CHAPTER FOURTEEN Identity Beyond Circumstances

Separating Who You Are from What Happens to You

My name is Andy. I am chosen and adopted — a son of the Most High King, bought completely and paid for by the perfect sacrifice of Christ's own blood, heir to an eternal inheritance that awaits me in heaven, and sealed for eternity by God's Holy Spirit. Don't mess with me.

— Declaration of Identity, Michelle Anthony

There is a moment in a man's life when everything he has built his identity upon gets tested — not by a dramatic crisis, necessarily, but by something far more subtle and far more devastating: the slow erosion of certainty about who, exactly, he is. Maybe it comes when the job title disappears. Maybe it comes in the silence of an empty nest. Maybe it comes in the dark hour when he realizes that the man who was supposed to tell him he was worthy never did. And now, decades later, he is still waiting for someone to say the words.

This chapter is about that moment. And more importantly, it is about what comes after it.

Andy Eberhard did not come to this topic as a theologian. He came to it as a son — a son who spent years navigating the quiet and confusing distance of a father who was there and yet somehow entirely absent. He came to it as a man who, while sitting in a worship service in a scrub top instead of the banker's suit he used to wear, finally heard the word father and, for the first time in his life, did not flinch. He came to it as someone who has spent the last four or five years working through, with God and with a community of brothers, what it actually means to build your life on something that cannot be taken away.

What follows is the fruit of that journey — not a polished theology lecture, but an honest reckoning with the deepest question a man can ask: Who am I, really, when everything else falls away?

I. The Father Wound: Why It Matters More Than We Think

Before we can talk about identity in Christ, we have to be honest about what happens to identity without a father's blessing. Because the evidence — from ancient Scripture to modern psychology — is uncomfortably consistent.

Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Michael Lamb, Jordan Peterson — the names span generations and disciplines, and yet they converge on a single, inconvenient truth: a man's foundational sense of self is shaped, more than almost anything else, by his relationship with his father. What his father said to him. What his father did not say. Whether his father was present in body and spirit, or only in body, or not at all. The way a father speaks over his son — 'I'm proud of you,' 'you are good at this,' 'I love who you are' — creates the scaffolding upon which a man builds his understanding of his own worth.

John Eldredge has written extensively on this in his Wild at Heart series, exploring how the father wound leaves a specific kind of mark — not always a visible scar, but a hollow place, an unanswered question that a boy carries into manhood: Do I have what it takes? Am I enough? Am I worth someone's time?

Andy's story did not involve overt abuse. He is careful to say that. He has deep gratitude when he considers what some men have endured. But the absence of warmth, the slow retreat of a wounded man who could not give what he never received — this has its own particular gravity.

There were weeks at a time where we were in the same house. He'd get home from work, go upstairs, just avoid me. I'm downstairs thinking, what's going on? And every interaction we would have would be in passing, and it was angry. Where I've seen that kind of land on me is I would seek validation through a lot of maybe traditional ways for an American teenage boy — girls, sports, driving really fast. All of these things that are like, when a guy is still looking for who he is, here are the things he tends to seek validation through.

— Andy Eberhard

Then came the moment that crystallized it all — the kind of offhand comment that a wounded man makes, perhaps not even intending permanent damage, but which lodges in a boy's soul like a splinter that works its way deeper over time. Andy had left laundry in the washer. His father came home, moved the wet clothes out, and threw them on the bedroom floor. When Andy asked why, his father said words that Andy still carries.

'You're always in the way. You are a log in the way of my life.'

— Andy's father

Those words became a lens — a distorted lens — through which Andy began to interpret himself. Not because his father intended a campaign of destruction, but because a boy with no counterweight to that word has nothing else to grab onto. And so he went looking for counterweights in all the usual places: achievement, appearance, performance, approval. He wore his identity on the outside because he had not yet been given one on the inside.

The good news — and this chapter is ultimately good news — is that the story does not end there.

II. Who Are We in Christ?

Paul the apostle wrote from prison. He wrote from shipwrecks. He wrote after beatings and betrayals. And what he wrote, over and over again, was not a survival manual for difficult circumstances — it was a declaration about identity. Read his letters slowly and you begin to notice: Paul is not primarily interested in getting out of his situation. He is interested in who he is inside of it.

The first anchor verse Andy brought to the group cuts to the heart of it:

Romans 8:14–17

For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, 'Abba, Father.' The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs — heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

Andy put it plainly: this verse says we are not just saved — we are brought into the family with full rights. Adopted, not enslaved. Heirs, not outsiders. This is not the posture of a group of people that God barely has time for. This is inheritance language. This is sonship.

Matt, one of the men in the room, leaned into what this passage stirs up for him:

For me, it speaks of this dynamic — that our identity revolves around our capacity to step into sonship. Because if we're brought into that life as a son, and if a son then an heir, there's an acceptance. And I think that's the battle for me: do I matter enough to be worthy of that? I have to challenge myself daily to go back to the sonship piece and realize that I am something more than just a guy who said a prayer and reads the Bible. There's a deeper, more intimate connection than that. And I need to know how he sees me, and go to that daily — because it's easy to seek validation in so many other places that are cheap and fleeting.

— Matt

Cheap and fleeting. Those two words are worth sitting with. The world offers validation in abundance — but it is always contingent, always shifting, always dependent on performance. The approval of the crowd is given and revoked. The job title arrives and departs. The bank account rises and falls. Only one identity is non-contingent, and it was secured not by anything we did, but by what was done for us.

Tim shared a memory from a trip to Israel that gave this theological reality a face:

I remember sitting on the plane. A man got up to go to the bathroom, and his little boy started following him, yelling, 'Abba! Abba!' And he came up and grabbed his hand and walked back. That's when it hit me — that's what that word means. That's the intimacy of a father and son. And Paul is explaining that because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, the Spirit who calls out, 'Abba, Father.'

— Tim

The word Abba is not formal. It is not distant. It is the word a toddler uses when he sees his father across the room and breaks into a run. It is the word that carries within it the whole weight of being known, wanted, and safe. And Paul — writing in chains — says this is what you have been given. Not as a reward. Not as a prize for good performance. As a gift. As an adoption.

III. Separating Who You Are from What Happens to You

The Orbits of Identity

One of the most clarifying moments in the group's conversation came when one of the men — a pastor — pulled out a marker and began sketching a diagram. At the center: your identity in Christ. Around it, in concentric rings, the roles and seasons of a life — father, husband, friend, professional, brother, neighbor. And further out still, the things the world uses to define a man: his title, his income, his image, his productivity.

The insight was simple and devastating: these outer rings change. They are supposed to change. That is not failure — that is life. But when a man has allowed those outer rings to drift inward and take the place of what belongs at the center, the natural transitions of life begin to feel like annihilation.

My wife really went through a time after our last kid left home where she said, 'I'm not a mom anymore.' And I was logically like — let me demonstrate, you still are a mom, technically. But that's not what she was saying. What she was saying is, I'm not this anymore. Who am I? Or when I left 30 years of being a pastor, and people would say, 'What do you do?' And I was like, 'I used to be a pastor.' Because I didn't know. These are real things. And there is grief and loss that come with them.

— Thomas

Thomas's honesty here is important. It would be easy — and wrong — to simply wave off the loss of a role with a spiritual platitude. 'You're a child of God, so none of this should hurt.' But that is not what Scripture says, and it is not what these men were saying to each other. The roles are real. The grief when they shift is real. The pain of losing a job, a relationship, a season — this has genuine weight.

The question is not whether it hurts. The question is whether the center holds when it does.

And the center can only hold if it is actually at the center. This is the diagnostic question for every man in the room: Has what belongs in the orbit crept into the core? Has the job title, the bank balance, the suit, the reputation — has any of it quietly displaced the one thing that cannot be taken?

The more I invest time into what I do, and suddenly that is pulled — man, it bumps right up against how I view myself. My value was in what I produced, what I could deliver. Moving from that to something else — just being paid for what I think — that was a big jump. And somebody challenging what you think based on your sense of value? Holy moly. It's hard to be secure when the identity you've built your life on can be revoked by a phone call.

— Russell

This is the trap — not the trap of having roles and caring about them, but the trap of confusing them with the self. A man can be a devoted father without his worth depending on how his kids turn out. He can pursue excellence at work without his dignity depending on the next promotion. He can inhabit each ring fully without building his house there — but only if the center is occupied by something that does not shift.

And when hardship comes — as it always does — the man whose center holds is not the man who feels no pain. He is the man who knows who he is even inside the pain.

The Valley Is Real — And So Is the Center

The prophet Habakkuk lived in a moment of complete collapse. And what he wrote was not a denial of the collapse — it was a declaration made in full acknowledgment of it:

Habakkuk 3:17–19

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to tread on the heights.

Notice what the prophet does not do. He does not say the crops are fine. He does not pretend the barns are full. He looks directly at the devastation — and then he looks to the one thing that the devastation cannot touch. The verse is not a spiritual bypass of the pain; it is a choice made inside the pain. Yet. Yet I will rejoice.

The group also sat with Psalm 84:5–6:

Psalm 84:5–6

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Baka, they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools.

The Valley of Baka. The Valley of Tears. Andy pointed out what struck him about this passage: the pilgrims do not avoid the valley. They pass through it. And as they do, something happens — the valley is transformed. Springs appear. Pools form. The suffering does not disappear, but neither does it have the final word.

There's what happens to you. There's who you are. And then there's also the impact that happens beyond that — as you choose to enter into the process of separating who you are from what happens to you, there are these other consequences that occur. What's the impact as I choose to walk this road? That's interesting to sit with.

— Andy Eberhard

Paul, writing from a prison cell in the letter to the Philippians, circles back to this with a frankness that can feel almost uncomfortable:

Philippians 4:11–13

I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

Learned. Paul uses the word learned. Contentment is not a personality trait or a spiritual gift given to the lucky few. It is a discipline. It is acquired, often through exactly the kind of hardship that feels most resistant to contentment. And the source of it — the secret, as Paul calls it — is not stoic detachment from circumstances. It is attachment to something that transcends them.

Russell put the tension in the room honestly, the way only a man who has actually sat in the valley can:

I hate being broke. I'm not broke today — we're flush. But I know the pain of what that is. And so, God, please don't send me back down that valley. I trust you, Lord — but really, I just don't want to. And it's hard, because then you're bumping up against the macro issues, the economy, all of it. Does that threaten who I am? I need to be reminded of who I am in a way I can't get there on my own. I need a hand on my shoulder that just says: you are so much more than what you do.

— Russell

That is not weak theology. That is honest anthropology. Men need each other for exactly this — to speak identity over one another when a man cannot speak it over himself.

IV. How Do We Actually Live This Out?

Understanding that your identity in Christ is foundational is one thing. Living as though you actually believe it is another. The gap between intellectual assent and embodied conviction is where most men spend most of their lives.

Andy spent several years at a bank, rising steadily through the ranks, becoming an area president, overseeing the southern half of Colorado. And then he left — for a job that required him to wear scrubs. And in that transition, something unexpected happened.

I had worn a suit every day. And then a few days before starting the new job, they told me: do you have your own set of scrubs? And I said, 'Scrubs? I do finances for you.' But I started to realize — how much had I put my identity and my worth into 'look, I wear a suit, I must be important, I must be valuable.' I started wearing a jacket when I was out, so people didn't see the scrubs. How will people know how much money I made if I'm not wearing a suit? And then I realized: we're actually better off financially than I was at the bank. And yet — I am like, but people might not know that.

— Andy Eberhard

The suit was not the problem. The suit had become a container for something that needed a different home. And that realization — that the container had become the foundation — opened a door.

He found himself at a young adult worship service shortly after. The worship team was playing, and the pastor was asking the congregation to simply speak to God about who he is to them. And the word that rose in Andy's heart was the word he had most avoided.

The word father came to mind. And that had been almost a bad word for me. And that night it hit me — I had to go sit down, I was just bawling. And I felt this transition of: who cares what's going on out there? This is who I am to him. The last couple years, identity has become such a big thing in how I see myself, how I react to the world.

