Become Good Soil

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 cal...

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 i...

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? ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 podcas...

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 p...

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...

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 hel...

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 o...

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 everyth...

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...

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...

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 app...

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 dr...

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...

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 bei...

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...

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 thin...

Subscribe in iTunes  |  Play in new window  |  Download “What grieves God most is not our sin but our refusing to believe that he is so kind, and that he desires to be with us so much more than we do with him.” – Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ How often do you have the opportunity to connect with a man who has invested five decades listening to the hearts and stories of over 5000 children and...

Subscribe in iTunes  |  Play in new window  |  Download There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: he invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. – C. S. Lewis What if our bodies a...

Subscribe in iTunes  |  Play in new window  |  Download Shall I abandon, O King of mysteries, the soft comforts of home? Shall I turn my back on my native land, and turn my face towards the sea? Shall I leave the prints of my knees on the sandy beach, a record of my final prayer in my native land? Shall I then suffer every kind of wound that the sea can inflict? Shall I take my tiny boat across th...

Subscribe in iTunes  |  Play in new window  |  Download “The intention of God is that we should each become the kind of person whom he can set free in his universe, empowered to do what we want to do. Just as we desire and intend this, so far as possible, for our children and others we love, so God desires and intends it for his children. But the character, the inner directedness of the self, must...