Many of our conversations with friends have been around the subject of the cost of "really" following God. There is a sort of understanding that we are not completely there yet, and to take the leap to full-fledged followers would usher in a high cost. Yet, as Peter said, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."
Brian Dreher is one of four Senior Terrestrial Biologist's in the state of Colorado. He got his masters studying bears. He's also an avid bowhunter. Enough said, right? Brian and Morgan have been longtime friends thanks to a shared passion of the wilderness, hunting, and conservation. Brian lives in a space between the interest groups of politicians with agendas, hunters and recreation enthusiast who want to maximize opportunities, and the care for the land and the animals so the resources thriv...
Back in the fall I (Blaine here) started building a mini barn in my backyard. Doing so dismantled a great many misconceptions I held about building and craftsmanship, like how good I was at it, and what it would be like. Example: I assumed craft would be contemplative and monastic, but it turns out that’s only true if you already have a contemplative and monastic disposition. To talk this through, we asked builder and finish carpenter and longtime craftsman Greg Winters to come into the studio a...
“Two things I ask of you, Lord; do not refuse me before I die: Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.” Yup. The Proverbs say some things about wealth and power we rarely say or pray. In this episode, we dive in to desire: what is worth wanting? Which is another way of saying, what nourishes the human soul? Because it doesn’t seem to be power, that is, wealth, success or influence, even though I (Blaine) spend a lot time thinking ...
“If your life with God doesn’t have a regular dose of adventure,” Padre says, “It’s not going to sustain the masculine soul.” That’s all well and good, but what if you live in the city? What if you have young kids? What if any one of a hundred what-ifs make adventure difficult? To answer that question, we snagged Bart Hansen, of the Ransomed Heart team. Bart has built rockets, parasails, and airplanes, flown all over the west, and done some of the craziest things we’ve ever heard. But it turns o...
We've touched on learning before, and this isn't a repeat episode. Recently a young man asked us how we learn things, as in, how we gain skills or information that actually effects our daily lives. Which is really the point of all that information out there, isn't it? Here's the excerpt from the poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay from the episode: "Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined. Wisdom enough to leech us...
Our identities are shaped by our stories, by the messages we receive from those around us, and by the scripts we seem doomed to live out. But out identity as we know it may not be who we really, truly, are. What we speak over others and over ourselves has immense power, and so much more so when we speak statements of identity. What are the statements you believe about yourself? What if you could exchange your script for a new, better, more hopeful one? What if everyone you knew said, "I trust yo...
Wookie is a designer, coffee shop owner, New Hampshire-based motorcycle rider. He’s a fascinating young dude with a penchant for risk and plenty of insight into which scooter to buy. We roped him in for a few reasons. When you see a guy who owns a coffee shop, works freelance, and maintains a stable of sweet bikes, its hard to imagine how all that happened. We wanted to know the story. What would the established freelancer tell the young freelancer? How do you manage risk when you have so many i...
Sam, Blaine, and Luke sit down to tell some stories from their experiences in dating from high school, into college, and eventually into marriage. This is not meant to be the official posture of And Sons on dating, but a round table where other's stories and experiences can help by way of understanding our own stories. What are the messages your story with dating is telling you, and what are the agreements you might be making over your future? The reference for the purity movement mentioned in t...
It’s Advent, folks. The beginning of the year. The reorientation to our revolution. Sure, advent is a time of preparation, too, but it’s also a time of doubling down on our story, of circling up to raise a glass to the Kingdom of God and remind ourselves of the urgency of our hour. It’s hard to say it better than folks have said it for centuries - “When the Church celebrates the liturgy of Advent each year, she makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah, for by sharing in the long prep...
What are you hoping for? What are you thinking about on a daily basis that brings expectation and anticipation? We all know the story of the Christian hope, it's on t-shirts and tattoos and hallmark cards. How often are we framing our days based on it though, and how often is the world's version taking over?
In this episode, we flip the script. Aaron McHugh, of Work Life Play, interviews the And Sons team (Sam and Blaine) to talk about creative work. How does And Sons keep moving dreams down the field and projects out the door? In brief, years of trial and error. But there’s more to it than that. From the personal challenges of work to basic creative habits, this is an episode on how to ship. Here’ the copy from Work Life Play: Today’s interview is with Blaine and Sam Eldredge with And Son’s Magazin...
If the data can be trusted, we’ll all find ourselves job searching, more than once, in our 20s (and 30s too). In this episode, we brought in Luke from a long-term undercover assignment job-searching to get a tactical download. Like, what job-searching sites are statistically reliable? How do you beat candidate-filtering algorithms? What’s a decent application/interview ratio? It’s all pretty darn helpful. Not jobless? Doesn’t matter. We dig in to keeping the heart alive in off seasons, the meani...
Two things are given in human experience. Birth and death. Our culture doesn’t spend much time thinking about either one. And neither, to be honest, do we. Not until we have to. Which is a problem. If there were two events framing every human life you’d think we’d spend the necessary time to understand them. In this episode, we roped in midwife/writer Kim Osterholzer to map out the territory. This isn’t health class. There’s no test at the end. In this episode, we ask more about the nature and m...
Here at And Sons there’s one question we get more than any other: How do I build conversational intimacy with God? Meaning normal, practical, chatty relationship. Hearing God is the basis for the rest of the Christian life. So of course we roped in John Eldredge to riff on steps to hearing His voice. From new categories for listening (playfulness, kindness) to basic relational skills (stress-free conversation, seeking confirmation) to stories from the field, this is one we’ll return to ourselves...