— Andy Eberhard

He went on to name something worth sitting with: when a man actually lives from his identity in Christ, the small things that used to set him off — the driver who cuts him off, the colleague who disrespects him, the friend who doesn't notice — stop having the same grip. Not because he has become indifferent, but because those moments are no longer threatening the thing that actually matters. They are just traffic.

He put the challenge to the group directly: How much do we actually act like we believe those things about our identity in Christ? How much does the declaration — chosen, adopted, son of the Most High King — actually govern the way we move through Tuesday afternoon?

The Scriptures he brought for this section are about posture, about daily orientation:

Jeremiah 17:7–8

Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.

The tree does not produce fruit by straining toward the sun. It produces fruit by being rooted where the water is. The heat comes — Jeremiah does not pretend it does not. But the tree's response to the heat is not panic. Its leaves are always green. It never fails to bear fruit. Not because it is in a comfortable climate, but because it is in the right soil.

Danny offered a picture from his own pilgrimage that captures this:

When I was in Israel, we went to the headwaters of the Jordan River. We drove past Jerusalem — everything was dead, no blooms, like winter. And then we went about seventy miles north, and there were fig trees on the banks in full bloom. In the dead of winter. That verse just came alive for me. It doesn't matter what is happening around the tree. It matters where the tree is planted.

— Danny

This is not abstract. Every man in the room has, in some form, a choice about where he plants himself. In the soil of performance and approval — where the water is always conditional? Or in the soil of who God says he is — where the water flows regardless of the season?

The armor passage from Ephesians 6 — the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, feet fitted with the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit — is not primarily about defensive posture in spiritual warfare, though it is that. It is about how a man dresses himself when he gets up in the morning. What he puts on. What he chooses to wear.

The man who lives from his identity in Christ does not simply know it intellectually. He puts it on. Daily. He reminds himself. He allows others to remind him. And slowly, imperceptibly at first, his leaves begin to stay green in seasons that used to wither him.

V. See Yourself in His Story

The Wemmicks

Andy closed his teaching with a children's book. He was a little sheepish about it — this was a group of men who had been through careers and divorces and deployments and dark nights of the soul. And here was a picture book. But the sheepishness dissolved as he read, because Max Lucado had done in a few hundred words what takes most authors a few hundred pages.

The story is called You Are Special. It begins in a village of small wooden people called Wemmicks, all carved by a woodworker named Eli who lives in a shop on the hill above the town. Every day, the Wemmicks do what Wemmicks do: they give each other stickers. Golden stars for the beautiful ones, the talented ones, the impressive ones. Gray dots for the clumsy, the chipped, the ordinary ones.

A Wemmick named Punchinello has collected so many gray dots that people give him new ones simply out of habit. He has begun to believe he deserves them. He avoids going outside. He hangs around other heavily-dotted Wemmicks because at least he doesn't feel so alone.

Then he meets Lucia — a Wemmick with no stickers at all. Not because people haven't tried to give them to her. They have. But the stickers don't stick. Stars fall off. Dots fall off. She is simply herself.

When Punchinello asks her secret, she says: 'Every day I go see Eli.' And she skips away.

Punchinello finally makes the journey up the hill, half-expecting to be turned away. Instead, the great craftsman calls him by name. Lifts him up. Sets him on the workbench. And when Punchinello tries to explain himself — to defend his dots, to justify his existence — Eli stops him.

'You don't have to defend yourself to me, child. I don't care what the other Wemmicks think. You don't have to either. Who are they to give you stars or dots? They're Wemmicks, just like you. What they think doesn't matter, Punchinello. All that matters is what I think. And I think you are pretty special.'

— Eli, in You Are Special by Max Lucado

'Why?' Punchinello asks. 'I can't walk fast. I can't jump. My paint is peeling. Why do I matter to you?'

And Eli looks at him and speaks slowly: 'Because you're mine. That's why you matter to me.'

When Punchinello turns to leave, Eli calls after him: 'Remember — I made you. And I don't make mistakes.' And as Punchinello walked away — still not entirely sure he believed it — one gray dot fell to the ground.

Andy read the last line quietly, and the room was still.

Because the room was full of Punchinellos. Men who had collected dots — from fathers who left or stayed and said nothing warm, from careers that ended, from failures they replayed at 2 a.m. Men who had sought stars in all the expected places and found that stars, when you build your house on them, make a poor foundation.

The key line of the whole story — the one that rewires everything — is what Eli says about why the stickers don't stick to Lucia: 'The stickers only stick if you let them. The more you trust my love, the less you care about their stickers.'

This is not a call to stop caring about anything. It is a call to care about the right thing first — and to let that primary caring reorder everything else. Lucia has not become cold or indifferent. She is lighter. She skips. And the reason she skips is that she spends time with the one who made her, and she has begun to see herself the way he sees her.

VI. The Declaration — and the Daily Journey

We began this chapter with a declaration. It is worth returning to it now — not as a warm sentiment, but as a practice. Michelle Anthony, who works in family ministry, developed these words to speak over her children each night as they went to sleep. Andy and his wife have taken them up for their own kids. And somewhere in the process of saying them over his children, Andy began to say them over himself.

My name is [your name]. I am chosen and adopted — a son of the Most High King, bought completely and paid for by the perfect sacrifice of Christ's own blood, heir to an eternal inheritance that awaits me in heaven, and sealed for eternity by God's Holy Spirit. Don't mess with me.

— Declaration of Identity

That last line — don't mess with me — is not arrogance. It is the posture of a man who knows where his value comes from and has decided that he is no longer available to have it redefined by circumstance, by a father's silence, by a layoff, by a dot someone tried to press on his chest.

But here is what we need to be honest about: declarations do not do this work by themselves. The declaration is the flag planted on the hill. The work is in returning to the one who carved you — returning daily, as Eli invited Punchinello to do, and letting him remind you.

This is what Andy found. The word father had been almost a bad word for him for most of his adult life. And then one night, in a worship service, in a scrub top, with nothing particularly impressive about where he sat or what he had accomplished lately — the word rose up in him. And something shifted. Not completely, not finally. But it began to shift.

And when he looks at his kids — when he thinks about the declaration he wants to plant in them, the steady voice he wants them to carry into adulthood — he is not just parenting. He is rewriting something. He is doing for the next generation what was not done for him. And in doing it for them, he finds that it is being done for him as well.

When we adopted Grady, something just resurfaced in my soul. I went to the other side of the world to get that boy. I chose him. And forever it just changed the way I viewed myself in God's hands. Did that kid earn it? No way. And I thought — how much more would He, my Father, do for me than what I've done for Grady?

— Russell

This is the gospel made tangible. The adopting parent who crosses the world, who chooses the child not because the child performed but because the parent decided — this is the image Paul is reaching for in Romans 8. You have not been tolerated. You have not been barely included. You have been chosen, crossed for, brought in, given the name.

And the daily work — the ongoing journey of identity beyond circumstances — is simply this: spend time with the Father. Let him remind you. Let him speak over you what your earthly father may not have known how to say. And as you do, the dots will begin, one by one, to fall.

Reflection Questions

These questions are not designed to be answered quickly. Sit with them. Bring them to a trusted brother. Bring them to God.

• When you think of the word 'father,' what is the first feeling that rises? What does that tell you about the lens through which you approach God as Father?

• What is currently in the center ring of your identity? What would have to be taken away for you to feel like you had lost yourself?

• Which roles or circumstances have you allowed to define you — either as a source of pride or as a source of shame — that actually belong in the outer orbit?

• When has a valley changed you? What did you find in you in the hard season that you could not have found any other way?

• How much of your daily life reflects the belief that you are chosen, adopted, fully paid for, and sealed? What would change if you lived as though that were actually true?

• Who in your life — a son, a friend, a younger man — needs you to speak identity over them the way you are learning to receive it yourself?

A Prayer for Identity Beyond Circumstances

Father,

We come to you as men who have spent a long time looking for ourselves in the wrong places. We have sought validation in what we produce and what we earn, in what people say about us and what titles we carry. We have worn our suits like armor and our accomplishments like armor, and underneath all of it we have been, many of us, still waiting for someone to say the words.

You have said the words. You have said them over us at great cost — at the cost of your Son, who walked willingly into the worst Friday any man has ever lived and came out the other side of it on Sunday with the declaration that death and shame and the accumulated weight of every dot we have ever been given do not get the last word.

Teach us to be sons. Not servants who perform to earn your notice, but sons who know they are already noticed, already chosen, already home. Let that certainty take up residence at the center of us, so that when the outer rings shift — and they will shift — we do not lose ourselves in the shifting.

Help us spend time with you, the way Punchinello finally climbed the hill. Not because we have cleaned ourselves up enough to be worth the visit, but because you are the one who made us and you do not make mistakes. Let the gray dots fall. Let the frantic grasping for golden stars give way to something quieter, something truer — the deep peace of a man who knows where he comes from and where he belongs.

For the fathers in this room: make us men who speak your words over our children. Let the declaration ring in their hearts before they fall asleep, so that when the world tries to redefine them — and it will try — they already know their name.

And for those among us still sitting with the silence of a father who could not give what he did not have: meet us there. Be the voice that speaks what was not spoken. Be the hand on the shoulder that says, you are more than what you do, you are more than what was done to you, you are mine — and I don't make mistakes.

Don't mess with us. We belong to you.

Amen.

Chapter Note

The declaration at the opening and close of this chapter was adapted from the identity declaration developed by Michelle Anthony for use with children in her care. Max Lucado's You Are Special (Crossway, 1997) is widely available and deeply worth reading aloud — to your children, and to yourself. The Scriptures referenced in this chapter include Romans 8:14–17, Philippians 4:11–14, Habakkuk 3:17–19, Psalm 84:5–6, and Jeremiah 17:7–8.

CHAPTER SEVEN - More Than Anger

More Than Anger

Breaking Masculine Stereotypes — What Feelings Are OK?

There is a moment that happens in most men's lives — a moment of misplaced rage that becomes a permanent fixture in the museum of personal regret. 

Matt Drexler carries his like most of us carry ours: vivid, a little embarrassing, and, in retrospect, deeply instructive.

His happened on a golf course in South Carolina. He was in his mid-twenties, running a chemical engineering research program at the university, and a colleague named Jeff had invited him out for a round. It was supposed to be a good afternoon. Nine holes in, things were fine. Then, out on the back nine — hole twelve, Matt recalls, the furthest point from the clubhouse, with no easy escape — Jeff turned to him and asked a quiet question.

“Matt, I’m just curious. Do you have a relationship with Jesus Christ?”

What happened next, Matt will tell you himself, is what he calls the most embarrassing moment of his life. His reptilian brain — his words — fired before his prefrontal cortex had a chance to intervene. He unloaded. Profanity. Indignation. How dare you bring this here. You've ruined a perfectly good round of golf.

Jeff went quiet. The friendship never fully recovered. And Matt spent the next twenty-plus years understanding, slowly, what was actually happening inside him in that moment — because it was not, as it turns out, about golf at all.

He was furious at God. He had been for years.

And because he had no language for that, no permission to feel it, no framework for what was actually lodged inside him — all of it came pouring out sideways, at a decent man who had simply asked a sincere question on a Tuesday afternoon on a South Carolina golf course.

That story is the doorway into this chapter.

Welcome to Chapter Seven.

An Introduction to James — Men Under Real Pressure

When Matt stood before the table and opened his teaching, he did not start with a formula or a self-help framework. He started with context. He started with James.

James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ, writes his letter not to men sitting comfortably in their living rooms. He writes to the scattered — Jewish Christians displaced from their homes, uprooted by persecution, living in a kind of suspended grief that would exhaust any man. The dispersion James references in his opening lines likely echoes the chaos described in Acts 8:3, when Saul was ravaging the church, dragging men and women from their homes and throwing them into prison.

These were not people with the luxury of emotional distance. These were men and women under genuine pressure — afraid, displaced, angry, and trying to figure out how to hold their faith together when the world had cracked beneath them. Into that context, James writes one of the most deceptively simple commands in all of Scripture:

"Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God."

— James 1:19–20

Matt paused on that verse for a long time. In his career as a litigation attorney, the courtroom rewarded the opposite: speak fast, advance your position, dominate the argument. And yet here is James — writing not theoretically, not to men at rest, but to men under siege — calling them to listen first, speak carefully, and go slow on anger.

