Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host Rodney Olsen. Welcome to another episode of Bleeding Daylight. Please follow Bleeding Daylight on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Links, contact details and hundreds of additional episodes are available now at bleedingdaylight.net.
Sometimes the things that threaten to blow our worlds apart aren't devastating actions, destructive choices or shocking betrayals. It can often be the steady and relentless path of unchecked neglect or apathy that lead us toward ruin. Today's guest found himself stuck in various areas of life and it nearly cost him everything. We'll explore his story in a moment. Today's episode is a conversation for men and the women in their lives.
My guest is Mark Osborne, the host of The Valiant Forge, a podcast built for men who want to grow in faith without pretense or shortcuts. Mark's story hits close to home for a lot of us. A health scare in his late 40s became a turning point that led him out of spiritual dryness and into a deeper walk with Christ. He's honest about the wilderness years, the self-absorption that nearly cost him his marriage and the surrender that changed everything.
Now he's helping other men use discipline not for self-improvement but for kingdom building. Mark, welcome to Bleeding Daylight. Rodney, thank you for having me. Before you reached your turning point, I'm guessing there were no flashing red lights that told you that things were going wrong. Rather, it was a life that wasn't fully what it could be. Can you give me a bit of an understanding of what life was like before that time?
So I always had this kind of frame for myself that there are leaders and there are followers and I was one of the followers. I was even asked by a pastor of the church that I was going to for a long time. He's like, I feel like you should be a deacon. I was like, you know, I don't feel like I should lead. I think I'm one of the followers. I always wanted to stay in the background. I play on the worship team.
I've been playing music in churches for years and I would just rather play rhythm guitar because it's a background, it's a support system. That's the way I always saw myself. I'm the person to support. I can play bass, I can play lead, I can do solo, but that was always too upfront. So I was like, I just want to be the background guy. I was very apathetic. I never had much ambition towards anything really. My purpose in life was to raise my kids in a godly home and I achieved that.
So it was a life that was not necessarily not going anywhere, but it was a life without spark, a life without some kind of direction. As I mentioned in the introduction, there was a bit of a scare that turned that around. Tell me about that time. I was 48 and during that time where I had that life that didn't have a whole lot of spark, I was not aware. I didn't want to be aware of my health at all. I didn't pay attention to what I ate. I barely exercised.
I honestly didn't really have a lot of mentors or people in my life telling me like, hey, your health is getting out of control. On my birthday is when I had that turnaround, when I had that prayer. A week before Christmas, I had a mild heart attack and I started feeling this heart palpitations. I was 205 pounds. I'm 5'3". So I was 205 pounds. I was having these heart palpitations and right after church, my wife took me straight to the ER. They hooked me up.
They're like, you know, we don't see anything dire, but your health is declining. And if you don't start making some life changes, dietary changes, you can be in trouble. I started making changes at the beginning of the year, just more in my eating. And then that led me to the day that everything turned around. So that was a health turnaround where there was that red flashing light in a sense that told you I've got to do something. When did that become a spiritual wake-up point?
That was on my birthday, my 48th birthday. I woke up getting ready for work as every day, even though I had changed some of my eating habits. I'm a very much a creature habit. So I would eat Captain Crunch every day for breakfast. So I'm sitting there watching the news, eating a bowl of Captain Crunch. It hit me, oh, it's my birthday. It's my 48th birthday. About a year before that, my youngest daughter had moved out. So it was just me and my wife now. We were empty nesters.
And I'm sitting there like, it's my 48th birthday. I should be kind of excited about this or happy in some way. And I wasn't. I just felt no sense of purpose, nothing. I felt discontent. I didn't pray a whole lot at that time. I would pray when I thought about it, or even read the Bible was when I thought. I just had no discipline. And I asked God, I'm like, why aren't I happy? I got a beautiful wife. I've raised two great kids. They have beautiful families.
They love the Lord. I did everything that I accomplished. Why aren't I happy? 10 years prior to that, I had sort of started a health journey, lasted about six or seven months. And I was seeing changes and I was feeling confidence and I was feeling good about myself. And as I was driving to work that day, I was reminded of that time. I feel like God did remind me. I was starting to feel a little bit of happiness that day. I joined the gym because I was like, okay, I need to get in shape.
That's what God's telling me to do is get in shape. But I didn't have my life right with God during that time. I had just this kind of subtle relationship with God. I was going to church and doing all the right things, but I didn't have a close relationship with God. I started this health journey and all of a sudden a man with low self-esteem, because I was like, I'm going to post this on social media and try to inspire people to do the same thing.
