Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick

Michael opens a new series by telling the truth about his own quiet time. At sixteen, newly a follower of Jesus through Young Life, he was given a formula: 30 minutes of Bible reading, ACTS prayer, and scripture memory. He kept a clipboard. Underneath it all, he believed that if he was faithful enough, God would smile instead of frown. As his struggles with lust and unaddressed trauma grew, the di...

This is a classic conversation. Michael traveled to the Ransomed Heart outpost in Colorado Springs and sat down with John Eldredge to talk about restoration: what it is, why the heart is central to it, and what the Christian life is actually supposed to do for a person. John explains why the pace of modern life traumatizes people —and why the graces available to heal the soul are closer than we th...

Many of us have been handed a faith of victory and failure, where the heroic are celebrated, and the weak quietly disappear from the story. Painter and author Makoto Fujimura has found something truer in the darkness. Through Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence and the bronze images of Christ that persecuted Japanese Christians were forced to step on, Mako reflects on a gospel big enough for anyone who d...

Many of us were taught that faith means believing the right things, and that the rest gets sorted out after we die. Dallas Willard spent decades gently insisting there’s far more available now. In this 2008 conversation, recorded in Los Angeles and one Michael counts among the highlights of his life, Dallas describes salvation as an interactive relationship with God: a life lived with him today, n...

Dr. Chuck DeGroat is back for his fourth podcast visit — and this time he brings a question that has followed him through his mid-fifties: why is it taking so long to grow up? His new book, Who You’re Becoming: The Slow and Courageous Work of Cultivating Character in a Narcissistic Age , grew out of that wrestling and a decade of sitting with leaders whose language had outrun their transformation....

In 1995, Michael sat down with Eugene Peterson for a conversation that was published in the Mars Hill Review and later in Eugene's own book Subversive Spirituality . There were no podcasts then. No one could have imagined that someday a person driving to work or sitting alone at home could put on headphones and hear a conversation recorded decades earlier. Eugene believed words were never mer...

Dr. Alison Cook is a psychologist, host of The Best of You podcast, and the author of The Secure Soul — and the first line she wrote for that book was: a part of me doesn't like God very much. She assumed her editor would cut it. Her editor said it was staying. That moment — a prayer walk in London, an eight-year-old part of her that didn't want to be there — opens a conversation with Mi...

Seven spots remain for the October men's weekend — and Michael wanted the men (and women!) who still needed to hear about it to hear it from two men who've been there. Matt found out about the Restoring the Soul podcast from a therapist in 2018, listened for a few months, heard an ad for the men's weekend, and signed up. He showed up to the airport terrified, texted his therapist fr...

Dr. Jim Wilder has been thinking about the relationship between brain science and spiritual formation since before most people knew the question existed. He trained under one of the inventors of the EEG machine, spent years working alongside Dallas Willard, and has spent decades building what he calls the Life Model — a unified account of what it looks like to grow up into the likeness of Christ,...

Andy Crouch's The Tech-Wise Family isn't about keeping pornography out of your home. It's about building the kind of home where you know what you actually want — and where technology doesn't quietly replace it. In part two of this conversation, Michael and Andy get into the ten commitments at the heart of the book, and they're not what you'd expect. They talk about wh...

Andy Crouch didn't set out to write a parenting book. But when he'd mention offhand that his family had no screens in the house until his kids turned ten, young parents would rush to him afterward with what he described as hungry desperation in their eyes. The Tech-Wise Family came out of that hunger — and out of original research with Barna that helped quantify what most people were alr...

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold — not to hide the damage, but to make the fractures the most beautiful part. Mako Fujimura, one of the world's leading contemporary artists, and his wife Haejin, an attorney and founder of Embers International, have built their lives and work around that image. This conversation is about what it actually looks like to believe it...