The irony wasn't lost on him. And it shouldn't be lost on us.

But here is what James does not say — and this matters. He does not say, "Thou shalt not be angry." He does not command emotional suppression. He asks for something harder and more sophisticated: restraint, intentionality, and understanding. Quick to hear. Slow to speak. Slow to anger. Not absent of emotion. Wise with it.

James 1:21 follows close behind:

"Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls."

— James 1:21

Matt drew the room's attention here. James isn't just regulating behavior — he's going after the heart. The real issue isn't the outburst, the slammed door, the word said in anger that can't be unsaid. The real issue is what lives underneath. Pride. Resistance to truth. A heart that hasn't yet been made soft enough to receive what God is trying to plant in it.

And that, said Matt, is where the conversation about masculinity actually begins.

Focus on the Heart — Reshaping What We Think Strength Looks Like

Every man at that table had been formed by the same basic code. It is not written down anywhere. It is not taught in a single classroom. But it is absorbed early and deeply, through fathers and coaches and playgrounds and locker rooms and every culture signal that shapes a boy into a man.

The code goes something like this: Speak quickly, because it signals you know what you're talking about. Hold strong opinions, because it signals confidence and authority. Get angry when challenged, because it signals you can't be pushed around. Strength is volume. Power is speed. Real men react.

Matt named it plainly: that is the societal framework for masculinity in the outside world. And James, writing to men under real persecution two thousand years ago, is still flipping the script on it.

Real strength, James says, looks like listening first. It looks like speaking carefully, choosing words rather than just discharging them. It looks like bringing anger under authority rather than letting anger be the authority. This is not weakness — this is what Matt called spiritual maturity and personal growth. And it is, for most men, far more difficult than anything the old code ever required of them.

The men around the table knew this in their bones. When the host of the gathering set up the conversation, he reached for a metaphor that landed hard: most of us, he said, run our emotional lives on a dashboard as limited as the one in his grandfather's old truck. Mad. Sad. Glad. And for many men, if they are being fully honest, the only emotion that feels socially legitimate to display — the only one that reads as strength — is anger. Everything else gets compressed down, rerouted, and expressed as fury.

"We as men potentially allow ourselves mad, sad, and glad — and that's about the extent of it. And for most men, the only legitimate emotion we're allowed to demonstrate is anger."

— Opening reflection from Russell

James is not asking men to abandon strength. He is asking them to relocate it — to move it from the jaw and the fist and the reflexive retort, and to find it instead in the attentive ear, the measured word, and the disciplined heart.

That is the work of this chapter.

Anger Danger — What Happens When It Takes the Wheel

Anger is not the enemy. Matt was careful about this, and we should be too. But uncontrolled anger — anger that has never been examined, never been named, never been submitted to anything larger than itself — that is where the danger lives.

Here is what the science confirms and what every honest man already knows from experience: when anger fires, the amygdala takes over and the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for logic, reasoning, and proportionate response — effectively shuts down. Two things happen simultaneously. You literally think worse. And you react faster than you can reflect.

Matt identified two primary dangers that flow from this, and he called them bluntly:

The first: anger distorts perception. When we are in the grip of it, we jump to conclusions. We see threat where there is none. We assign motives that may not exist. We catastrophize, amplify, and misread. The Ted Lasso dart scene — Season One, Episode Eight, for those who haven't seen it — captures this beautifully. The entire scene pivots on a single phrase borrowed from Walt Whitman: "Be curious, not judgmental." Curiosity requires slowing down. Anger forecloses everything.

"Whoever is patient has great understanding, but one who is quick-tempered displays folly."

— Proverbs 14:29

"Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the heart of fools."

— Ecclesiastes 7:8–9

The second danger: anger damages relationships. Not just in the moment — but for years, sometimes for lifetimes. Matt told his golf course story not as a comedy but as a cost analysis. One reflexive, unexamined outburst at a man who was extending genuine care. A friendship strained from that day forward. A lifetime of regret. A relationship with a follower of Jesus lost in the space of thirty seconds on the back nine.

"Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear."

— Ephesians 4:29

The damage anger does to relationships is not merely interpersonal — it is generational. One man at the table spoke quietly about a physical altercation with his oldest son, a gentle and soft-spoken boy, and the profound fear his own wife had in that moment — not for him, but for the child. "We both do," he said. "We talk about it quite a bit." The shadow that an unexamined anger casts does not stop at the edges of the man who carries it. It reaches.

And still, the damage is repairable. More on that in a moment.

Emotional Fluency — Naming What's Actually There

Here is one of the most clarifying things Matt said all morning, and it deserves to be said slowly:

Anger is almost always a secondary emotion.

Underneath the raised voice, the clenched jaw, the thrown item in the garage — there is something else. Hurt. Fear. Embarrassment. A sense of rejection or inadequacy. Shame. Feeling forgotten or disrespected. Grief. These are the primary emotions, and for most men, they never make it to the surface in their original form. They get compressed, rerouted, and expressed as anger — because anger is the only emotion in the masculine vocabulary that feels permitted.

Matt told his own story here: struggling for hours to diagnose a leaking air suspension system on his truck, unable to make traction, his frustration building until he was throwing things against the wall of his RV garage. His wife walked in at precisely that moment. What she saw was rage. What was actually happening, as he later understood it, was something far more vulnerable: "I'm feeling totally inadequate. I don't understand how this works. My mind isn't mechanical, and I feel embarrassed that I can't figure this out."

He didn't have those words then. He just had the throwing.

This gap — between the emotion that is actually present and the emotion that comes out — is exactly what emotional fluency is designed to close. Emotional fluency is the ability to accurately recognize, name, and express what you are actually feeling. Not what you think you should feel. Not the version that sounds strong or stoic or acceptable. What is actually in there.

One man at the table told the story of sitting with his wife in therapy and being handed an emotion wheel — a circular chart mapping dozens of emotions outward from a central core. His wife began circling feelings with recognition. He looked at his and circled "anger." Then he wrote the word "responsible."

"I had circled anger. And then I wrote the word 'responsible.' And then we had a big discussion about whether 'responsible' was a feeling. Growing up, I felt like I had anger and not-anger. Those were the two emotions."

— Thomas

The emotion wheel maps the landscape most men have never been invited to inhabit. Violated. Ridiculed. Powerless. Disrespected. Inadequate. Humiliated. Dismissed. These are precise words for precise wounds. And precision matters here — psychologically, the more accurately you can name what you're feeling, the more proportionate your response can be to it. The further out you move on the wheel, the more self-insight you gain, and the more choices open up to you.

Scripture, Matt was quick to note, does not model emotional suppression. It models emotional honesty. The man it holds up as the model — Jesus — is not a man of muted feeling. He overturns tables in the temple. He weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. In the garden of Gethsemane, his sweat becomes like great drops of blood falling to the ground.

"And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground."

— Luke 22:44

David, in the Psalms, does not whisper his anguish in careful, acceptable language. He shouts it:

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?"

— Psalm 22:1

And this is where Matt landed something that stopped the room: that same verse — David's cry of abandonment — is the verse Jesus quotes from the cross in Matthew 27:46. The emotional honesty of a shepherd-king thousands of years earlier becomes the language of the Son of God in his darkest hour. God himself models bringing the full weight of human feeling directly to the Father.

The cost of not doing this is steep. When men cannot identify what they are actually feeling, anger becomes a blunt instrument that carries everything — all the unprocessed fear, shame, grief, and hurt piled on top of each other. The result is disproportionate reactions to small things. "Seemingly small things end up having these big reactions," Matt said, "because the anger is carrying everything else."

It also stunts spiritual growth. If you cannot identify what you are actually feeling, you cannot bring it honestly to God. You cannot pray truthfully about something you have not yet named.

"When you get to the outer ring and you name it — when you say 'I'm actually feeling violated' — it is so powerful. This is so helpful."

— Thomas

The Surprising Benefits of Anger — When It Moves You Toward Something Good

This is the chapter's important turn.

Anger is not the enemy. Unexamined anger is the enemy. But anger examined, named, and submitted to something larger than the self — anger in service of love — is one of the most powerful forces available to a man.

"Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger."

— Ephesians 4:26

The Bible does not prohibit anger. Jesus in the temple was not composing a strongly worded letter. He was overturning tables. Righteous anger — anger in response to something that genuinely offends the heart of God — is not a character flaw to be managed. It is a signal that something in you is aligned with something in him.

One man in the group told the story that became the chapter's emotional centerpiece. Years ago, he had traveled to Russia to adopt a boy named Grady. There were two visits required by the Russian court — and then the judge had told them, three weeks, and you can come collect him. Three weeks became four. Four became five. The court systems had gone on vacation. One hundred and sixty children, three years old and under, were sitting in a baby house while paperwork moved at the pace of bureaucracy.

"Something activated in my prayers that I've never experienced, and I don't know if I've really experienced since. It was just this righteous anger of injustice — my son is sitting in that crib on the other side of the world. I was on a holy campaign and had nowhere to go with it other than prayer."

— Russell

He and the boy had locked eyes on that first visit. A bond was forged that no court schedule could dissolve. And the anger that rose in him — that fierce, consuming, unrelenting indignation — drove him to pray in a way he had never prayed before. Moving heaven and earth. Not a polite request. A demand born of love.

That, said another man at the table, is what anger in God's design looks like: motivated by love, in defense of something loved, pointed at a genuine wrong. "If what we love is good," he said, "then the anger that protects it is good."

"Anger is not outside his design. If we're angry and it's righteous anger, it's because something that we love is being threatened. Anger will help us protect whatever it is we love."

— Matthew

Another man described watching poverty up close — four or five people living in a space smaller than the room they were sitting in, and on their faces, inexplicably, joy. "This ain't right," he said, and the dissonance of that — beauty in the midst of injustice — had never left him. That anger, he said, was not noise. It was signal. It was the beginning of a response.

Matt himself found a version of this in his work as a litigation attorney: the pro bono cases, roughly one a month, the ones that come through that make you boil. Child abuse. Injustice that has no other advocate. "We're on the side of the angels on this one," he told his team when they took those cases. The anger didn't disappear. It was disciplined, channeled through procedure and law, and aimed at the thing that needed fixing.

The key question Matt posed to the group: "When has anger pushed you toward something good? When has it motivated you to do something that mattered?"

That is not a rhetorical question. Every man reading this chapter should sit with it.

The Battle: Reaction vs. Response — Choosing the Higher Path

The most dangerous version of anger is the one we have rehearsed.

More than one man at that table confessed to maintaining what might be called a fantasy life of unresolved arguments. Arguments from twenty years ago, replayed in mental widescreen. The perfect rejoinder finally delivered. The confrontation that never happened, scripted and rescripted in the mind. One man described elaborate fantasies about a father who had abandoned his children — a man he had poured into and loved over the course of eighteen years — imagining the day he might finally show up at a wrestling tournament and hear every unsaid thing said aloud.

"I have these fantasies of, like, I would find out they had child porn on their computer and they'd be arrested..." he admitted, then stopped himself. "That's just crazy stuff."

It is also universal. The rehearsal of anger is one of the most common and least discussed features of the male interior life. And Matt connected it clearly to the feeling of powerlessness: we rehearse the argument we never got to have because somewhere inside us we believe that having it would finally resolve something. It never does. The anger just gets another rotation.

"Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the heart of fools."

— Ecclesiastes 7:9

"You're drinking poison hoping the other person gets injured," Matt said. And the room recognized it.

The alternative is not suppression. It is not swallowing everything and performing calm while bitterness calcifies underneath. Suppressed anger, as one man noted, has a way of destroying a man from the inside out. It lodges. It festers. It shows up in the body — Proverbs says it rots the bones. It shows up in relationships as a kind of low-grade coldness that everyone can feel but no one can name. And it shows up in the spirit as a locked door between the man and God, because you cannot honestly engage with a God you have never honestly addressed.

What James calls for — and what the table kept returning to — is not suppression or explosion, but response. The ability to feel the full weight of what is happening, to name it accurately, to pause long enough for the prefrontal cortex to come back online, and then to choose what to do with it.

