no matter your religion, everyone asks those questions. 

The first line of that book, it says it's not about you. Period. And then the book continues. I read that in my—maybe I was 19 or 20. And it's really carried me throughout life. So when I think about how I approach each day, it's not about me. I know what I'm called to. I'm called to serve people. I'm called to effectuate change. And that was a guiding post for me in my spiritual life to hold on to that to say, this life I'm living actually is just not about my own enrichment economically or spiritually. I'm sharing this experience with everyone on this Earth. And it gives me just a little bit of hope to know I can fix my eyes on Jesus. I can fix my eyes on something bigger than me, but then I can also take my eyes off myself and put it on my neighbor, put it on my friend, put it on my colleagues. And that grounding for me is so much more part of what life is about than just looking in the mirror and going, what can Michelle do for Michelle today? 

JORDAN AHMED: Yeah. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: We all, right now, need to be clinging to one another in ways that I think are greater than the messaging coming from the United States government, now, and other places around the world. The rest of the world is wanting us to look at each other and see each other as enemies, see each other as different, be divided. 

And I feel like our superpower is going to come when we come together. No matter if it's religious space or just a community of practice or an intramural basketball league, find community and build some spiritual grounding and practice just by being among others. That's going to be part of the panacea for the pain we're seeing right now in the world and hopefully a little Thurman and also just a little bit of remembering it's not about us will help us get there. 

JORDAN AHMED: Thank you so, so, so much, Michelle. It has been an absolute pleasure to interview you, to be changed by you in this one, little interview. Thank you so much for coming in and talking to me today. 

MICHELLE MILLBEN: You know, I was honored. And to find a time to spend with you, I'll sign up for it any day. But I do appreciate the opportunity to be here. 

JORDAN AHMED: Yes, and more to come. 

[BIRDS CHIRPING]