I was getting all kinds of attention and my ego was just eating it up. I got really self-absorbed. I got to where I could flex Friday and show off all the things that I am doing. All the while I was saying, God told me to get in shape. That was the little bit of credit I was giving God. What I did learn in that time is discipline. Because if you're going to get into fitness and working out, you have to discipline yourself. You have to get up in the morning, get ready to go to the gym.
But that whole self-ego, self-dreaming took me to a much darker place. In the same way that God was part of your life, but there wasn't this burning desire to know Him more, what was it like at home? Was that the same in other relationships? For instance, with your wife, was there, yeah, we're married, we're okay, we're doing all right. Not realizing that there wasn't that connection that you thought maybe there? Yeah, that was exactly what it was. My wife, amazing woman.
They say behind every man is a good woman. She is an amazing woman. She was supporting me through the whole thing and praying for me during the whole thing because she saw what was happening. We went through this in marriage counseling. She didn't feel comfortable enough because she saw my demeanor changing, my happiness. I was showing happiness, but I didn't have it on the inside. She didn't want to disrupt that. So she kind of left it alone and just kept praying about it.
Our relationship was not good because I was spending time doing all the things that I was trying to do. I was going to like start a side hustle, build a fitness business on Instagram. I had gained a number of followers and I was getting DMs from people. I was like, hey, can you coach me, teach me to do what you're doing? I just let my whole life get consumed into that. So how did it start to turn around?
When did you realize that discipline is good, but not for the sake of discipline and not for the sake of our own purposes in a sense? I had a pastor used to tell me that sometimes when God wants your attention, he has to use a bigger hammer. Like I mentioned, I was getting DMs on Instagram. In the fitness world, DMs come from everybody, both sexes. There were some that I was kind of entertaining from another woman. It was nothing more than just flirting. I left my phone open one day.
My wife opened my phone. She was like, okay, I got to call him out on it. It's time to start talking. This was right after our 35th anniversary. This year, my wife and I will be married 40 years. So right after our 35th anniversary, we had this talk like, okay, if this is the man you're going to become, then I don't know if I can live this way. I don't know if I can stay with you. And I had that moment of decision. I thought about the 35 years that I built.
I thought about what my daughters who saw me and I never understood why. I understand it a bit more now. They saw me as some kind of a hero because I always did the right things in church. They didn't really know that I didn't have a great relationship with God, but they saw that I put forth effort. That meant a lot to them and that's why their lives are where they are right now. But I thought about, and I had two grandkids at the time, like what are they going to think of me?
And what am I going to do to them if I decide to follow this path that at the moment seems glamorous. All this attention from people and I can make money on social media. I can train people. I can change people's lives. That was my mindset when I was on that road. But then on the other hand, what am I leaving behind? My life of 35 years, what kind of trauma am I going to cause to the rest of my family? And then in the middle of that was God. I felt God saying, what about me?
I got on my knees and prayed in that moment. I told my wife, I'm going to leave it all behind. I deleted all my social media. My wife and I prayed together. I'm going to truly turn my life back to God and I'm going to start pursuing him the way that I never have. That's what happened from that moment. Obviously you'd taken that decision and you'd taken it together with your wife. You'd prayed together. How hard was it though to start to win back that trust?
Sometimes we lose the trust of someone because of an action we've taken. And as you've said, this was flirting. Obviously it caused a deeper wound for your wife. What was the road back to trust like there? It was very, very hard in some senses. And in another sense, it was easy because we had that 35 years of knowing each other. She knew the man who I was that she married. She saw me change. Obviously this is why I do what I do. My thought is if this happened to me, this happens to a lot of men.
My purpose is to try to catch men before they go down that wrong path, before they hurt their wife and break the trust with their wife. It's hard to rebuild. If you think about Nehemiah, when he had to go back and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, the enemy was coming against him. It was the right thing to do, but there was trials and tribulation. Even the men, they were building with one hand and a sword in another hand.
So when you're rebuilding something, it's going to take a lot of effort and it's not always going to be that easy. So there was a lot of effort into rebuilding the trust. But a lot of that really helped because we decided to start something that we'd never done before. We would start reading the Bible together. We'd start praying together and that really helped. There was a Bible study.
We would go to a Wednesday night Bible study and it was an open discussion I felt led to raise my hands and share something. I don't even remember what it was, but I remember my wife looking at me and starting to tear up a little bit and then driving home that night, she said, God told me to watch what I'm going to do with this man. That was five years ago. Then it was a couple of years ago that I started feeling this call to start a podcast. Before that, I was a worship leader.
