Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in"; aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health your main and direct object you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilization as long a...
Feb 01, 2022•1 hr 4 min
We all need a witness to the particularities of our story, someone who takes in and holds everything from banal trivialities to what is so horrendous it can barely be seen, let alone spoken. Even truer, however, is that we are a proxy witness for the One who reminds us that our life is seen and held by a great cloud of witnesses. – Dan Allender It was Ezra, one of the heroes of our faith, who reminded us, "The eyes of the Lord search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are ...
Jan 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Life is our resume. It is our story to tell, and the choices we make write the chapters. Can we live in a way where we look forward to looking back? Inevitably, we are all going to die. Our eulogy, our story, will be told by others, and forever introduce us when we are gone. The soul objective: begin with the end in mind. – Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights Where have you collided with the limit of what your best can accomplish? Where are you coming to terms with your powerlessness? How have you ...
Jan 04, 2022•1 hr 29 min
To be a man, a boy must see a man. – J. R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar Adultery. Rumors. Scandal. A growing cloud of suspicion. God invades humanity through the womb of an unwed 14-year-old Jewish girl? Mary had been betrothed to Joseph in a romance fit for a fairytale, but her story suddenly appeared to be going sideways. Joseph could’ve bailed; it was his right given the alleged adultery. How does a woman get pregnant without having sex? If he had chosen this path, would Mary have been left, li...
Dec 15, 2021•39 min
What will they say about you when you're gone? What is the most important thing? What if you had another chance? What if there was an ancient path that led to life as it was meant to be? Would you take it? What if it wasn't easy? What if it wasn’t cheap? What if it wasn’t quick? What if there was a way to be good again? ...to become who God meant when he meant you? What if you could have your whole heart restored? What if you could be strong again? ...courageous again? ...and learn to love with ...
Dec 07, 2021•47 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download We see the things we want to see, the things that confirm our assumptions and our preferred way of looking at the world. Our masculine initiation was intended to be an interpretive grid and narrative arc for every moment of every day of our lives. However, the transformative experiences at the heart of the process often come in forms contrary to our preferences. Here’s the good news: God at times gives us what we want, but at all times gives us...
Nov 24, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Christ from the very first moment of his existence virtually bears all men within himself....For the Word did not merely take a human body; he incorporated himself in our humanity, and incorporated our humanity in his humanity. – G. K. Chesterton As a man, what does Advent mean? What is a winsome onramp to engage in the practice of Advent for our own souls and for those entrusted to our care? And what is the fruit of a wholehearted preparation ...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 8 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose. – C. S. Lewis In the twilight of his life, Parker J. Palmer, one of the last great elders of our da...
Oct 26, 2021•49 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Reading is the first thing, just reading the Bible. As we read we enter a new world of words and find ourselves in on a conversation in which God has the first and last words. We soon realize that we are included in the conversation. The Bible is not only written about us but to us. – Eugene Peterson, introduction to The Message David Brooks, the author of The Second Mountain and The Road to Character, offers rare transparency into how his expe...
Oct 11, 2021•1 hr 8 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download There are two ways of seeing. One is to look at a forest, and take in a landscape, and the colors, depth, dimensions, and nuances of all of it. But there is also the act of getting on your hands and knees and looking at one flower, and one petal. – Walt Harrington, The Everlasting Stream What do we do with this collection of ancient texts called the Bible? For many of us, even the word “Bible” elicits mixed feelings. As I talk to men, these sor...
Sep 28, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Who will cry for the little boy, lost and all alone? Who will cry for the little boy, the boy inside the man? – Antwone Fisher Our initiation as sons is a wildly intimate process that travels terrain both universal and unique. One universal feature is found in our origin story from Genesis 1 and 2, when God bestows on man the deeply seeded identity of very good. So what's gone wrong? It was Chesterton who said, “Every man has forgotten who he i...
Sep 13, 2021•58 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download It was the Beauty I longed for, beyond the beauty that I longed for in her... – Frederick Beuchner Sex is never about sex. It’s always connected to places hidden deeply in the souls of men and women. Where have we taken our longing for love? What have we done with the glory and complexity of embodiment in a fallen and being-redeemed world? And how does the story of our sexuality connect with these questions? Friends, I'm inviting you to dive wi...
Aug 28, 2021•59 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download When I look at him there is a collection of awful memories. Memories I have spent most of my adult life trying to forget. – The Kid Some of our most determined energy is poured into forgetting the sights, sounds, and locations that harmed our souls. At best we acknowledge them but minimize their significance; at worst we bury them, laboring to convince ourselves that our painful experiences play little role in the kind of men we have become. Ye...