Matt offered a practical framework he called the Anger Toolbox — five steps for moving from reaction to response:

1. Notice it.  Be slow to anger. Recognize when the heat is rising.

2. Name the real emotion.  Go to the wheel. What is actually underneath the anger?

3. Pause.  Slow to speak. Do not react. Create space between stimulus and response.

4. Get curious, not judgmental.  Before concluding, ask a question.

5. Choose your response.  Proactive, not reactive. What serves the relationship? What serves God's purposes here?

Alongside the toolbox, he offered something simpler — a three-step biblical framework that maps directly onto the rhythm James describes: Pause. Pray. Proceed. Not as a formula, but as a posture. The anger is real; you don't perform your way past it. You stop long enough to bring it to God before you bring it to the person. You name it honestly in prayer. And then you move forward — not suppressed, not discharged, but transformed.

One man described learning a version of this from a mentor fifteen years ago: the twenty-four hour check-in. After a conflict — especially a heated one — give it a day, and then return to the relationship. Not to relitigate. Not to press for victory. Simply to ask: "That was hard. Are we okay?"

He had used it that very week — after a difficult feedback session with a supervisor, a moment where his internal temperature had been somewhere near boiling and the things he wanted to say were available and ready. Twenty-four hours later, he came back. "That was a tough conversation," he said. "How are we feeling?" What followed was a better conversation than the one they had originally had — one that restored the relationship rather than calcifying the wound.

"New mercies are written in the morning. The 24-hour check-in creates the opportunity to de-escalate, come back in, and just ask: are we okay? It allowed us to square up — because I value the relationship."

— Russell

This is the discipline of the mature man: not to feel less, but to respond more wisely than he reacts. To carry the emotion without being carried away by it. To be, in the language of James, slow to anger — not because the anger isn't real, but because he has learned that the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Stop the Suppression — The Call to Respond Over React

Here is where Matt left us.

The goal is not to become less emotional. Let that land. The goal is not the stoic, affectless man who has successfully locked everything down behind a wall of performance and self-control. That man is not strong. He is defended. There is a difference.

The goal is to become emotionally fluent. To expand the vocabulary until the emotion wheel is not intimidating but illuminating. To get further and further from the blunt instrument of anger-as-default and closer to the precise language that can actually name what is happening inside you — so that you can bring it honestly to God, to your wife, to your son, to the men around the table who are doing the same hard work.

The suppression has to stop. Not because your feelings deserve a louder platform, but because what is suppressed does not disappear. It lodges. It surfaces in the places you least want it — in the car ride home, at the dinner table, in the garage, in the inheritance you leave your children. The anger you do not name becomes the anger they inherit.

But here is the other side of the call: the reaction has to become a response. The speed of the amygdala — that fast, certain, righteous feeling that you are about to say or do something that will finally fix this — that speed is the enemy of wisdom. Not the feeling. The speed.

Pause. Pray. Proceed.

Notice. Name. Pause. Get curious. Choose.

And underneath all of it — the question Matt asked that quieted the room and deserves to quiet yours:

"What's underneath your anger most of the time? If you dig down — what's really there?"

— Matt Drexler

For some of us, it is old wounds that never got named. For some, it is anger at a father who didn't show up, expressed as anger at the man across the table. For some, it is anger at God — the kind that feels too dangerous or too sacrilegious to speak aloud, so it gets redirected at everyone else. And for some — like Matt on the golf course at twenty-two — the most honest answer is that the fury had almost nothing to do with the question being asked and everything to do with a life of pain that had never been brought into the open.

At fifty, Matt understands what was happening with that twenty-two-year-old. He was not angry at Jeff. He was angry at God. And he had no words for it, no permission for it, no framework for it — so it came out sideways, at full volume, on hole twelve, on a Tuesday afternoon.

That is the work of emotional fluency. Not to make the anger smaller. To make the man bigger — bigger than his reactions, wiser than his defaults, more honest than the code he inherited.

The world does not need more men who perform calm while quietly drowning. It needs men who have done the harder work: who have named the thing under the anger, brought it to the God who wept at a graveside and sweat blood in a garden, and chosen to respond rather than react.

That is not weakness. That is the most masculine thing you can do.

Reflections

Reflection: Think of a moment when your anger damaged a relationship. What was the secondary emotion underneath it? What were you actually feeling?

Reflection: Where on the emotion wheel do you tend to live? What emotions do you have the most fluency with — and which ones are still foreign to you?

Reflection: Is there anger you are rehearsing — an argument you keep rerunning, a person you keep putting on trial in your mind? What would it take to release it?

Reflection: Have you ever been angry at God? Have you told him? What would it look like to bring that honestly to the Father rather than to everyone else in your path?

Reflection: When has your anger moved you toward something good — toward justice, protection, or love? What was the love underneath it?

Reflection: What is one step you can take this week to move from reaction to response? Who in your life would feel that change first?

A Prayer

Father,

You are the giver of every emotion — including this one. You designed us to feel. You wept at a grave. You prayed in agony in a garden. You overturned tables in righteous indignation. You are not frightened by what is inside us. You made it.

We confess that we have often used anger as a shortcut — to avoid the harder emotions underneath, to perform strength rather than feel it, to discharge what we should have examined. We have thrown things in garages. We have said words on golf courses that we cannot take back. We have passed on to our children the inheritance of a narrowed emotional world that we ourselves received and never questioned.

Teach us to be quick to hear. Slow to speak. Slow to anger.

Give us the courage to go further down into the wheel — to name what is actually there. The hurt. The fear. The shame. The grief. The anger at you that we have been too afraid, or too proud, or too theologically uncomfortable to admit. Meet us there, as you have always met your people there — in the Psalms, in the garden, on the cross.

Where we have been carrying the poison of unforgiveness, hoping someone else suffers for it — release us from it. Where we have been suppressing what needed to be said — give us the words. Where we have been reacting when we should have been responding — give us the pause.

Let our anger be in service of love. Let it move us toward justice, protection, and restoration — and let it always be submitted, finally, to you.

For the men at this table, and for every man doing this work — you see them. You are with them. Commission them out to another week, knowing that the work they are doing in the interior places is real, and it matters, and it is yours.

Pause. Pray. Proceed.

Amen.

CHAPTER SIX - Creating Memorials

Creating Memorials

There is a photograph Jeff Hawthorne carries on his phone. It was taken on a summer afternoon in the mountains above Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, in the middle of one of the hardest seasons of his life. He and his three kids had climbed up past the treeline and sat down on a ledge in the rocks, and for thirty minutes nobody said a word. The silence wasn't awkward. It was sacred. It was the kind of quiet that only comes when grief has exhausted itself and something else — something stubborn and alive — begins to take its place. Jeff looks at that photograph often. Not to rehearse the pain, but to remember what God was doing in the middle of it.

That photograph is, for Jeff, a memorial.

Memorials, as it turns out, are one of God's most persistent and practical gifts to His people. From the moment He gave Moses His name in the wilderness to the night Jesus broke bread in an upper room and said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” the arc of Scripture is lined with stones and symbols and stories, all placed there for one reason: because we forget. We forget what God has done. We forget who He is. And when we forget, we lose our footing. We lose our courage. We begin to wonder whether any of it was ever real.

This chapter is about the practice of remembering — not as sentiment, not as nostalgia, but as a spiritual discipline that shapes the way we live, the stories we tell, and the faith we pass on to the people who come after us.

A Man Who Learned to Remember

Jeff Hawthorne is not a man who talks easily about his failures. He grew up in a family where stories stayed locked inside, where questions about the past were met with silence or tears. His father served in the Navy for nearly a decade but spoke almost nothing of it. His grandfather’s history was a closed door. His birth father’s identity — a consequence of an affair his mother carried with great shame — was never discussed. He has never seen a photograph of the man.

“My family is not a storytelling family,” Jeff said plainly. “And I think sometimes we can get caught in our own shame and guilt cycle, and it causes us to clam up. The stories are meant to be shared. They’re meant to be told.”

Jeff walked into his first marriage declaring that divorce was not an option. Nearly ten years later, it was. And for years after, every weekend carried a kind of memorial he hadn’t chosen: the moment he dropped his kids off and wouldn’t see them again for days. Those recurring goodbyes became a rhythm of grief, a stone he stumbled over again and again.

But the story didn’t end there. It never does, when God is still writing it.

There is a photograph from Jeff’s first date with his wife that hangs in their entryway — the first thing he sees when he walks through the door. There’s a Christmas photo from before they were married, taken when he already knew she was the one. There is a gratitude journal with a handwritten date at the top of each entry and three things he is grateful for, every single morning. Sometimes it’s tacos. Sometimes it’s the smell of coffee. Sometimes it’s the face of a man across a breakfast table who said something that landed in his chest like a gift. Jeff writes it all down.

He chose to write it by hand for a specific reason. “Years from now,” he said, “when I’m gone, my kids could have something that spoke to how grateful their dad was.” The journal is itself a memorial — a stone set up to say: thus far, the Lord has helped us.

“Every time I tell my story, the response I’m met with is: ‘Wow. Thanks for sharing that. That’s encouraging. That brings me hope.’ And I don’t tell it nearly enough.”

— Jeff Hawthorne

Why Memorials Matter: A People Who Forget

Psalm 77 begins in a place most of us know well: in distress, crying out to God, unable to sleep, too troubled to speak. The psalmist rehearses his anxiety in a spiral of unanswerable questions. “Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again? Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time?”

And then comes one of the great pivots in the whole of Scripture. A single word turns the tide: “Then.”

“Then I thought to this: I will appeal to the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand. I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds.”

This is the work of remembering. Not wishful thinking. Not positive self-talk. It is a deliberate, disciplined return to the record of God’s faithfulness — a going back to the stones that have been set up, the names that have been spoken, the stories that have been told. The psalmist doesn’t conjure hope from thin air. He retrieves it from memory. He walks back to the place where he laid something down, picks it up, and carries it forward.

The great challenge, of course, is that we are a forgetful people. We have always been. The Lord knows this about us with a tenderness that borders on exasperation. The entire structure of Old Testament life — the festivals, the feasts, the laws, the altars, the priests, the sacrificial system — can be read, in part, as God’s long, patient, creative effort to build remembrance into the bones of a people who would otherwise forget Him by Thursday.

Andy put it plainly during one of our conversations: “Paul’s letter to America — what did you do to all of this?” The Jews had a prayer when they woke, a prayer at meals, a prayer at the doorpost. They had feasts woven through the year, each one pointing to a specific act of God’s faithfulness. We have largely dismantled all of that structure, and we wonder why we can’t seem to hold on to what we believe.

The answer, at least in part, is that we have stopped building memorials.

1. Names and Symbols

Exodus 3:13–15 — The Memorial of God’s Name

Exodus 3:13–15

Moses said to God, ‘Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I am has sent me to you.” God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers — the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob — has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.”

Moses stood at the edge of something terrifying. He had been called to walk back into the country that had wanted him dead, to stand before the most powerful man in the world, and to declare freedom for an enslaved people. He needed something to give the Israelites. Not a strategy. Not a plan. A name.

And God gave him one.

It is easy to skip past the genealogies and the name-lists of Scripture, to treat them as ancient filler between the stories we’re more interested in. But names in the Hebrew tradition carried everything: lineage, authority, identity, covenant. To know someone’s name was to know their story. To speak it was to invoke it. When God said, “This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation,” He was setting up a memorial — one that every Israelite would carry on their lips and in their hearts wherever they went.

“I think we all understand the power of a name,” Jeff reflected. “What is communicated in a name is lineage, a family you’re a part of, an authority that comes with that, a confidence.” Moses didn’t walk back to Egypt armed only with a staff. He walked back with the name of the Living God — and that name was itself a memorial to everything God had already done, and a promise of everything He was about to do.

Genesis 9:12–15 — The Memorial of the Rainbow

Genesis 9:12–15

Then God said: “I am giving you a sign of my covenant with you and with all living creatures, for all generations to come. I have placed my rainbow in the clouds. It is the sign of my covenant with you and with all the earth. When I send clouds over the earth, the rainbow will appear in the clouds, and I will remember my covenant with you and with all living creatures. Never again will the floodwaters destroy all life.”

Here is something remarkable: this memorial was not primarily for Noah and his family. It was for God.