Two years after all of that happened, I stepped up and became a worship leader and then I'm leading a men's group at my church. Things that I had never done ever in my life. I never even wanted to, to be honest, I still don't want to, but I'm just being obedient. It was a long road. In your fitness journey, you certainly learned that discipline means that I don't see results straight away. I need to keep working at this if I'm going to see results long-term.
Do you think sometimes we forget that in the spiritual sense that we need to have a discipline? If we are serious about growing closer to God, we need discipline, not to make it a works-based gospel, but simply to do what must be done to grow that relationship and closeness? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's what I learned. I would wake up every morning, go to the gym six days a week. On the seventh day, I'd go out for a run.
Once I started developing my relationship with God, I had read Children of Israel, bring your first fruits. My first fruits before this was going to the gym, taking care of myself. I got to change that. My first fruits became spending time with God. For five years now, I wake up in the morning, I grab my Bible or I listen on the Bible app while I'm drinking my coffee, at least 30 to 45 minutes of devotions.
Sometimes it's just listening to a devotion while I'm cleaning the kitchen or whatever, which that's another thing to help build trust with your wife is do things for her that will help her make her day go better and she appreciates it all. I do those things while I'm listening to the Bible or I sit down if I'm doing a study, if I'm preparing for a class or a podcast, I sit down and do a study. I wake up early in the morning, something I never did until I started fitness.
Once I started that fitness journey, I was up at 3.30 every day. Now I'm up at four o'clock and my time is with God. It's nice and quiet in the house. That was a discipline I never had before any of this happened. The spiritual disciplines are key to becoming a better man of God and developing your faith in relationship with him. You mentioned that you have now the disciplines of waking early to spend time with God's word to be praying.
Are there other disciplines that you've taken on that you find helpful and that you help others discover through the podcast? Yeah, I have the four foundations, which is faith, family, finances, and fitness. Those are the four things that if a man can get right, then he is doing very well. I still struggle in a lot of those areas. The family is a key thing for spend time with your family, be present with your kids, be present with your wife.
That's actually more important than the fitness or the finances. I said it in that order on purpose, faith, because you got to have your relationship with God. When you spend your time with your family properly and being present, if your relationship with God is correct, then that will just automatically come about. If you're being a good steward of your time, which is also discipline, and your finances, and everything else you do in your life, it's kind of like a snowball effect.
When you get your faith right and you get your family relationships right, the rest kind of just fall into place. Do you think that a lot of men may well be chasing after God and they're looking after that faith piece, but they have missed the point that we are spirit and we need to be in a relationship with God in that way, but we are spirit housed at the moment in a body, and that that's important too, and that scripture actually speaks to that? Yeah, absolutely.
The way I talk about my journey of fitness, because I got into self-development at the same time. All those things were important to know, because they help you, but I never really liked the term self-improvement. I got so self-absorbed myself, so I hate using the word self, and I call it Christ-centered development, because when you try to discipline yourself, so when we talk about discipline, that is actually a fruit of the Holy Spirit.
It's called self-control. The Holy Spirit gives you the fruit of self-control. Discipline, the self-control to not look at things, or see things, or do things that you shouldn't do. The self-control to get up and do the things that you should do. That's one of the fruits of the When you combine what you're trying to do to be a better man with the Holy Spirit as your guide, as your center, it's just so much easier than trying to white-knuckle and push your way through.
I've been reading a book right now called The Awe of God, and it talked about being God's friend. Abraham was a friend of God. Abraham was so close to God that when God was going to take out Sodom and Gomorrah, he told Abraham, this is what's going to happen. Abraham was able to have that negotiation with him. Lot, on the other hand, even though the Bible says Lot was a righteous man, he didn't have that ability because he didn't have that relationship with God. We can be righteous men.
We can do the right things, but unless you have that true relationship with God, you have that fear of God, the fear, respect, reverence for God, then you truly can't be the man of God that you should be. There seems to be a lot of confusing and conflicting ideas of what a man should be. You describe biblical masculinity as humility, responsibility, and sacrificial love, not the image that we so often see.
How do you help men to actually unlearn the cultural narratives that they've absorbed about what it means to be a man? Some of the cultural narratives that what it means to be a man is that you should never cry. That's wrong. You just man up and take care of business. When you're manning up and taking care of business, you're doing it all on your own. You're not relying on God. You're not relying on your faith. That's the wrong way to do it. The Bible says to humble yourself.
Humbling yourself is knowing that you're not perfect. You don't got it all figured out and you start relying on God. If you humble yourself, you're going to have this moment where you're going to break down. True repentance can be sorrowful. The world says men shouldn't cry.
