2025

Dave Brisbin 1.5.25
An angel was walking down the street carrying a torch and a pail of water. When asked what he was going to do with torch and pail, the angel said that with the torch he was burning down the mansions of heaven, and with the pail, putting out the fires of hell. Because only then would we see who truly loves God. 

With no promise of reward or fear of punishment, what is the temperature of our love when there is nothing “in it” for us—no consequence for not engaging.

Everything in us rebels at this. We’re offended if there’s no reward for hard work. Yet Jesus tells us that no matter when we show up, we’re all paid the same at the end of the day—love is its own reward. We’re offended if there’s no punishment for failure, yet Jesus says that sun and rain fall on the just and unjust alike—love can never be other than what it is. We have to scale the wall of reward and punishment before we can ever hope to experience love without degree. Jesus relentlessly works to tear down this wall, knowing how deeply life has embedded it while giving no experience of something as alien as degreeless love.

When I stopped practicing Catholicism, my horrified mother told me it wasn’t enough to be a good person, implying that without conforming to correct doctrine and practice, punishment would be my only reward. Yet for Jesus, all law and scripture is summed by loving God and neighbor. His last commandment was to love as he loved, that his followers would be defined by love—not what we rationally understand, irrationally believe, or ritually practice. The only purpose of religious belief and practice is to guide us to the experience of degreeless love. If it does, it’s true. If not, it’s irrelevant at best.

Life is so uncertain and humans so fragile, we crave certainty as medication, and the paradigm of reward and punishment at least gives some illusion of control. That performing as we imagine God wills, binds God contractually to love and acceptance. But even the slightest vestige of meritocracy blinds us to the possibility of a love that can’t be withheld or altered, keeping us forever striving for what we already possess.

Reward And Punishment

Dave Brisbin 1.12.25
I’m often asked about the big words... 

The words of Christian doctrine that seem to contradict the nature of God that Jesus called Good News, love itself. Degreeless and indiscriminate love that can’t be altered or avoided, showering on everyone equally—just and unjust alike. Yet Christianity feels exclusive…acceptance withheld unless we believe in an orthodox Jesus, declare him as Lord, obey church rule and ritual. There is heaven for those who perform, the eternal torment of hell for the rest, and at the center of it all stands the cross. Ironically, the ultimate dividing line.

Here’s a big word: propitiation. An English word used to translate the Greek and Aramaic words used by John and Paul to describe Jesus’ death on the cross. It means to appease wrath, regain favor, change the mind of an angry God. In 1611, the King James bible translated the Greek hilasmos and Aramaic husaya as propitiation, but this has become controversial. Later translations use expiation instead—atonement, the extinguishing of guilt. The ancient words can mean both, so which?

If you’re a hammer, the world looks like a nail. Our concept of life determines what we see and understand, so if our focus is justice, we see propitiation—if love, expiation. Propitiation defines God’s nature as angry and apparently incapable of mercy without the mechanism of a perfect sacrifice. Expiation defines our nature, our need to extinguish “original sin/guilt,” the illusion of separation of which our minds are capable once we become self-aware as children. To extinguish that illusion is the true meaning of the cross. That Jesus could overcome his human sense of separation, remain one with the Father’s love even on the cross, is the salvation we seek. There is only reward and punishment in propitiation. In expiation, we find the degreeless and indiscriminate love that is never withheld.

None of the big words mean what we think when placed back in the language Jesus and his followers spoke and wrote. We must re-know what they knew. Jesus was laser-focused on love… 

The meaning of any big word that contradicts that love is a mistranslation.

The Big Words

Dave Brisbin 1.19.25
From someone going through a perfect storm of difficulties: I see no evidence of God, but plenty of evidence of the devil. Despite years as a devout Christian, she’s hit the point we all do, over and over in life, the point Karl Jaspers called a limit situation. The moment we realize we’re gonna need a bigger boat. Hitting the limit of our ability to cope, make sense, make meaning—everything that ordered our universe lying in a heap.

Why does God seem silent when evil is so loud?