This is worth sitting with. God — the one who does not forget, who does not change, who does not waver — set up a sign in the sky as a reminder to Himself. The men in the room paused on this for a long moment. Tim laughed and said, “I start to think, ‘Ooh, I wonder who He’s mad at right now.’” But beneath the laughter was something genuinely moving: a God who knows how to meet His people where they are, who builds into the very fabric of creation the structures of covenant faithfulness.

There was also a question about the physics of it — whether the rainbow was something already present in nature that God claimed and redeemed for holy purpose, or whether He changed the laws of refraction on the spot. One of the men offered that before the flood, a kind of greenhouse canopy may have existed, so that rainbows would have been unknown. With the world reshaped, the rainbow appeared for the first time as the clouds parted. Whether or not that is so, the theological weight is the same: something visible, something beautiful, placed in the creation as a marker of promise.

And consider what it was a promise toward. Noah and his family had just survived forty days and forty nights of catastrophic flood. They had watched the world they knew end. They stepped off the ark onto unfamiliar ground, and God did not simply say, “Okay, go rebuild.” He gave them a sign. He gave them a reason to live forward. The rainbow was not just a memorial to the past — it was an invitation to the future. Go and be fruitful. Go and multiply. The worst is behind you. I am with you.

“Memorials are not primarily human inventions to help us feel nostalgic. They are God’s gifts to help us remember His character and His covenant, and to live in light of them.”

— Jeff Hawthorne

This is the key insight that reframes how we understand memorials: they are not monuments to the past. They are launching pads into the future. Every stone, every symbol, every name and ritual and practice is meant to say: because of what God has already done, you can trust what He is about to do.

2. Stones and Stories

Joshua 4:1–7, 21–24 — The Memorial of Twelve Stones

Joshua 4:5–7

“Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”

The Israelites had just crossed the Jordan River on dry ground. Behind them was a generation of wandering. Ahead of them was a land promised but not yet possessed. And God, before they took another step, stopped the whole procession and said: go back. Take twelve stones from the middle of the riverbed. Stack them here.

Why?

Jeff landed on a phrase that stayed with everyone in the room: “preplanned opportunities for testimony.” The stones weren’t for the adults who’d watched the water stop. They were for the children who would one day point at that pile of rocks and say, “What are these?” And in that moment, a parent would have the opportunity — not an accident, not a lucky opening, but a designed and preplanned opportunity — to tell the story. To say: let me tell you what God did here.

Jeff turned the question around on the men: “What are the preplanned opportunities for testimony in your own life? What are the memorials that make people ask ‘why’ — and then require you to follow up with a story of faithfulness?”

The room got quiet. It is easier to ask the question than to answer it.

There is a telling implication in Scripture that the people of God would want to tell these stories. The assumption is not that testimony needs to be extracted under pressure, but that the faithful life produces stories that overflow, stories that demand to be shared because God has been too good, too faithful, too present for silence. And yet, as Jeff noted with real honesty, something in us resists. For men in particular, the stories stay locked inside. Shame keeps them there. Guilt keeps them there. The suspicion that no one really wants to hear it, that the story belongs only to us, that to share it might be to expose too much.

But the stones were never meant to stay in the riverbed. They were meant to be stacked in public, where children would see them and ask questions.

Three Things the Memorial Does

Looking at the Joshua passage, Jeff drew out three characteristics of a true memorial:

1. The memorial is tangible. You can touch it, see it, point to it. It exists in the physical world, not just in memory.

2. The memorial is connected to a story. Stones by themselves mean nothing. As Jeff put it, “Stones plus story shape faith.” A stack of rocks on a trail is just a curiosity. A stack of rocks with a story behind it becomes a marker on the map of a life.

3. The memorial is intergenerational. It is specifically designed for the questions of children and the answers of parents. The memorial is not complete until it is passed on.

The hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” understands all of this. Its second verse reaches back to 1 Samuel 7:12 for its central image:

1 Samuel 7:12

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.”

Ebenezer: stone of help. “Thus far the Lord has helped us.” Samuel planted a stone in the ground and gave it a name that told a story and made a claim about the future: if God has been faithful thus far, we can trust Him for what lies ahead. The stone became a standing argument against despair.

The hymn’s third verse gives the memorial its full emotional weight: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it — prone to leave the God I love. Here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.” This is not triumphalism. It is honest faith: I know myself. I know how quickly I forget. I know that without these stones, without these markers, without these practices of remembrance, my heart will drift. So I set up the stone. And I come back to it.

“I see my kids as a memorial to my testimony. Your lives are so different from what I grew up with, what my dad grew up with. I just have to look at them and say, ‘But for God.’”

— Ron

One of the men in the room named Ron offered something that stopped the conversation cold. Looking at his children, he said quietly: “They are your Ebenezer stone.” And something in the room recognized the truth of it. The people who bear the fingerprints of God’s faithfulness in our lives — the children we didn’t deserve, the marriages we couldn’t have manufactured, the friendships that arrived at exactly the right moment — these are memorials. They are stones God has set in the ground of our lives to mark how far He has brought us.

The conversation also turned toward what memorials mark as endings — not just beginnings. Thomas pressed into this: “I think memorials are also about helping you mark the end of something. And grieving.” There is something in us that needs a ceremony for the things that die, whether that’s a relationship, a season, a version of ourselves we’ve outgrown. Without a marker, the ending stays loose. It bleeds into the next thing. The grief has nowhere to land.

Jeff recognized this from his own story. His divorce — something he would not wish on anyone, something he stayed in too long out of stubbornness and pride — had its own memorial moment. The day it was finally done was the day something ended, and he knew it. Not with relief exactly, but with the strange, solemn recognition that an era had closed. And with it came, eventually, the possibility of something new.

3. Memorials Have a Rhythm and a Cadence

The Jewish calendar was a masterwork of embodied theology. The Sabbath every seven days. Passover every year. The Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Day of Atonement — each one a scheduled return to a particular act of God’s faithfulness, a built-in moment for the community to stop, remember, and re-orient.

Andy observed that so much of what fills the Old Testament can be understood as God responding to His people’s persistent need for structure. They needed a king. He gave them a king. They needed six hundred-plus laws to try to stay on the path of holiness. He gave them that too. The tent of meeting, the ark of the covenant, the entire sacrificial system — all of it, at least in part, God saying: I know you need a spot. I know you need something you can see and touch and return to. Here it is.

There is something important here for those of us living two or three millennia later on the other side of the Jordan. The structures are different, but the need is the same. We are still forgetful. We still need rhythms that bring us back to the story.

Jeff put the question directly: “What are the landscapes and rhythms of your life that help you remember and prompt you to tell the stories?”

For some of us, the honest answer is: not many. We have the standard Christian calendar — Easter, Christmas, maybe the Lord’s Supper once a month or once a quarter. But what about the rhythms that are shaped by our own particular story with God? What are the regular practices, the returning rituals, the habitual movements of our lives that bring us back to the record of His faithfulness?

Tim spoke of the altar — something he has missed in modern church. “I’m always a little nervous when we destroy memorials or tear things down,” he said. “There’s stuff I don’t want to read or think about, but I think it’s important to not forget it.” He remembered kneeling at seventeen in a Nazarene church, the pastor coming down to pray with him, the words: “Drive the stake right here.” Thirty years later, the memory is still a stake in the ground, a point he can return to.

The memorials that endure are the ones tethered to a rhythm. The gratitude journal opened every morning. The anniversary remembered. The photograph revisited. The conversation returned to. They do not require elaborate ceremony — only intention and consistency. The point is not the form but the function: to bring the wandering heart back to the God who has been faithful.

“Drive the stake right here. There’s nothing that can take that away. That’s got a placeholder in my life and in my spirit of this is where this happened.”

— Tim

4. Jesus as a Memorial

Luke 22:14–20 — The Memorial of the Lord’s Table

Luke 22:19–20

And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.”

At the center of the Christian faith stands a memorial.

Jesus did not leave his followers with an abstraction. He left them with bread and wine — physical, tangible things — and He said: every time you do this, remember me. This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.

Jeff has come to love that his church practices the Lord’s Supper every single week. It was not always so. As a worship leader in earlier years, he found it an intrusion — time that could be given to another song, another moment of corporate worship. But something has shifted. “In my more spiritually mature state,” he said with a self-aware smile, “I love that I get this every single weekend. This reminder, this memorial that was set up for me, to point back to where it all both begins and ends.”

Every time we come to the Lord’s Table, we are doing three things simultaneously:

• Looking back to the cross — to the specific, historical act of God in the body of Jesus Christ, the death that paid what could not otherwise be paid.

• Looking around at the body of Christ gathered — at the community of people who carry the same story, who are themselves memorials of God’s faithfulness to one another.

• Looking forward to the day when He returns — toward the future that the Lord’s Supper promises, the great feast at the end of all things when the memorial becomes the reality.

Past grace fuels present faith and future hope. This is the rhythm of the Table. This is what it does to us when we let it.

And this — people as memorials — becomes the final and perhaps most personal dimension of the practice. Jeff spoke of his wife, whose very existence in his life he reads as a sign of God’s faithfulness. After a divorce that left him certain he would never be able to love or be loved in marriage again, God gave him a crown, to use the language of Proverbs. The first thing he sees when he walks through his front door is the photograph from their first date. It is a memorial.

His children, even in the hardest days of the divorce — especially then — were memorials. They brought laughter when he could not stop crying. They brought joy when joy had no business showing up. They were three small, living stones set in the ground of his hardest season, each one saying: thus far, the Lord has helped us.

“My wife is a sign of His faithfulness. I thought it would never be possible again to love and be married and all that. But there she is.”

— Jeff Hawthorne

Memorials for Today: Practices for a Forgetful People

The principle has not changed. God wants His people to remember who He is and what He has done, so they can live faithfully in the present and pass that faith on to the next generation. The question is simply what that looks like now, in our own lives, in our own families, in our own ordinary and extraordinary stories.

There is wisdom in the conversation about what gets thrown away. One of the men described the strange grief of discarding his aunt’s religious certificates after she died — walking to the dumpster with the symbols of a life given to God and dropping them in. Another described emptying his mother’s house and filling three roll-off containers with the accumulated artifacts of a life. We keep things because we think they matter; eventually, they get carried to the curb.

This is worth taking seriously. Not everything we keep is a memorial, and not everything we discard was meant to last. The question is: which things truly point to God’s faithfulness in our lives? Which things carry a story? Which things, if a child asked about them, would give us the opportunity to say: let me tell you what God did?

Jeff also described an inverse memorial: the military awards and academy honors he packed away in a trunk in the basement when he transitioned out of the corporate world into something new. He packed them away not out of shame but out of discernment — recognizing that his identity could not be anchored in past performance. The season had changed. The memorial had done its work. It was time for something else.

But then he paused. “My kids don’t have anything to prompt them to ask me about such and such.” The memorial that helped him move forward also removed from his children’s sight the stories they might one day need to hear. There is a tension here that doesn’t resolve easily: between the memorials we need to set down and the stories we still owe to those who come after us.

Mathias pointed to the museums of Washington D.C. — billions of dollars spent annually so that people can stand in front of the things that made them. The Star-Spangled Banner in its darkened room. The memorials to wars and fallen soldiers. The artifacts of moments that changed everything. People travel hundreds of miles and spend hundreds of dollars to see these things, not because the things happened to them, but because the stories are timeless and the need to be tethered to something real and significant is written into human nature.

God knew this about us before we did. So He gave us His name. He gave us the rainbow. He gave us twelve stones. He gave us bread and wine. He gave us people who carry His faithfulness in their lives. And He gave us the practice of returning, regularly and intentionally, to all of these things.

Questions to Reflect On

Jeff closed his time with a set of questions worth carrying into the week — and perhaps into the rest of a life:

• What is one “stone of remembrance” in your life — a moment, a place, a person, a practice — that marks what God has done?

• What story of God’s faithfulness do you need to tell more often? What has kept you from telling it?

• What practice could help your family, small group, or church remember God better? What would it look like to build that rhythm into your life this week?

• Are there memorials that have ended — eras, relationships, seasons — that need to be named and mourned before you can fully move forward?

• What would it look like for your own life to become a memorial for someone else — a living stone that points others toward God’s faithfulness?

