At Sea with Justin McRoberts

Among the many gifts I got early in high school was an F I got on a paper from an English class, a paper that the teacher said was too poetic. What he didn't mean by that is that I had written great poetry in the wrong place. What he meant really, in large part, is that it was really poorly written poetry. A lot was going on for me at the moment. One was I really wasn't actually prepared to write...

I don't remember the exact details surrounding my introduction to Gregory or his work. I do remember that upon my first reading, I was captured. In fact, one of my favorite live performance moments ever was sitting with my friend David dark, who's also been a guest on this podcast several times, at a reading of Gregory Orr's at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., and having one of those...

On most Sundays, I get the privilege of gathering in my house with a group of preteens and reading through bits of the scripture and talking about them. And then praying together, it's a thing we call the good news Club, which borrows from a tradition we've gleaned from. One of my favorite parts of these gatherings is that we don't just read from one translation of the Bible. We actually crack ope...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry, I could not travel them both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth, you might recognize that as the opening stanza to the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken. It's the poem that ends, Two roads diverged in the wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and it has made all the di...

Welcome to the At Sea Podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts.  I'm recording this on December 21, 2022. It is the winter solstice, the day where I live that features the least amount of light. The night is longest. And I'll be honest with you, I'm not feeling great. I don't know if I quite have the flu yet, but I might. Because my daughter does. And I found that out a few hours ago. It's been re...

It's possible, if not likely, that if you are remotely pop culture aware and spend any time on social media platforms, you'll see news about or posts about the death, the passing of dancer, DJ, choreographer named tWitch. I was struck by the moment I heard about his passing. A fan of his, I've liked his work, I've liked him on TV. I've liked his posture online otherwise. I was saddened by the fact...

I'm recording this introduction a few days after Thanksgiving. And if you're listening to this when the episode comes out, it'll be roughly a week, maybe a week and a day or so after the Thanksgiving holiday, which is to say this is the holiday season. And between Thanksgiving and maybe some things that happen in between. And the Christmas holiday is a season during which we sit down at a table wi...

In 2002, I wrote and recorded a song called love.  And I've been waiting to write some kind of follow-up to that song pretty much since I released it. It was a song that meant a lot to me at the time because I was trying to publicly and personally redefine the word and my experience of the word love for myself. And for people that were interested in paying attention. To me, it was this hopeful att...

I’ve long lived with Seth Godin’s suggestion that art is anything you make that forges a connection between people.  Over time, and in that light, I’ve also come to recognize that the depth and sustainability of my professional art life has a lot to do with the particular people I am connected to in/through my work.  Which brings me to my now 12yo son, Asa.  Asa wrote a lot of the melody for the s...

It used to confuse me when, as people talked about relationships, romantic or otherwise, they would refer to the relationship as, like a third entity, there was the person and a person, or a few people. And then there was the relationship that they're in like it was this other thing. You, me, and then the relationship. But it turns out there's actually something to that. Sometimes what's being ref...

I've never really enjoyed fighting. And while I know there might be some folks who come to a different conclusion, depending on their experience of me, the reality is that while I certainly did Hone some skills in the art of argumentation, I've always actually hated what it's cost me to fight. Which brings me to the question, what is worth fighting for? And the truth of the matter is, for the most...

My social landscape does not look the way I expected it to a few years ago. Some of that comes on the heels of religious difference or political disagreement. And as sad as that stuff can be, it's also a bit cliche and predictable.   If I'm being honest, what's been harder, is recognizing that the more I've grown into who I am, and the more distance I've experienced between myself and people I was...

When I first started playing music professionally, it wasn't the beginning of a dream. It wasn't the culmination of a wish from my youth, not really. I thought of playing music. I thought it would be cool. But it's probably most true to say about that moment, the moment in which I decided to see what it would be like to have a career in music was that it was another step. And a long trajectory of...

So I've been really enjoying this new feature of the podcast, taking a question from my Monday q&a sessions at Instagram, and digging just a tad deeper into one of those questions, specifically, those questions when you seem to resonate with those questions and my response. This past week, I got a question that I've been around and asked a lot as a question by somebody who asked "Why do churches s...

You've probably had the bad experience that I had recently, that I'm about to tell you a story about, in which when your mind is already focused on something. You're already thinking about something regularly, and you start noticing it or connections to it everywhere. That happened the other night while I was reading a book to my daughter to help get her to sleep. I am in the process of editing an...

I want to spend a few moments dissecting and maybe even dismantling this phrase. This idea that comes up in coaching conversations and has come up for a long, long time. In my 20-plus years in pastoral ministry as an artist and is the phrase work-life balance. I've got a lot of issues with this. And not just theoretical, but more so as a practical reality. So I'll start where I'm going to end and...

Mike Edel is a very talented singer, songwriter, and producer from Canada. And full disclosure a dear friend of mine, he's also which is a gift to me, a client. He's someone I've had the privilege of coaching over the last couple of years. And as I am with many of my clients, I'm really proud of the work they do, the work they've done. And the way they have over the course of last year and a half...

Last week, I introduced a new element to the podcast; namely, bringing part of my Instagram Q&A sessions to this space and providing a longer answer to some of the deeper or, in my opinion, more pressing questions. On Monday, during the Q&A, this question really stuck out to me: “How do we manage over-pouring ourselves when there is an unending well available?” It might be worth noting here, parti...

Part of how I answered the question on Instagram was to say that it depends on what my priorities are.  Here’s what I mean:  “Church,” as I understand it, is largely a way to intentionally practice the Divine gift of life with other people. Certainly, there are facets of regular church attendance that means I can “worship” God, particularly in music and that I can learn or be taught. I also get to...

My son and I recently went to see the most recent Marvel release. It's a movie about Dr. Strange. He's one of the primary characters in the Marvel Universe. And he is, according to his title, a master of the Mystic Arts, which begs a little bit of a question about what mystic is. See in the films, him being the master of mystic arts is manifested in the ability to open portals to different univers...

While the experiences of displacement and disorientation play such a significant role in conversations about cultural place, institutional belonging, and even interpersonal relationship. I am moved and inspired not only by the stories of those who endure and triumph over that sense of displacement or dislocation but in fact sometimes even choose displacement and the adventure of relocation in orde...

For a number of years, my favorite event in the country was The Festival of Faith and Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The festival host, a gentleman named Ken Hefner would stand up in front of headlining artists' audiences and challenge those audiences to be as prepared for the show, as the band that we were about to see. He would say, "That you would expect this band to have brought their A-game...

One of my favorite characters in all of literature is from a Dostoevsky novel called The Brothers Karamazov.  The character's name is Father Zosima. Father Zosima doles out wisdom throughout the course of the book and its particular instance stands out to me, it's one of the moments that solidifies him as a favorite character. He's counseling. a congregant, who is not just detached from and losing...

One of the surprising benefits changes fruits in me, that have come from partnering with folks who work in the anti trafficking world has been a different understanding and a deeper understanding what it means to live in the body, or in a body. For instance, partnering with Amy Lynch here in the San Francisco Bay Area, who through her organization helps to create pathways to healing for girls who'...

A few episodes ago, I shared a short story about being what I called misnamed at an event. The organizer called me a singer/songwriter when I was there to speak. Now, part of that setup for me emotionally was I was actually in the process of reinventing. I had been playing music for many, many years. And I had been speaking a little bit at the time but paying attention to what was going on in me,...