This is the second half of Michael's conversation with Dr. Dan Allender, and it's the more personal of the two. Dan opens by talking about his mother, her death earlier that year, the borderline unpredictability, the way she triangulated him into a surrogate role he never asked for and couldn't escape. He shares it not as a confession but as a map: here is where the wound began, her...

Dan Allender has spent thirty years doing work most people would rather not look at — and in this first of two conversations, he and Michael go there together. Dan is a psychologist, professor at The Seattle School, and the author of The Wounded Heart , among many others. Michael first encountered his work in 1989, at one of Dan's conferences, in a season when his own double life had just com...

As part of our Soul Care Summer, we're revisiting a conversation that's stayed with many listeners. Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up the idea that God can only look at us through gritted teeth, or worse, has to look away. Brad Jersak joins Michael to gently dismantle that picture, showing that the ache of feeling far from God was never God's doing. The conversation move...

Michael continues his conversation with Dr. Curt Thompson, picking up where last week left off. There's a tender ache running underneath the neuroscience here — the ten-year-old boy on a summer evening, looking for permission to just be a kid, and the mother who couldn't see it. Most of us carry some version of that missed look, and Curt names how the body remembers what the mind can&apo...

You were made for beauty and goodness. You feel that, even on the hardest days. What neuroscience is beginning to show us is that this longing isn't incidental. It's written into the architecture of how you were made. In this conversation, psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson opens up the world of interpersonal neurobiology and what it has to do with the soul, how the mind is not the br...

Most people picture narcissism as loud, obvious, and easy to spot. The research says otherwise — and so does the Enneagram. In this second conversation with Chuck DeGroat, Michael and Chuck work through all nine Enneagram types and the unique way narcissism hides inside each one: the nine's quiet, invisible anger; the two's helpfulness that quietly demands to be needed; the three's...

There are at least three wrong ways to write about heaven, and Brian Zahnd spent his new book carefully avoiding all of them — too sentimental, too sensational, too escapist to bother caring about the world right in front of us. In this conversation, Brian and Michael talk about why heaven isn't a far-off destination but a realm woven through the space between every atom of this one, and why...

For decades, the church's answer to struggling marriages has been clear: pray more, submit more, give him what he needs. Sheila Wray Gregoire's research asked a different question: What if the advice itself is the problem? Drawing on a survey of 20,000 women, the largest ever done on Christian women's marital and sexual satisfaction, Sheila lays out what the data actually shows: a s...

We can know we are loved and still not be able to let it in. The gap between believing something and feeling it in the body is not a faith problem — it's a physiological one. In this second conversation with Aundi Kolber, Michael and Julianne press deeper into what it actually takes to change: why being loved is not just a comfort but a biological prerequisite for growth, why asking someone t...

Most of us were taught, somewhere along the way, that the answer to pain is to push through it. Try harder. White-knuckle it. And for a long time, that worked — until it didn't. Aundi Kolber wrote Try Softer as a love letter to her younger self, and in this conversation with Michael and Julianne Cusick, she unpacks what it actually means to pay compassionate attention to your own experience —...

Most people who know the five love languages have tried speaking their partner's language — and wondered why it still isn't working. The problem usually isn't the language. It's something underneath it. Dr. Gary Chapman returns with new research showing how personality, empathy, and the subtle dialects within each love language determine whether love actually lands. In this con...

Shame doesn't only live in the dark corners of a broken life. It lives just as quietly in the person everyone else envies — the one who has achieved everything and still wakes up feeling like it isn't enough. Ken Shigematsu grew up moving between Japan, England, and Canada, carrying the weight of a shame-and-honor culture that most Western theology never addresses. In this conversation,...

Most people assume temptation is about weakness or willpower. But the wilderness story in Matthew 4 reveals something far older — evil moves first against the places where we have not been seen, soothed, safe, and secure. In this conversation, Michael and AJ Denson walk slowly through the baptism and temptation of Jesus, presenting them as a portrait of attachment under siege. They explore how the...