A Challenge and a Commission

Jeff ended with a simple challenge, offered in the same tone he carries throughout — not thundering, but earnest, the way a man speaks when he has lived the thing he is asking you to consider:

“If you don’t have a memorial — an intentional memorial — that keeps you in it right now, you need one. And if you do, what does it mean to take that to the next level and tell the stories?”

The beaten-up Bible Tom carries. The journal Russell keeps. The photographs Jeff scrolls through on his phone on ordinary evenings. The children who carry in their lives the evidence of something God has been doing across generations. These are not relics. They are living things. They do not preserve the past — they fund the future.

Memorials keep stories of God’s faithfulness in front of us when we tend to forget.

And we will forget. That is not a failure; it is a feature of the human condition that God has been addressing with infinite patience since the beginning. The answer is not to try harder to remember. The answer is to build the structures, practice the rhythms, tell the stories, stack the stones — and then return to them, again and again, as often as it takes, until the faithful life becomes second nature.

Thus far, the Lord has helped us.

That has always been enough.

•  •  •

A Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father,

You know us. You know that we forget. You know how quickly the fire of a moment cools, how fast the clarity of a mountain summit fades when we return to the valley. You knew all of this before you set a rainbow in the sky, before you told Moses your name, before twelve men carried twelve stones out of a dry riverbed.

Thank you that you have not left us without help. Thank you for the symbols and signs, the practices and rhythms, the people and places that keep your faithfulness in front of us when we are prone to wander. Thank you for the bread and the cup. Thank you for the stories we carry and the ones we have yet to tell.

Give us courage to tell the stories we have kept too long in silence. Give us wisdom to build the rhythms that will carry those stories to our children and our children’s children. Give us eyes to see the memorials you have already placed in our lives — the people, the moments, the hard-won gifts of your grace — and hearts willing to call them what they are.

And when we forget — because we will — bring us back to the stones. Bring us back to the cross. Bring us back to the record of what you have done, and let that record be enough to carry us into what comes next.

Thus far, you have helped us.

That is enough.

In the name of Jesus, the greatest memorial of all. Amen.

CHAPTER NINE - The Power of Vulnerability

"The call to courage begins with vulnerability."

— Tom Strong

There are rooms where men walk in carrying everything — the weight of what they've done, what they've failed to do, what they're afraid others might find out. They sit down, cross their arms, and wait to see if this is safe. Most of the time, they leave the same way they came. Armor on. Nothing given. Nothing received.

Then there are the rare mornings — the ones you don't plan for — when someone speaks and something breaks open. Not the person. The silence. And suddenly the room shifts, and every man in it leans in just a little closer, because what was just said is what none of them had the nerve to say first.

That is what happened the Friday morning Tom Strong walked in and setting a picture of his military dress uniform jacket on the table. Not to impress. To tell the truth.

Tom has spent his adult life in rooms where the stakes were as high as they get. Combat zones. Field hospitals. Beside flag-draped caskets in forward operating bases. He has seen what men are made of when the performance falls away because there is simply no time or safety for it anymore. And what he found — what he has carried out of every one of those rooms — is that the men who endure, who lead, who actually help the people around them, are not the men who feel nothing. They are the men who feel everything and find a way to stay present anyway.

Vulnerability, Tom told us that morning, is not the opposite of strength. It is where strength is born.

— ✦ —

A Chest Full of Stories

Tom is a retired Army chaplain. A man who has worn the uniform of the Special Operations community, earned the Combat Action Badge, served in submarine units — a Navy badge on an Army uniform, as he noted with a quiet grin. He spent the better part of two years in combat zones across multiple deployments. He has sat with the dying. He has walked into rooms where men were trying to figure out how to keep living. He has helped carry the bags of men he knew.

But what Tom brought that morning was not his record of valor. He brought a story about a 250-foot tower, a torn calf muscle, and a limp he hid from the men who were paid to watch for it.

He was forty-five years old when his unit sent him to the Army's Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia — three weeks of learning to jump out of planes. There were 432 students in the class. Tom was the second oldest among them. And from the moment he arrived, the message was clear: chaplains fail. Don't be another one.

"Hey Chaplain," the black-cap instructors announced in front of everyone, "are you going to fail out like most of your fellow chaplains?"

Tom let the words land. He didn't argue. He suited up.

One of the culminating exercises was the 250-foot tower — a massive steel structure with four arms extending outward, each rigged to raise a jumper strapped to a parachute and then release them, letting them drift to the plowed earth below. It had been broken for three months. The entire class assembled. The black-cap instructors looked at Tom.

"Chappy, you are going first. This thing hasn't been used in three months and we want some good luck."

And then — because this is the Army and because there is always one more thing — they announced to all 432 students that the last man tested on the tower had blown into the frame, gotten caught, and fallen.

Tom stood at the base of that tower in front of more than four hundred people, carrying the weight of every expectation, every doubt, every chaplain who had quit before him. Four hundred sets of eyes watching to see what the old man of God would do.

He floated down soft as a leaf.

The first jump of the final week was different.

It was a long day. The kind where exhaustion settles deep into the joints. And somewhere in it, Tom felt it — a tearing, deep in his right calf. He looked down. He could see blood pooling beneath the skin. The muscle had torn, forty to fifty percent of it gone. Four more jumps remained before he could earn his wings.

That night, limping back to the barracks, Tom sat with something harder than physical pain. He sat with the weight of what it would mean to quit. The commanders who had believed in him enough to send him. The Army funds spent on his behalf. The 400 students watching. The instructors already waiting for the chaplain to confirm what they expected.

"Lord," he said, "what do I do?"

And a verse came.

"Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand."

— Isaiah 41:10

The next morning, formation assembled before dawn. Every student ran a mile in boots and uniform to the gear-up site. The black-cap instructors lined the route, watching for any soldier whose gait gave them away. Tom knew this. Tom had one good leg.

So he limped on the good one.

He exaggerated the limp on his healthy left leg so that his stride evened out, and he ran smoothly through the screen. Four more mornings. Four more jumps. Blood still moving beneath his skin. Isaiah 41:10 still moving through his mind.

He earned his wings. The oldest man left standing.

Here is what struck Tom when he told that story and when the room received it — not the accomplishment, but what happened in the in-between moments, in the waiting around, in the pauses between training exercises. The black-cap instructors — the hard men whose job it was to break people down — would quietly pull Tom aside. "Hey Chappy, you got a minute?" And they would share their lives with him.

Not because he was impressive. Because he was honest. Because he was carrying something real and not pretending otherwise. Because there is a kind of gravity to a man who is clearly in over his head and has decided, with God's help, to show up anyway. People are not drawn to perfection. They are drawn to truth. And the truth Tom carried that week in Fort Benning — blood beneath the skin, verse on his lips, limp on the good leg — was the most compelling thing in that field.

— ✦ —

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Tom had been reading Brené Brown's Daring Greatly when something cracked open in his thinking. Brown told the story of a soldier who had received a medal for valor on the battlefield — and she connected that courage not to invulnerability, not to fearlessness, but to vulnerability. To the willingness to step into genuine exposure, genuine risk, genuine uncertainty, and go anyway.

"As soon as I read that," Tom told the room, "I thought — I have a chest full of moments where I was vulnerable. I just never thought about it that way."

That reframe is the whole ballgame.

For most men, vulnerability and courage exist on a spectrum — opposites pulling against each other from either end. The more courage you develop, the less vulnerable you become. Weakness on one end. Strength on the other. Toughen up and you move right. Show weakness and you slide left. That is the architecture of the Western hero, the lone gunslinger, the strong silent type — the man who has mastered his emotions so completely that he appears to have none.

But Tom was standing in front of a roomful of men saying: it is not a spectrum. It is a coin. Flip it over. On one side — courage. On the other — vulnerability. They are not opposites. They are the same thing, seen from two different angles.

"Vulnerability is really related to courage — but for many of us, we've never thought of it as a courageous act to be vulnerable." — Tom Strong

Thomas — a pastor who has spent decades watching this play out in congregations — pushed the idea further. He told the story about the door. The time he got into a fight with his wife, and she left for the airport and told him to figure it out. In a moment of rage, he kicked the bathroom door so hard it punched a hole through it. He spent the weekend sanding it down and spackling it over.

Months later, he stood in front of his congregation and preached on anger. He brought the door to the stage.

"I was terrified," he said. "I thought this is my last Sunday. Everyone's going to walk out. Here's the pastor who was supposed to be leading people to faith on airplanes, and he's been kicking holes in doors."

But something happened that he did not expect. Years later, more men from that congregation have told him that sermon changed their lives than anything else he ever preached or did. Man after man, pulling him aside: I punched a wall. I threw something across a room. I thought I was a monster. I came to church every Sunday ashamed, but I couldn't say it to anyone. And then you brought that door out and said that, and I thought — there's a way out. There's a man who did what I did and found his way through.

Not the pastor's polish. The pastor's hole in the door.

"There's a great power in being vulnerable as a leader," Thomas shared. "It begets vulnerability. It calls it out in others. It normalizes it and makes it possible." He paused and looked around the room. "I was watching Tom tear up over there and it was emboldening me in ways I didn't expect. Just watching that."

Vulnerability is contagious in the best possible way. One man breaks the seal, and the whole room breathes differently.

— ✦ —

What Keeps Us from the Coin

One of the men in the circle named what sits between us and vulnerability with unusual precision. He works with men navigating recovery — from addiction, from broken relationships, from the versions of themselves they can no longer sustain. He has watched men circle community, truth, and authenticity their whole lives. Longing for all three. Getting close. Retreating.

Every time, he said, it comes back to three things. Fear. Trust. Image.

"Vulnerability is putting yourself out there — not knowing in any way how that person is going to receive it, what they're going to do with it, how they're going to react. That's the courage of realizing I'm okay. I don't have to fear. I can trust. And this isn't about my image." — Matt

Fear of rejection. Fear that what you reveal will be used against you. Fear that the moment you stop managing the narrative, the narrative manages you.

Trust that doesn't yet exist, or that has been burned before. The men in that room have earned their caution. Some of them opened up at some point in their lives and got wrecked for it — by a friend who became an adversary, a community that turned cold, a moment of honesty that cost them more than they'd budgeted for. That scar tissue is real. It doesn't just disappear because someone in a Friday morning circle quotes Brené Brown.

And then image. The hardest one. The face that took years to build. The reputation that opens doors. The version of yourself that works — that leads, that provides, that handles things. The one you are not certain survives contact with the truth of what you've done, what you haven't done, what you're afraid of.

Tom had named this without using the word. Standing in front of 432 soldiers with instructors waiting for him to fail, he felt the full gravitational pull of external validation — the need to prove worth by performance. That pull is not weakness. It is deeply human. And it is the exact thing the gospel is designed to interrupt.

"We as men seek to validate our worth from the outside in," Tom said quietly. "And yet what God says about us — what the gospel is all about — is that we validate our worth from the inside out."

That sentence changes the whole equation. As long as your worth lives outside you — in the title, the performance, the perception of others — vulnerability is not just uncomfortable. It is existentially threatening. You cannot afford to be seen as broken, because broken is all you are without the external scaffolding holding you up.

But when your worth is grounded in something that cannot be revoked by circumstances or failure or an instructor's contempt — when you are held by a righteous right hand you did not earn and cannot lose — then vulnerability becomes something different. Not a liability. A doorway.

— ✦ —

The Perfectionist's Trap

There is a close cousin to the fear-trust-image triad that the room didn't name directly but kept circling around, the way you circle a word you can't quite find. It showed up in the man who talked about authenticity. It showed up in the executive who admitted he over-disclosed and lost his team's confidence. It showed up in Tom's story about the instructors waiting for the chaplain to fail. It is the perfectionist mindset — and it is one of vulnerability's most sophisticated and stubborn opponents.

Perfectionism is not the same as having high standards. High standards say: I want to do this well. Perfectionism says: I must do this without flaw, because if I fail, I am the failure. High standards leave room for honest effort and honest reckoning. Perfectionism does not. It demands an unblemished record — and since no such record exists, it demands something worse: the performance of one.