We can walk into a dilapidated house and say we see no evidence of an architect, but the fact of the house, the space in which we could care for and maintain a home, is the architect’s fingerprint. If the consequences of human action or natural processes like extreme weather or viruses frustrate our agendas, security, and certainty, we label them evil. They overwhelm us, obscuring the order beneath. God is everywhere and everything, the foundation and bones of the house, the floor on which we act. But no matter how badly we neglect the floor, it still exists, if we’re still acting. We can say the news is always bad, but that’s good. Though loud, bad news is still the aberration against the backdrop of good.

Someone asked me how we know when God is speaking—looking for words, specificity, certainty. But God’s native language is silence, a non-specific, non-rational background radiation, the fabric of life vibrating in every person and landscape. God’s silence never overwhelms the noise we create, but when we allow ourselves to sink beneath the noise, we can reaffirm a wordless message that is always the same, like an audio loop we can enter at any moment: I am here. All I have is yours. All is well and will be well.

Such a non-specific message is not what we want, but all that we need. 

The suffering always present in a limit situation is the only experience powerful enough to pull back the curtain of our certainties du jour and show us the next larger reality we may be ready to engage…a spiritual awakening. But as long as we equate our suffering with evil, let it blot out the possibility of good, it can’t show us anything.

More Big Words

Dave Brisbin 1.26.25
One of the best-known stories from the gospels, one that has seeped into collective consciousness, is the story of Jesus walking on water. This and turning water to wine has become shorthand for divine power. It’s natural for us to focus on the literal, but all Jesus’ miracles have spiritual meaning as well, and since most of us will live full lives never walking on water, the spiritual meaning is more relevant. Especially when Peter asks Jesus to bring him out on the water, and we can suddenly see ourselves as participants in miracle making. 

But Peter gets out a few steps, sees the waves from his new perspective, and starts sinking, screaming for help. Jesus puts him back in the boat saying, you of little faith, why did you doubt? How many times have Jesus’ words been aimed at us when we’ve expressed the least bit of existential uncertainty? But is doubt as uncertainty really what Jesus is rebuking? The word translated as doubt comes from a root that means twice or again, so we can understand it as second guessing ourselves, wavering in resolve as we ruminate.

The boat is our little island of rational thought floating on a chaotic sea of unconscious mystery. We take a breathlessly non-rational step out of the boat, a leap of faith, then immediately start thinking rationally again, fearing again. It’s our human cycle of surrender and refortification to embedded thought that limits our ability to follow Jesus to truth that liberates. 

We don’t have little faith when we stop thinking we mentally believe. We have little faith when we start thinking again and stop acting. Faith is not thought. It’s acting as if what we say we believe is true enough to carry us on the surface tension of uncertainty. The nonrational ability to act in the presence of doubt, step out of the boat of all our very good reasons why not.

Little faith is not much doubt. It’s the need for much certainty. Keeping the faith is not steely-eyed adherence to mental concept. It’s the embrace of uncertainty, accepting we will never have enough information to step out of our boats. We just do. Over and over. Until trust replaces certainty.

Keeping The Faith

Dave Brisbin 2.2.25
Would Jesus have been a Republican or Democrat?

What seems like the setup to a joke is being asked in all seriousness. Two weeks into a controversial administration, I’m hearing people ask how a good Christian could possibly vote… How a Christian pastor could possibly support… An Episcopal bishop and a sitting president both state that God is on their side while remaining flatly opposed to one another. Near the end of the Civil War, Lincoln said that both North and South read the same bible, pray to the same God, invoke God’s aid against the other, but the prayers of both could not be answered, that of neither had been answered fully. 

Once we see an enemy, we imagine God is on our side, because we only have an enemy if we are certain we are right. An enemy is the wrong one. God is never wrong, so God is on our side, because we are right. Blaise Pascal said that people never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. 

Truth is, the real enemy is not the other tribe—
the real enemy is the certainty that makes the other tribe an enemy.

We’re all co-opting God to our side, our tribe. It’s natural for anyone who reveres Jesus, or the authority of his name, to imagine he is in their camp. But what does the record show? Jesus made his own followers crazy, over and over…every time they became certain of their positions, thought they had him figured out, domesticated, he rocked them back on their heels. For anyone with an agenda, he was frustrating, infuriating, unexpected, outrageous, an equal opportunity offender of anyone who was seeing the enemies of their certainty.