If you're truly sorry for the things that you've done, like the things that I've done in my past, I know I'm redeemed from them, but I go on these podcasts and I talk about it and I think about it and I feel terrible that all that happened, that it even got to that place to where I was even contemplating, pursuing other things rather than my family and my wife and my God. I feel sorrowful for that.
The sorrow that I've put my family through, that I put my God through, I think about the things that I could have done in that time that I wasted. It makes me sorrowful. No regrets. That's a word you hear all the time. No regrets. I don't care. I just move forward. I believe everything can be redeemed through God and God puts all of our sins into a sea of forgetfulness and we shouldn't look back.
I totally agree with that, but that doesn't mean you don't regret the things that you've done in the past. I can imagine that there would be some women listening who are saying, hey, I know that Mark is not there yet. He is still on the journey of becoming the man that God has called him to be, but I'd love my man, I'd love my husband to have the sort of turnaround that Mark has had.
How can women gently introduce that to their men and encourage them to seek the sort of turnaround that you've had? A conversation that I had with my wife later down the road after we kind of got to a better place because we have to continually have conversations just to make sure we're both feeling the right way about each other. I've constantly asked her because I'm busy now. I have a full-time job just like you and I'm podcasting and now I'm going on other podcasts.
I also minister at my church. I'm doing classes at my church. I'm doing small groups. I'm meeting with men one-on-one, so I'm busy. I have to constantly check in and say, hey, is this okay? Are we spending enough time together? How do you feel about our relationship?
For me to say to a woman, this is kind of a hard question because I don't really know how to, how women should feel about this, but I do think that you should constantly check in with your husband and don't just ask how your relationship is. Say, how is your relationship with God right now? Can we pray together? Ask him questions about the Bible. Make him feel like he has a reason to search the Bible because you have this issue.
Find an issue that you're struggling with and you want a biblical answer. It gives him a purpose and a reason to go study this out and actually spend time with Catholic. Hey, my wife's asking me this question. What's the answer? How do I help her? I think that would be a gentle nudge. If your husband doesn't go to church, just say, hey, I would really love it if you just would come to church with me one Sunday a month.
And then if you're a Christian woman and you're praying to God, just ask the Holy Spirit to gently nudge him in the right direction. For the men who are listening, if they tune in and listen to the Valiant Forge, what are they going to find there? How are they going to be helped towards a closer walk with Jesus? At the moment, I'm doing a lot of interviews, kind of like we're doing right now. And I interview high level men who have had issues in their past and they have been through it.
And now God is using them in other areas, authors, writers. I do a lot of testimonies. I do also do solo episodes where God leads me to teach on a certain topic. There's one that I'm working on right now that I thought about even naming my podcast is called Come See a Man. It's John 4, where Jesus meets the woman in Samaria, the woman at the well. She goes to Samaria and says, come and see a man who told me all that I've ever done.
So when you come to the Valiant Forge, what I hope you see is not me, but come and see the man that has done everything for me, that is working through me. Don't see me, see the Jesus Christ in me. That's the man that I want everybody to see. I will certainly make sure that there is a link to the Valiant Forge in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily, so that people can continue on that journey with you.
But as we close, what would be the words that you would say to a man listening who may be at his own crossroads and wondering which way to turn? Is it going to be worth the effort to put in that discipline to walk towards Jesus? Absolutely. What do you have to go back to? The Bible says broad is the way that leads to destruction. Narrow is the path that leads to life. When you're at that crossroads, you're looking at what seems so glamorous over here and what seems like a hard road over here.
The hard road will lead you to heaven and lead you to Jesus. The broad road is going to lead you to maybe it'll be nice in the beginning, but then if you look at all the Bible stories, you look at people like Solomon. Solomon was the wisest man on earth. He had everything. He even went the way of destruction. In the end, he turned around, if you read Ecclesiastes, but he went the wrong way. He did not have a great life at the end.
He had all the riches and all the women and all the concubine, but if you read the book of Ecclesiastes, he was cynical about it. It all meant nothing. A life of meaning is a life with Jesus. If you're following Jesus and you're close to God, and even though it may be a hard road, I can tell you me starting a podcast, me talking on podcasts was never the man I was. I would never go up and even talk to people, but now here I am on a podcast talking to men. I do my own podcast.
I'm teaching in my church. I would never have done that ever. That road, that hard road, it's way more rewarding because you're helping others and you have this sense of purpose that God is using you to touch someone's life. What I would say to that man is even though it may seem hard, in the end it will be worth it. You can find a link to the Valiant Forge in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net.
Mark, I want to thank you for your openness, your honesty, for the work that you're doing, helping so many men through your podcast, and thank you for spending time with us today on Bleeding Daylight. Rodney, thank you very much for having me on. God bless you. Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight. Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others. For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.