This is the thing that makes perfectionism so destructive in the context of vulnerability. It is not just that perfectionists don't want to fail. It is that they have constructed an identity so thoroughly built on not failing that failure — or even the admission of struggle — feels like the complete unraveling of who they are. To be vulnerable is to let someone see the seams. And for the perfectionist, the seams are everything he has spent his life hiding.

"People aren't so much enamored by our successes. They are enamored by how we failed — and then found a way to work through it and recover and find hope. That's when we're vulnerable." — Tom Strong

One of the men in the room put language to a version of this he has lived. He described himself as a highly authentic person — genuinely relatable, the kind of man people are drawn to, a storyteller who can bring a room along. He is not hiding behind a mask. He knows who he is. And yet there is a threshold he has identified, a line he doesn't cross without enormous effort.

"There is a big difference," he said, "between being real and authentic and then crossing that threshold of vulnerability — which is acknowledging a need. When I move from storytelling to saying I need something, I need help — that's a form of vulnerability that I still maybe lack. And it's an area where I want to continue to grow."

That observation cuts to the bone, because it describes something perfectionism does that we rarely acknowledge: it allows a very convincing imitation of openness. The perfectionist can be charismatic, even confessional — as long as the confessions are curated, the struggles are past-tense, the wounds are already healed. What he cannot do is say, in the present tense, with the outcome still uncertain: I don't have this. I need help.

Because that sentence — I need help — puts the result outside his control. And for the perfectionist, loss of control is the deepest fear of all.

The executive coach story one man shared said it differently. His bank had brought in a coach who asked the team to start distinguishing between employees who were reactive and employees who were self-aware. At first, that framing seemed off. Those aren't opposites, the man thought. But the more he sat with it, the more he saw it. Reactivity is what fills the vacuum left by self-awareness. When you don't know your triggers, your weak spots, the places where fear is running you rather than the other way around — you react. You perform. You manage the room. You present the version of yourself that has it together, because the only alternative your perfectionism allows is the version that has fallen apart entirely.

Self-awareness breaks that binary. The man who knows his triggers isn't free from them — but he is no longer blindsided by them. He can name them. He can even name them to other people. And that naming, that honest accounting of what moves in him and why, is the first form of vulnerability that perfectionism has to surrender to if anything is going to change.

"How often do we bring that into our relationship with God — being self-aware versus reactive? The verse says 'search me, know my heart.' How much do I actually go: help me see those things? Versus just being reactive with God?" — Andy

This is where perfectionism does its most insidious work — not in our relationships with other people, but in our relationship with God. The man who has spent his whole life managing his image brings that same energy to his prayer life. He presents the acceptable version of himself. He comes with what he has handled, what he has figured out, what he can report favorably. He is not dishonest, exactly. He is just selective. He edits himself before God.

And the tragedy is that God already knows. Psalm 139 is not a surprise to Him. The searching and the knowing are not a threat — they are the invitation. But the perfectionist has to unlearn a lifetime of believing that being fully seen means being found wanting. He has to discover, slowly and usually painfully, that the righteous right hand that upholds him does not first require that he have it together.

Tom's story at Fort Benning is a perfectionist's nightmare that became a story of grace. He could not be perfect. He could not hide the injury forever. He could not guarantee the outcome of those four remaining jumps. What he could do — what he did — was tell God the truth, get his boots on, and run on the good leg. Not flawless. Faithful.

There is a version of that moment that perfectionism would have scripted differently. Don't tell anyone. Don't show weakness. Either gut it out in silence or withdraw entirely — because those are the only two options the perfectionist mind offers. Tough it out perfectly or don't go at all.

But Tom found a third way. He acknowledged the limitation — at least to God and to himself — and moved forward anyway, with help he didn't earn and couldn't manufacture. That is what vulnerability looks like when it defeats perfectionism. Not dramatic confession. Not public breakdown. A man on his knees with a verse and four more jumps to go.

Marshall Goldsmith's line surfaced in the room: what got you here won't get you there. For the perfectionist, this is the hardest truth in leadership development. The same relentlessness that drove you to achieve, the same refusal to tolerate mediocrity in yourself, the same iron discipline that built your record — those are the exact qualities that will become your ceiling if they are not tempered by the willingness to be honestly, appropriately, courageously vulnerable. The perfectionist gets to a certain altitude on performance alone. And then he stalls, because he will not admit what he doesn't know, ask for what he needs, or let anyone see the cost he is paying to maintain the appearance of effortless competence.

The men who lead well for a long time — the ones others want to follow not just because of their results but because of who they are — are not the men who never failed. They are the men who failed and told the truth about it. Who stepped back from the perfectionist's binary of succeed-or-collapse and found the harder, truer posture: I am in process. I am held. I am moving forward. Come with me.

— ✦ —

Flourishing Requires Both

Jeff had been sitting with Andy Crouch's book Strong and Weak, and he brought the framework into the conversation at exactly the right moment. Crouch constructs a two-by-two quadrant: authority on one axis, vulnerability on the other. The four quadrants he names are flourishing, suffering, withdrawal, and exploitation.

• High authority, high vulnerability: flourishing.

• High authority, low vulnerability: exploitation.

• Low authority, high vulnerability: suffering.

• Low authority, low vulnerability: withdrawal.

The room felt the weight of that framework because every man there could locate himself in it — not just now, but at different seasons of their lives, in different roles, under different pressures. A leader who was flourishing at work while withdrawing at home. A father who was deeply vulnerable with his kids while exploiting his authority at the office. The quadrant was not a judgment. It was a map.

The insight that landed hardest: the failure mode for strong men, gifted men, men with genuine authority and capability — is not that they lack strength. It is that they wall off vulnerability so completely, for so long, that they slip into exploitation without even intending to. Power without exposure. Influence without honesty. The ability to shape rooms and outcomes without the willingness to be shaped by them.

"The way to be the most flourishing father is to be a father who understands his authority and responsibility — but who also has high vulnerability. And where I struggle is: I've been given the title, the authority. So I don't want to let anyone know that I don't have what it takes sometimes." — Jeff

Tim told the story of walking into a large leadership role he wasn't sure he was qualified for — a diverse international team, a cultural context he didn't fully understand. He started being radically transparent about his limitations. I don't know that. You're the expert. I trust you. And it almost backfired. Feedback came back through the grapevine: it would be nice to have a leader who seemed confident in his position.

He sat with that. Not to harden back up, but to ask the harder question the Crouch framework raises. What does it look like to be simultaneously strong and exposed? To carry the weight of the position without disappearing behind it, and to admit limitation without abandoning the people who need someone to actually lead?

"I wanted my team to flourish," he said. "Even when I was in a suffering quadrant myself — how do I still get above that line? How do I lead them upward even when I'm not there yet?"

The answer, the room decided together, is not a formula. It is a posture. And that posture is love.

"We're not courageous for courage's sake. We're not vulnerable for the sake of vulnerability. The reason we're courageous and vulnerable — the only reason that sustains it — is love for whoever has been entrusted to us." — Sheldon

Pat Lencioni's framework surfaced briefly: most leaders think the role is about privilege. That is the exploitation mindset. The leader who is flourishing understands that the role is about responsibility for the greater good. That reframe changes what vulnerability means. You are not exposing yourself for your own emotional processing. You are exposing yourself in service of the people in your care. That is not weakness. That is the deepest kind of leadership strength.

— ✦ —

The Strange Arithmetic of Suffering

Someone said something in the middle of all of this that no one had quite planned to say, and it settled over the room like a second presence:

"Your authority is one hundred percent related to your suffering. Through suffering, there's something that emboldens you. Your personal influence and personal authority is one hundred percent linked to your ability to suffer." Russell

It sounds counterintuitive until you sit in it a moment. We do not follow people because they have never been broken. We follow people who have been broken and found a way forward — or are still, humbly, finding it. The credential that matters most in the rooms where real things get said is not the title or the track record. It is the evidence that this man has paid a price. That he has gone somewhere hard and come back with something true.

David is the model the room kept returning to. The man anointed to be king who ends up in a cave at Adullam, surrounded by the desperate, the indebted, the discontented. Four hundred men in rough shape gathered around a man who is himself on the run. And out of that — out of his own suffering — he becomes their captain. Not despite the cave. Because of it.

"David could have said — I've got enough of my own problems right now," one man observed. "I don't have the capacity to lead you through your struggles. But he didn't. He went: okay. I've been called. I'm suffering. These people have a need. This is where God has me right now. So I'm going to do what I've been called to do in the context of my suffering."

There is a distinction, though, between leading out of suffering and performing suffering publicly. The leader who announces his wounds every week eventually has no one left to lead. That is not vulnerability — that is an abdication of the responsibility to actually show up for people. The movement that produces real authority is from "I have suffered" to "and here is what I am learning" — or the more honest version: "here is how I am, slowly, imperfectly, with God's help, working through it."

That is the sermon on the door. That is the limp disguised as a normal stride. That is the forty-five-year-old chaplain finishing jump school on nothing but a verse and a decision to lace up his boots.

Not victory. Faithfulness. And faithfulness, over time, builds the kind of authority that no title can manufacture.

— ✦ —

We Were Never Meant to Go It Alone

Tom came back, at the end, to where he always comes back: battle buddies.

On the battlefield, he said, if you ask any war fighter — male or female — were you ever vulnerable, they will say yes. Every single time. One hundred percent. Because the battlefield strips the performance away fast. Nobody gets to be invincible when the ground is shaking and there is no fallback position.

And yet we walk around in civilian life pretending the ground isn't shaking.

"Life is an adventure," Tom said. "And it's a battlefield. And it's hard. We've all seen that in each other and experienced it ourselves. And so we need each other."

Our youngest son Josh — Tom mentioned him with visible tenderness — is thirty-three, living in Seattle, working as a sous chef. They've been reconnecting, the two of them, in ways that feel like recovered ground. Josh called a few days before that Friday morning, and after they talked, he told his father: I was sitting here with a few minutes and thought — who am I going to call? I'm going to call Dad. His friend has been teasing him about it: your dad's whole thing about "battle buddies for life" — kind of cheesy. Josh shrugged. I like it.

Tom smiled telling it. Even cheesy things can be true.

One of the men told a quiet story about his divorce. A Saturday morning, alone in the house, unable to stop crying. The weight of brokenness and failure sitting on his chest. He picked up his phone and thought about calling a friend — a friend whose wife happened to work on his team, two levels down from him in the org chart. Which meant that if he called, she would know. And that meant the leader he'd worked so hard to appear to be would be exposed as the suffering man he actually was.

He called anyway.

The text came back: We're going hiking. Meet us here.

"I spent the rest of the day with them," he said. "It pulled me out of that pit. But it was vulnerable. And I was genuinely wrestling with whether it was courageous or just foolish."

That is the honest question, and the room didn't rush past it. Is vulnerability risky? Yes. Can you get hurt? Absolutely. Will it always be received the way you need it to be? No. The picture someone offered: a dog rolling over, exposing its belly — the softest, most undefended part of its body. The risk is real. But the possibility — of being known, of being helped, of connection that actually means something — is worth it.

"Life isn't about being safe," someone said. "It's about managing risk. And that's really what parenting is. What friendship is. What any real relationship is."

And then, almost under his breath, another man added: "Even in relation to yourself — coming down to a point where you love yourself enough."

That is the ground floor of it. The courage to be vulnerable is finally, at its root, an act of love. Love for the people in your life. Love received from a God who sees the whole of you and holds you anyway. And enough love for yourself to believe that the truth of who you are — the medals and the limp, the accomplishments and the hole in the door — is worth bringing into the room.

There is something else Tom observed that morning about what happens when a man is genuinely vulnerable: it is not only that it creates permission for others. It creates gravity. The black-cap instructors at Fort Benning, the hardest men in the room, came to the old chaplain not in spite of his obvious struggle but because of it. Because a man who is honest about what he is carrying — and still showing up — is the most trustworthy person in any environment. He has nothing to perform. He is just there.

— ✦ —

Questions Worth Carrying

Tom left the room with a few questions. Not the kind you answer on the spot. The kind you carry around for a while and let work on you, the way a good verse does — you think you're reading it, and then you realize it's been reading you.

1.  How would life be different — from this point forward — if you held the coin of vulnerability and courage together, understanding them not as opposites but as two sides of the same thing?