Jesus refused to be co-opted into any camp. Whatever political beliefs he had are not preserved in the gospels, meaning they were irrelevant to his message. They never created enemies for him because his primary identity was not in camp or tribe, but in oneness with his Father. If we can only see truth in our own tribe, we’ll see enemies everywhere, but we won’t see Jesus. He’s in the space between camps, where the real enemy is not another tribe, but the certainty that makes enemies of everyone else.

The Real Enemy

Dave Brisbin 6.22.25
Chances are, if you were raised in a Christian tradition, you learned that doubt was the enemy of faith, the opposite of faith, if you had any doubt at all you had no faith. Such learning goes deep and doesn’t go away without a fight. Makes us so hard on ourselves, feeling the inevitable doubts of uncertain human life only to pile on the condemnation of childhood.

Making matters worse, we read the gospels to see the first followers of Jesus drop their nets, their entire lives, to follow him at their very first meeting. These were men with wives and children, livelihoods supporting their households. They left all that at the first meeting with a stranger? Is that the bar for faith?

We make a fundamental error in assuming that the first mention of a person meeting Jesus is also their first meeting. In Matthew and Mark’s gospels, Andrew and Peter are first mentioned following Jesus immediately, but was that their first meeting? In Luke, Jesus walks into Peter’s house as if he lives there and heals his mother-in-law a chapter before he calls Peter to follow. And in John, Andrew meets Jesus first, then persuades Peter to come, while other disciples are gathered over time. First mention is not the same as first meeting. The decision to follow Jesus was a gradual process as with the development of any human relationship. They met, got to know one another, sat in each other’s homes with a growing realization of who Jesus was.

Luke relates that Jesus gets in Peter’s boat at the end of an unsuccessful day of fishing and asks him to put out a little way from shore so he could address the pressing crowd. After speaking, he tells Peter to put out into deep water where they catch more fish than they can haul. Putting out a little way, little risk, to hear the logos or propositional truth is always the first step. Putting out to deep water to hear the rhema or living call to action is the moment truth becomes more than we can haul. Even then, Peter is still wracked with doubt.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith. 
Faith needs doubt as courage needs fear. 
Answering the call in spite of our doubts is the best humans do.

Small Boat Deep Water

Dave Brisbin 6.29.25
A leper approaches Jesus, calls out: If you are willing, you can make me clean. 

A statement. Not asking anything. No question whether Jesus is able to heal. Only if he’s willing. We’re obsessed with whether we’re worthy or capable of connection, acceptance. It’s our fear talking. But moved with compassion, Jesus reaches out and touches the man saying, saba ana, I am willing. In his language, it’s his deepest desire, pleasure, and purpose that he/we are healed, reconnected. His embrace before healing says it all. There is never a moment when full acceptance is not full reality.

Years ago, a woman living on the streets would come on Sundays, usually under the influence. We and the donuts didn’t mind, until one Sunday she was acting out so violently, we had to escort her out. After the service she came back as we were all mingling and made a beeline for me. I stiffened, may have actually taken a step back, but gave her direct eye contact, listening while she speed-talked about things I can’t remember. 

On full alert, I was ready for anything, but the more she talked, the more it seemed her difficult moment had passed. Then she stopped, and after a beat said, I guess I just need a hug. Didn’t see that coming, hope I had the presence of mind to smile, sure that I hesitated, but moved in for the embrace.

You know first hugs…all shoulders and arms. I was thinking through it all, waited what seemed the right number of seconds, then relaxed my grip to back away. She maintained pressure, not letting go. Oh, ok…I re-engaged and waited what again seemed right lapse of time, relaxed, but she still held on, saying in my ear but not necessarily to me: sometimes it’s hard to get a good hug. The human condition in eight words. And as my humanity recognized hers, all the categories in which I’d placed her, all my interior boundaries, my tension, fell to the floor. I reeled her back in and held on until I finally felt her relax.

We worry whether we’re worthy or able. But our worthiness and capability are never in question. Only our willingness…to reach out and touch first. 

Because sometimes a good hug is hard to find.