Books and seminars and conferences and counselors and lifetimes are spent on this subject, and rightly so. But the truth is, knowing that we need to care for our souls, to seek stillness, and to be active about our healing is one thing, actually doing something about it is quite another. Sam and Blaine offer a few simple practices that they use to care for their souls, intentionally, because the alternative is a lifetime of neglect.
We roped in And Sons strategist Jon Dale to riff on a growing concern. It’s education. Problem is, when most folks think of education, they think of mining textbooks for answers other people already know, taking multiple choice tests and reading dusty books, all because they have to. In short, we think of the system designed to make industrial workers for a world that doesn’t want industrial workers any more. In this episode, we discuss the alternative: how to love problem solving, how to fail, ...
When it comes to our daily rhythms, we tend to drift into paths with less resistance and difficulty than others. Life is hard enough as it is, so why wouldn't we choose to ease off where we can? The problem is that that posture can bleed into every aspect of our lives, until we avoid anything that seems too difficult or like too much work. Sam and Blaine share about places they are choosing difficult things for the sake of life, their families, and God.
Strategy is an abused word for a vital concept. In this episode, we sat down with our friend and longtime pro-strategist Anthony Ashley to get to the root of the discipline: what is strategy, what’s it made of, and how do we use strategy as a paradigm to structure our world. Listen for tools to assess immediate strengths and weaknesses, build good goals, and refine the unique approach the corresponds to the personality of any person or team. From the history of warfare to the formation of a drea...
We've got a few books stacked around the office that we like to flip through for inspiration, and Hank Shaw's "Buck, Buck, Moose" has had a spot on our desk for a while now. Shaw is a forager, angler, hunter, and chef, who combines all of his experience to pretty staggering effect. His journey out of political writing and into the ethics and better use of wild food would be worth an episode on its own, but throw in his knowledge of the culinary world and you've got something even more enticing. ...
Dr James practices medicine out of his clinic in Colorado, True Life Medicine, after leaving behind the "traditional Western model" of healthcare. By addressing symptoms alone, Dr James claims that we are giving people bigger and bigger band-aids that never solve the root of the issue. It's time to throw most of our assumptions and ideas of normal out the window, and start being active in our own lives when it comes to our bodies.
Know what Familiarity breeds? Perceived Familiarity. Perceived Familiarity breeds Unfamiliarity. Which breeds Disinterest, Apathy, and, yup, Contempt. This is one of the most important facts about a life with God—we must fight Perceived Familiarity. Today we’ll do that. We’ll blank the slate and tell the story, highlighting it’s many strange facets (Abraham’s fighting company of 318 men, the throw-down, single-elimination tournament with the gods of Egypt, the apocalypse after Malachi, etc), to ...
Laurie Thornton is one part of a husband/wife pastoral team (guess which) with a decade of experience in music ministry, discipleship, missions, retreat-leading, all that. She has a dynamite relationship with God, is what we’re saying, and a proven handle on what it means to live as a disciple in his Kingdom. We asked her to come talk about leadership, starting with a little paradigm work and moving on to kingdom households, finding mentors, and developing a life with God that’s actually worth e...
The summer issue of And Sons is out, and yes, it technically is still summer even though most schools are back in session. In this episode Blaine and Sam flesh out some of the articles on super reading, fathering, and the creative life.
When Justin Lukasavige began running he didn't imagine going for 100 kilometers let alone down the block. But then Dave Eitemiller came along and offered his guidance, and an ultrarunning partnership was born. It's not just about handling the miles, or learning how to pace, or how to deal with suffering. Sometimes what we need is a mentor who we can learn from and be invited by into new and previously impossible adventures.
Why do we keep going back to the same places? What is the value of knowing a land, a rock face, a town, when everything is about "what's next"? John (Padre) writes, "Each year we return lays down a new layer of story, and adventure, beauty and encounter. Layer upon layer, like a rich patina on a piece of heirloom furniture, or better, like the technique Rembrandt and the Old Masters used in their painting, carefully laying down dozens of layers of paint to achieve that extraordinary effect of de...
Sean Buckles is a coffee shop maven with a long career in the US Army, both as a member of a Special Ops team and as an instructor. He’s one of those people you like more every new thing you learn, though it isn’t easy to get him to talk about himself. We like Sean for a lot of reasons, but principally because he’s a dad with a life with God. And not just to his own family, though that’s true, but to his staff and to his community and a to a wider circle than we probably know. In this conversati...
The pernicious and crippling feeling of "it's too late" can infiltrate almost every part of our lives, so it should be no surprise that we are already feeling it in regards to our summer and all the daydreamed adventures we had for it back in the colder months. Sometimes setting small goals, finding loopholes in our own routines, or using a hack to break through a wall of impossibility is just what we need. Not all of these will apply to everyone, maybe none of them will, but at the end of the d...
We'll be honest and say that this episode made a least 1/2 of the And Sons team a little queasy, insofar as it looked like we'd have to buy typewriters and write outside in Oxfords, no socks. This episode is about wonder, and beauty. The case study is poetry. How do you deepen you capacity for beauty? What regular practices increase a person's sensitivity? How long should it take. We've brought Luke back on to talk about all of it. Only we asked him to leave his black beret at home.
You remember Jesse Barkalow - the longtime painter, line cook, and world's most prolific reader. Well, he's been at seminary. Usually, that makes us concerned for a person's well being. But Jesse has a rare disposition, and the opportunity seems to be improving his life with God. We wanted to know why. So in this episode, we're asking a key question: what's the basic question of theology/the human heart? As a matter of course, we also dive into the method that promotes union with God, as well as...
