Become Good Soil

God loves you unconditionally, exactly as you are and not as you "should be.” – Brennan Manning, All Is Grace The best teachers are foremost, always and forever, committed students.  Jonathan David and Melissa Helser are unapologetically committed, life-long students of Jesus and his Kingdom. Risk-takers, worship leaders, and courageous parents, the Helsers blaze a path for people to encounter God...

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. – Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation Our stories do not define us; the Author of them does.  It’s a profound truth and reality that takes many tears, much blood, and many years to fully participate in.  Tommy Colwell is one of the men heroically participating i...

So take seriously the story that God has given you to live. It's time to read your own life, because your story is the one that could set us all ablaze. – To Be Told, Dan Allender As we share our stories, engage our stories, and begin to partner with God in the restoration of our stories, we experience an increasing measure of what Saint Paul scandalously discloses in Romans 8: None of this fazes...

Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not. – Saint Augustine Since we are the sons of God, we must become the sons of God.  Since we are the kings of Jesus, we must become the kings of Jesus—kings to whom he is glad to entrust his Kingdom.  It brings an honorable sobriety to come to the realization that our heart—our healing and our wholeness—is not about us, nor is it primarily for us. It’...

You’re right where God wants you to be when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you, there is more of God. – Jesus of Nazareth, to his closest friends Your reliance on your talent and gifting must die before they can ever be truly free. It is impossible for a man to fully know the love of God until he has experienced the love of God apart from his gifting, his performance, and his success...

Sometimes we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are….What happened wasn’t about you, it was about me. – Superintendent Eric Marsh, Only the Brave Brothers,  As we mature as kings who offer more love and strength to those entrusted to our care, Jesus invites us even deeper: Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults—unless, of course, you want the same treatme...

You are a soul made by God, made for God, and made to need God, made to run on God. Which means that you are not made to be self-sufficient. – Dallas Willard Change in the rate of change is the quiet killer of our generation. Change is the constant.  Habits were meant to root our masculine soul in the life of God. They were meant to be an onramp of constancy in a changing world. Our masculine soul...

All you need is 20 seconds of insane courage, and I promise you something great will come of it. – Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo It was Francis Schaeffer who boldly invited disciples to "do the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way,” instructing that “we must take the lowest seat at the table until God makes it impossible to do otherwise.”  As we live into more and more of the reality of sonship, one of t...

Attachment begins in the first few months of life, but it is the continuous presence of a mother in the first 18 months that is the first step in building a deep and lasting sense of emotional security in a child. This security forms the basis of a child’s sense of self for the rest of life. Bonding is putting the pieces together and attachment is gluing them into place. – Erica Komisar, Being The...

A 30-year old-man is like a densely populated city. Nothing new can be built, in its heart, without something else being torn down. – Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage The theme of "dying before we die" is Jesus’ steady and consistent invitation to his closest companions.  “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; emb...

There are many people who think they want to be a matador, only to find themselves in the ring with 2,000 pounds of bull bearing down on them, and then they discover that what they really wanted was to wear tight pants and hear the crowd roar. – Terry Pearce Over 20 years ago, I found myself navigating a man’s world but largely feeling like a boy. Balancing a young marriage, young children, and a...

I will not abandon you as orphans….I am coming back for you. – Jesus of Nazareth Friends, there is much to hope for in the face of our apparent waywardness with God and our nagging discontent.  God is coming for us.  In his book Renovated, Jim Wilder explains the very simple and profound path to re-attaching ourselves to God and finally becoming the kind of people who can heed the supreme command...

Christianity has tended to focus on right beliefs and right choices as the keys for personal growth. But biblical evidence and modern brain science show that our character is shaped more by whom we love than what we believe. – Jim Wilder, Renovated What if coming home to a new and secure attachment to God is the primary definition of salvation?  What would it be like to come home to God as our pri...

All of life is a coming home. Salesmen, secretaries, coal miners, bee keepers, sword swallowers, all of us. All the restless hearts of the world, trying to find a way to go home. It's hard to describe how I felt then. Picture yourself walking for days in a driving snow. You don't even know you're walking in circles...the heaviness of your legs in the drifts, your shouts disappearing into the wind....

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. – Wendell Berry There simply is no distinction between sacred and unsacred work in the world.  The ache and longing in a man to have purpose and meaning expressed in his daily work is universal. It is intrinsic to our design, marred in the fall, and contested terrain in every masculine soul. So often we spend preciou...

Now I have had most of the life I am going to have, and I can see what it has been. I can remember those early years when it seemed to me I was completely adrift, and time when, looking back, at earliest times, it seemed I had been wandering in the dark woods of error. But now it looks to me as though I was following a path that was laid out for me, unbroken, and maybe even as straight as possible...

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 thing...

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 remi...

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...

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 doe...

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 whol...

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...

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 fo...

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 purp...

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,...