A Good Hug

Dave Brisbin 7.6.25
Leader of a retreat some thirty years ago, Catholic priest, asked the group—who attended same weekend every year—why Jesus came, why was he born. Hands went up to answer right out of the Baltimore Catechism—to die for our sins. Priest was so frustrated he said that after all their years of attending, if they weren’t willing to grow, learn anything new, next year just stay home. Wow.

I had also been drilled that Jesus came to save us from our sins, shocked by his intensity.

Christian writer and speaker, Brennan Manning, revealed in his memoir just before he died that he’d been an alcoholic since age 18, tried to be the good child stumbling into church every Sunday, ordained a priest, became a famous writer and speaker who fell in love, left the priesthood to marry, relapsed after 15 years sober. From motel to motel on speaking tours, drinking to blackout, all while inspiring so many, like me, with his writing on the radical, furious love of God…on grace. Philip Yancey wrote that we’re tempted to ask what might have been if Brennan had not given in to drink. Wrong question. Real question: what might have been if Brennan had never discovered grace?

How did Brennan discover grace? By continuing to show back up after every relapse, every failing, to find that God was still there waiting, completely unfazed, love undimmed. Our failings usher us into the presence of grace, never our successes. Only when we’ve embraced our failings, ourselves as imperfect, yet still bring ourselves back to Presence do we experience God’s love as unchanging, degreeless, graceful. Only when we have felt completely unworthy and yet completely accepted at the same time, can we see our shame for what it is—a fear of disconnection that keeps us disconnected.

Jesus didn’t come to save us from our sins. 

God understands those, loves right through them. But our shame keeps us from seeing the good news of that kind of love. It’s the long way home, but Jesus came to save us from shame. Only love can do that. He came to show us the perfection of God’s love. To experience that is to lose the shame, the fear that causes all we call sinful. 

Into Grace

Dave Brisbin 7.13.25
How many times have you asked God for a sign? Desperately cried out for any toehold you could get on some certainty…imploring, making bargains. Great scene in the movie Bruce Almighty, begging for a sign but too focused on his pain to see all the signs along the road until he’s finally stopped in his tracks, forced to admit his loss of control. Art imitating life.

When religious authorities ask Jesus for a sign, he refuses, calling them an evil generation—bisha in Aramaic—literally unripe, unready, unprepared. He knows as with almighty Bruce, no sign will be enough to convince them of anything until they are prepared to see. Except for the sign of Jonah. We all know Jonah: God asks him to preach to the people of Nineveh but he hates them so much, wants to see them burn, that he runs away aboard a ship only to be swallowed by a great fish. He camps in the fish for three days, until he can finally admit his loss of control.

Ironically, Jonah is the only Old Testament prophet who successfully preaches a people to repentance, but when God spares the city, Jonah is not happy. This is why he ran away. He knew his God, the extent of God’s love and compassion. But his own love was still tribal. His God should not be their God. God’s love should not extend to those he hated. The descent of his three days in the belly of the beast brought him to the gates of Nineveh, but he’d need another descent before he could extend his love all the way to the enemy.

This is the way of it. 

No sign will ever be enough to overcome our human fears and need for tribal certainty. But the sign of Jonah, descending deep enough, long enough to implode our narrow view of life and love, is the only way to become free enough to see a greater expanse. Whether through external trauma and loss, or internally through intentional spiritual formation, if we’re willing to surrender to the beast, we still won’t find certainty—that’s impossible. But in stripping off illusion, the reality of love extending everywhere, filling every crack, can convince us our borders are artificial, our tribes too small, and our identity defined only in each other.

Belly of the Beast

Dave Brisbin 7.20.25
We’ve painfully learned that when something seems too good to be true…be very careful or run.

Grace falls into this category. What’s too good to be true more than unmerited favor, unconditional  acceptance? Not only too good, but not even fair or ethical. Our theology speaks of grace, but denies it in practice, lost in the glare of reward and punishment. That paradigm, created for us and reinforced by us, is like a box for our minds, describing life and our role so rigidly that even if we do somehow get a glimpse of graceful love, we still can’t believe it really extends to us, unworthy as we are.