Aug 16, 2021•51 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Live at Home. Love at Home. Thrive at Home. Family First. – Morgan Snyder “All of life is a coming home. Salesman, secretaries, coal miners, beekeepers, sword swallowers—all of us. All the restless hearts of the world, all trying to find our way home….Home: the dictionary defines it as both a place of origin and a destination.” – Patch Adams Where and when do you have the sense of being “home"? What does that feel like? How would your family de...
Jul 31, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Sometimes we have to leave what we know to find out what we know. – Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey A modern-day parable, The Company Men depicts one man’s journey along the ancient path and process of masculine initiation. Like most initiation stories, the process begins with a man who finds himself at the end of his rope. A. W. Tozer once said, “It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply.” Where does a ma...
Jul 22, 2021•55 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. – Goethe If the primary expression of God, his Kingdom, and his story happens through the recovery of family, why is it often so difficult to experience breakthrough? What's with the regular boredom, monotony, or discouragement? What if engaging these challenges is not a distraction from our Kingdom calling, but rather precisely the path to its fulfillment? What i...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it's having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it's our greatest measure of courage. – Brené Brown The Father is a wild one, undivided in his commitment to meet us where we are and father every uninitiated place in us. This podcast is one of the many privileged opportunities the Father provided this year to reach the many to find the...
Jun 22, 2021•59 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… It is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished ...
Jun 08, 2021•58 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men's loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not r...
May 25, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success. – Ad placed by Sir Ernest Shackleton, 1915 He would never tell you that he was the one who connected Eugene Peterson, author of The Message paraphrase of the Bible, with U2’s Bono and helped cultivate their enduring friendship. It’s reasonable to say that he has fostered more connections be...
May 11, 2021•53 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download In 70-year-old men, the number one factor in shaping who they had become was the presence or lack of strong emotional bonds with a single consistent feminine caregiver. – Robert Karen, Becoming Attached Where have you taken your soul’s need for feminine love? Have you ever considered your relationship with food and how that story has played out in your life over decades? How are you receiving daily feminine nourishment from the heart of God? I ...
Apr 27, 2021•53 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download You speak often of my drinking, but little of my thirst. – Scottish Proverb In seven years of crafting the Become Good Soil podcast for you, no episode has infused me with more JOY than my time with Winton Nicholson as we explored Slow Is Pro. Winton is a fiery, full-hearted Joy-Bringer who has found the treasure in the field and sold everything to possess it. He looks back to us from further down the narrow road and, with a wink and sparkle in...
Apr 13, 2021•37 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about. – N. T. Wright In The Second Mountain, David Brooks observes the inescapable fact that we all grow up in one moral ecology or another. Our moral ecology is the system of beliefs and behaviors that are often based in collective responses to bi...
Mar 29, 2021•40 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is men who have come alive. – Howard Thurman Over two decades ago through his book Wild at Heart, John Eldredge offered men the central thing they were missing: Permission. Permission to recover what God meant when he created masculinity. Permission to recover a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and the courage to f...
Mar 16, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download I haven't made all A's in the art of living. But I give a damn. And I'll take an experienced C over an ignorant A any day. – Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights In Backpacking with the Saints, Belden Lane captures a fundamental mystery of masculine initiation: “What does [a man] do when there’s nothing he can do, when there’s no audience to applaud his performance, when he faces a cold, silent indifference, if not hostility? His world falls to pie...
Mar 01, 2021•58 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download To an unaccustomed onlooker, the ancient practices, set prayers, bells, and incense of formal liturgy may seem perplexing or even bizarre. But as I've gone through another round of unlearning and relearning rightly, I've begun to grasp—with the help of longtime ally Simon Kyne—that liturgy was intended to be a grace and essential stream to draw near to God and access the full breadth and depth of his Kingdom. And as is often the case with any s...
Feb 15, 2021•1 hr
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download “I have not failed. I've just found 1000 ways that won't work.” –Thomas Edison, inventor of electric light What is the path of inner transformation and becoming like Christ? Is such transformation even possible? Dallas Willard assures us it is readily available. We can, in time, become the kind of people who naturally bless those who curse us and love our enemies as our normal reaction. However, he presses that it happens only with a compelling...
Feb 02, 2021•55 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Thinking about something rather than trying not to think about something is much more successful. Walking toward rather than away from something allows us to get where we want to go. – Bill Lokey Jesus has an uncanny way of pulling that singular string that, over time, unravels the well-woven fig leaf we use to insulate our true self from being found and restored. One day he uses merciful deliverance; the next, an exacting question. One day he ...
Jan 19, 2021•1 hr 27 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unb...
Jan 05, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another obscure village where he trained and worked as a carpenter until he was thirty. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never went to college. He never traveled more than two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things usually associated with greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only thirty-three. His f...
Dec 21, 2020•1 hr 2 min