Unworthy people can’t imagine they qualify for grace. Shame blinds them. Perfect people can’t imagine they need grace. Entitlement blinds them. So hard to fall in between. The only way to experience the first possibility of grace is to fully admit and embrace our imperfections and failings and yet keep showing up to the possibility of relationship—just as we are, with no pretense or expectation—to graduate from shame or entitlement to gratitude. Gratitude is telling. We’re only grateful for gifts we could never give ourselves…best definition of grace.

This is Jesus’ whole job: graduating us to the gratitude of grace. He knows he’s got to shock our minds out of the box that defines our lives and denies the existence of grace, and it’s got to be a violent shock, a loss of comforting but limiting beliefs as painful as his own was in the wilderness experience that brought him right to the edge. He knows how we think, that we’re always thinking, and that if we’re thinking it, naming it, trying to control it, we’re missing it.

How do you know when you’re in love? Can you explain it? Define it? Control it? Only way to fall in love, experience grace, is to stop thinking, fall out of control. Admit you were never in control and that you don’t exist independently. Isn’t that how it feels? That each breath is not your own, but your beloved’s. Your life only has meaning in theirs? That’s grace, and to move so completely into connection with another is to shock our minds out of the box and graduate to gratitude. 

Mind in the Box

Dave Brisbin 7.27.25
Had a conversation with two devout Christians about Gaza. One believed Israel was committing genocide and saw no justification for their military action, nor for killing a human being under any circumstances. The other, heartbroken over civilian deaths, saw more nuance in Israel fighting for survival against an enemy hiding behind its civilians.

Two loving, sincere Christians using Jesus and scripture as guides came to very different conclusions. 

Is there a “right” way to come to ethical decisions? There are three main families of ethical theory: consequentialism looks at the utility of an action—does it create the greatest good for greatest number? Deontology looks at moral duties, “categorical imperatives” that must be followed regardless of consequences. And virtue ethics looks at ideal human character, or a “virtuous agent” to guide ethical choices—WWJD, what would Jesus do?

Using Jesus as a virtuous agent, we still need to decide whether to focus on universal rules or the consequences we create. Was Jesus consequence or rule-based? As to scripture, which many Christians consider imperative, Jesus is not tied to literal meaning. He paraphrases, adapts passages to current situations as rabbis did then and still do. He interprets metaphorically, changes context, and only quotes passages that present God as the loving Abba he models with his life—practices many Christian scholars would not allow.

Jesus is not tied to the letter of the law, but to its purpose of preserving life and promoting God’s presence. His Sabbath violations are case in point. When he says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, he’s flatly putting consequences over rules. Law and scripture serve to create the greatest good for the greatest number—never an end in themselves.

Jesus models his ethical decision-making, but even this is a guide, not a law. He brings full presence to each situation so he can best discern, guided by scripture and his Father’s love, what the greatest good requires in the moment. We can do no better. Yet we’ll often come to different conclusions. 

It’s how we know we’re doing it “right.”

WWJD

Dave Brisbin 8.10.25
Central jail is a different world. Humorless guards, colorless surfaces, bolted down tables, stools. Time is wherever you are told to wait for as long as it turns out to be. I have plenty of time to take it all in. Unexpected energy, more family reunion than jail visit. Young women dressed up, made up, parents, grandparents, two girls next to me over the low, privacyless divider speaking fast and high, Spanish and English in same sentences. I spin on my stool to face the opposite wall of windows.

Young woman leaning into the glass speaking to a young man in his orange jumpsuit. The look in her eye, even from my angle, stops me. She could have been staring across white tablecloth and candlelight. Nothing else exists except the face in the glass. Like the prodigal son in an orange jumpsuit being hugged home, seems that Jesus, God, and the girl are all orange colorblind. No-fault love. 

So what about justice? God is supposed to be just, right?

Well, we’re in a jail, so justice is grinding along, but Jesus understands that humans occupy two contexts at once. We live in macro groups, but our moment by moment encounters are micro, one on one. And though there is only one love, that love looks like justice in the macro and mercy and compassion in the micro. Because justice must rule in the macro—to lose fairness and equality is to lose the cohesion of the group. But justice becomes intolerance in the micro—mercy and compassion must define actual relationships.

Jesus and a girl at the jail are showing us how it works. Mercy within justice. Love shape-shifting through all of human experience. Though Jesus is always teaching from within a micro context, he respects the law and the macro justice it represents, but uses it as a guide, instruction—never an absolute instrument, never an excuse to miss the opportunity for mercy, for loving the person behind the glass. The young man will wear his orange jumpsuit however long justice requires, but if he keeps that look in his woman’s eyes, his soul will manage.

Isn’t that what we all need? 
To see love and acceptance through the glass while still in our orange jumpsuits?

Micro and Macro

Dave Brisbin 8.3.25
When we are presented with difficult ethical decisions, looking to the law, rules we are obligated to obey, can be comforting as we imagine that choice has been taken out of our hands. But as followers of Jesus, we also look to him as the ideal human who embodies good ethical choice. So knowing how Jesus looked to law is a primary guide in making our own choices.

Jesus says he didn’t come to abolish the law but to fulfill, that until heaven and earth passes away, not the smallest letter or stroke will pass from the law until all is accomplished (Mt 5). Sounds pretty absolute. But Paul says that Christ is the end of the law to everyone who believes (Rom 10). So, which is it? Is the law continuing or ending? When we look more closely, we find that Jesus and Paul are saying the same thing as they look to the telos—the fulfillment, completion, or as we could say ethically, the consequence of our choices.

Christ is the end of the law for righteousness, meaning once we’re transformed in Christ, righteousness no longer comes from obedience to the law but from a different source. Jesus is more explicit: the law will continue until heaven and earth pass away, abar, which means to cross a boundary or go beyond a limit. Jesus is saying that law, namosa—not an absolute code, but instruction and guidance—is needed to direct our choices until the unity and oneness of heaven cross over to merge with the individual form and diversity of earth in our own hearts. To see life in Christ as God sees it…all one thing with which we choose to identify, love.

It’s a “disappearing law,” guidance existing only as long as needed. 

Chuang Tzu said: the purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish. Once the fish is caught the trap is forgotten. Purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch a rabbit. Once the rabbit is caught, the snare is forgotten. Purpose of words is to convey ideas. Once the idea is grasped, the words are forgotten. Show me someone who has forgotten words. That is who I want to talk to. 

The purpose of law is to catch God. Once God is caught, law is forgotten. 
Show me someone who has forgotten law. That is who I want to obey.

Choosing Well

Dave Brisbin 8.17.25
Not long after we started our faith community based on understanding Jesus’ teaching from a first century, Eastern/Aramaic point of view, I received an email from a man on the east coast who told me about debates he was having with his 17-year-old son over Christian doctrine. The boy was increasingly challenging his beliefs, and at one point asked his father: is what you believe really true, or just what you believe? Exasperated, the man asked his son where he was getting all these ideas, and the boy handed him the address to our website. God bless the internet.

Is what you believe really true, or just what you believe? 

What a question. THE question we should all be asking continuously if we’re serious about meaning and purpose. We’ve been taught not to question by those who already have their answers. But any answers merely accepted as received, not the result of a perilous journey of questioning, not subject to the testing of continued life experience, will not be “true” very long. They won’t be able to describe the life and world we’ve lived long enough to see.

Aldous Huxley said that all new ideas begin as heresy, advance to orthodoxy, and end in superstition. Orthodox is that of which we believe we’re certain. It’s a perfect duality. This is right and all the rest is wrong. The only way to deal with a new idea is label it heresy. But if a heretical idea persists long enough, it becomes accepted, and if an accepted idea persists long enough without question, all meaning is lost, only the label remains to which we cling like a rabbit’s foot.

Our minds operate on two tracks, seeing everything as right or wrong, but if we’re serious about truth, we will move beyond those two tracks, beyond received concepts, to fully experience the moment we’re in, align with its flow to find meaning that may last only long as the moment itself, but gives principles for entering all moments. Real time, one track truth that can make us free. 

We’ll be called heretics for our trouble. But we’ll only know that what we believe is really true when we’re willing to let go of the rabbit’s foot, question, and embrace heretical.

Two Track Minds

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.

More Big Words

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