2.  How does this show up across the different areas of your life — your marriage, your parenting, your work, your friendships, your relationship with God? Where are you flourishing in this? Where are you stuck?

3.  Personal development has been called "loving yourself." We are told to love God, love others, and love ourselves. Where does vulnerability fit into that third category — loving yourself honestly enough to be fully known?

4.  Where does perfectionism show up in your life as a barrier to vulnerability? What is the performance you maintain, and what would it cost to let someone see behind it? What might you gain?

5.  How do we lead by example rather than by performance? What does it look like when vulnerability becomes the thing people are actually following — not the results, not the title, but the honest humanity?

6.  Where is vulnerability a liability? Not every room is safe. Not every moment calls for full exposure. What is the discernment required — what one man called "appropriate vulnerability" — and how do you develop it?

That last question matters most for the perfectionist, because his tendency is to take any principle and apply it absolutely. Vulnerability is good, therefore I should be vulnerable everywhere, always, with everyone, immediately. That is not vulnerability — that is indiscriminate exposure, and it produces exactly the kind of backlash the man in the room experienced when his team wanted to see some confidence.

Appropriate vulnerability is discernment. It is the opening story that lets a guard down without betraying a confidence. It is the admission of uncertainty that empowers a team rather than destabilizing them. It is the limp on the good leg — not because you are hiding forever, but because this is not the moment, and you know the difference. That knowing, that calibration, is itself a form of maturity that perfectionism cannot access — because perfectionism only has two speeds: flawless performance or complete collapse.

— ✦ —

The Call to Courage

There is a passage in 2 Corinthians that one of the men read aloud that morning, and it has the weight of lived experience behind it — Paul writing not from a comfortable study but from a life of shipwrecks and beatings and long nights in the dark:

"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day."

— 2 Corinthians 4:16

Wasting away and being renewed. At the same time. Not one after the other. Simultaneously. That is the strange, holy arithmetic of a life lived in honest dependence — on God, on others, on the truth of who you are and what you need and where you are falling short. The perfectionist wants the renewal without the wasting. He wants the inside work without the outside exposure. But Paul says they come together, in the same body, on the same day.

Tom stood at the end and said it plainly:

"The call to courage begins with vulnerability."

Not after vulnerability. Not despite it. Not once you've got it together and cleaned yourself up and prepared something worth saying. Begins with it. With the honest admission, the turned-over stomach, the hand over the heart, the blood beneath the skin and the verse on the lips and the decision to lace up the boots one more morning.

The men in that room carry a lot. One is watching a job evaporate. Another is in the long aftermath of a marriage that didn't survive. Several carry the faces of people they have lost — in combat zones, in hospital rooms, in their own families. More than a few are still learning, in their fifties and sixties, how to ask for help — really ask, not perform asking. All of them are wasting away in some measure and being renewed in another. All of them showed up that Friday morning to a room where they are, finally, allowed to say so.

That is not weakness. That is the bravest thing most men ever do.

Tom is moving on — a new city, a new season, the men in Tulsa who don't yet know what's coming. He will walk into new rooms, and eventually he will set something on the table that tells the truth. He will offer the limp behind the stride, the verse that got him through, the story about the tower and the blood and the dawn formation and the four more jumps. He will offer it not to impress but to invite. And because he does, other men will find permission to do the same.

That is how courage spreads. Not from the man who claims he was never afraid. From the man who was afraid, and went anyway, and can tell you — with specificity and without sentimentality — what held him up.

Retired Navy SEAL Mark Divine says: when bad things happen, they can destroy you, define you, or grow you. The men who stay in that third category — who refuse to be destroyed or merely defined by their worst moments — are the men who have made peace with vulnerability. Not as a program, not as a technique, not as a box to check. As a way of being. As the other side of the coin they carry everywhere they go.

— ✦ —

Reflections

As the morning ended, one of the men put words to what the room had been circling for an hour. He talked about his father — a man who had driven trucks for decades, had millions of miles behind him, and who could not physically ride in the backseat without reaching for controls that weren't there. He tied it, not cruelly, to the spiritual life. To all the ways we insist on having the wheel — on managing the outcome, on maintaining the appearance of control over things that were never ours to control.

"Vulnerability in that context," he said, "is not having control. It's a trust issue. Do you trust who has the wheel?"

We trust God with our eternity. We said the prayer, we mean the prayer, we are grateful for the prayer. But we white-knuckle the steering wheel of our daily lives — our reputations, our failures, our fears, our marriages, our finances, our bodies as they age and slow and ache — as if the surrender that saved us was a one-time transaction rather than a daily practice. As if God's mercies are new every morning in theory but we still need to manage our own image by noon.

The perfectionist in us comes out most clearly right there. We believe in grace for salvation. We are far less sure about grace for the Tuesday afternoon meeting where we didn't have the answer, for the Saturday morning in the empty house when we couldn't stop crying, for the calf torn forty to fifty percent and four more jumps to go. We want to bring God the cleaned-up version. And he keeps asking for the real one.

The men on that Friday morning were practicing it. In the imperfect, ordinary way that men practice things — imprecisely, incompletely, with long detours into football metaphors and leadership frameworks and the occasional well-timed joke. Telling true stories. Asking hard questions. Sitting in discomfort long enough for something real to surface.

Not performing courage. Being it.

One man offered the image, near the end, of a deaf translator struggling to find the sign for the word "vulnerability." She couldn't find it in the formal vocabulary. Finally she placed her hand over her heart and opened her chest — a gesture of the body, not the dictionary. Tom smiled at that and said nothing, because there was nothing to add.

That's the whole sermon, right there. Hand over the heart. Chest open. Not knowing if it will be received. Going first anyway.

Whatever version of the performance you've been maintaining — whatever limp you've been disguising, whatever door you've been spackling over, whatever injury you've been running through without telling anyone — the invitation is the same one that was waiting for Tom at the bottom of that tower. Step up. Say the verse. Float down soft. Tell someone what it cost. Let that be enough.

— ✦ —

A Prayer to Close

Jesus —

We thank you for the model you gave us. You left the safety of everything and walked among us. You were God and you became vulnerable — exhausted, grieving, betrayed, misunderstood, afraid in a garden on a Thursday night. Not performing vulnerability. Choosing it. For us. Freely and fully and without any guarantee of how it would be received.

Help us become men who hold the coin. Men who understand that the courage you call us to and the vulnerability you invite us into are not enemies, but companions. Two sides of the same act of trust. Two sides of the same act of love.

Where we are wasting away — in our bodies, our relationships, our finances, our sense of self — renew us inwardly, day by day. When the ground shakes, let us not reach for the performance. Let us reach for you, and for the men beside us.

Deliver us from the perfectionist's trap — from the belief that we must arrive fully assembled before you, before each other, before ourselves. Teach us that the blood beneath the skin is not shameful. That the limp is not disqualifying. That the verse on the lips and the boot on the ground are enough. That faithfulness is enough.

Teach us appropriate vulnerability — the discernment to know what room we're in, what season it is, what is ours to carry quietly and what is ours to offer out loud. And give us the courage to be the one who goes first. The one who breaks the seal. The one who tells the truth so the man sitting next to him doesn't have to carry his alone one more morning.

We pray for every man reading this who is running on a broken leg. Who is limping on the good side so no one pulls him out of the race. You see the blood beneath the skin. You know the verse he needs. Meet him there. Hold him. Strengthen him. Uphold him with your righteous right hand.

And may we never forget: the call to courage begins with vulnerability.

In the name of Christ — who was strong and weak, courageous and broken, full authority and complete sacrifice —

Amen.

— ✦ —

CHAPTER FIVE - Permission to Grieve

Permission to Grieve

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

— Psalm 23:4

The aisle of a Costco warehouse is not the kind of place most of us would choose to have our world fall apart. The fluorescent lights are too bright. The carts are too loud. The warehouse hum goes on indifferently, stacked pallets of paper towels and bulk breakfast cereal bearing silent witness to a thousand ordinary errands. It is not a sacred space. It is the opposite of sacred — it is entirely, aggressively mundane.

And yet, that is exactly where Peter stood one afternoon, batteries in each hand, when his phone rang and the voice on the other end told him his father was gone.

What happened next tells you almost everything you need to know about how most men — and perhaps most of us who have gathered in these pages — have been trained to navigate grief. Peter did not crumble. He did not sit down on the warehouse floor and weep. He did not call someone he loved. He did not even let himself feel, not then, not fully. Instead, he pulled up his shopping list.

I'd bring up my shopping list and I finish — because that's what rocks do. And I got my stuff and I took it to the car. And then I had a conference call for work. So I took a conference call for work. Did I tell any of my peers? No. I had work to do.

He went to the airport. He put his eighteen-year-old daughter on a plane to China to begin college. He kept moving. He kept producing. He kept taking care of everyone around him. And somewhere in the machinery of all that forward motion, he filed his father's death under the category of "later."

"I'm really good at later," he would say, years down the road, with a kind of rueful recognition. "I'm not sure later ever truly came."

This chapter is about permission. Specifically, the permission most of us have never been given — and have never given ourselves — to grieve. Not just the catastrophic losses, the deaths and the diagnoses, though those certainly qualify. But the smaller fractures too. The career that didn't go where you planned. The marriage that changed shape. The version of yourself you quietly buried somewhere along the way. The graph that was supposed to go up and to the right, and didn't.

Grief lives in the gap between what we expected and what we got. And until we learn to walk through that valley honestly — with God, with one another, and with ourselves — we will keep shopping for batteries while our hearts break in silence.

The Rock That Isn't Supposed to Crack

Peter's name, as he himself noted with some irony, means "little rock." He had always been drawn to that image — the idea of being strong, unmovable, stable, reliable. The rock is a reassuring thing to be. People lean on rocks. Rocks don't need tending. Rocks don't ask for help or make scenes in warehouse aisles.

The trouble is that Peter is not actually a rock. None of us are. We are flesh and blood and memory and loss, and the story of grief is ultimately the story of what happens when we pretend otherwise for too long.

Peter was honest about this. He had spent years, he admitted, becoming extraordinarily skilled at the art of not grieving. He was good at producing, at doing, at taking care of others, at pushing through. What he was not good at was stopping. Sitting with his own emotions. Letting the crack show.

He had a wife who, by the time of this conversation, had known him since 2008 — nearly two decades of shared life. In all that time, she had seen him cry exactly twice. Once at their wedding. Once when they laid his parents to rest, their ashes finally together in the ground after years apart. One moment of joy. One moment of grief. That was the entire visible emotional ledger of a man who had, in that same span, lost both his parents, navigated divorce, raised children, changed careers, and carried the ordinary crushing weight of a life fully lived.

"That's how horrible I am at showing my own emotions," he said, and there was no bravado in it. Just a man naming something true about himself, in a room full of other men who recognized it immediately, because they were living versions of the same story.

What We Were Taught to Do with Pain

Before we can talk about grieving well, we have to understand how thoroughly most of us were taught to grieve badly — or not at all.

The lessons came from everywhere. From fathers who modeled stoicism as strength. From coaches who praised the players who walked off injuries. From a culture that celebrates productivity and treats emotional processing as an indulgence, a soft thing, a thing for therapy couches and women's book clubs, not for men with work to do.

One man around the table put it plainly: "My dad would say, 'You better stop that crying, or I'll give you something to cry about.'" He paused, letting the familiar sting of that memory settle in the room. "That teaches me that you're not supposed to cry — suppress it."

That phrase — "you better stop that crying, or I'll give you something to cry about" — may be one of the most efficient emotional damage mechanisms ever devised. In a single sentence, it accomplishes several things simultaneously. It teaches the child that their pain is inconvenient. It suggests that grief is a performance rather than a reality. It implies that stronger suffering is more legitimate, training us from childhood in the art of comparison-based emotional invalidation. And it delivers the whole package with the authority of a parent, which means it lands in the deepest rooms of who we are.

Many men received versions of this instruction. Not always in those words. Sometimes it came from the culture of the church, which offered its own brand of suppression dressed in scripture. Peter had absorbed certain verses in a particular way growing up — passages about fearing not, about perfect love casting out fear, about rejoicing always, about casting anxiety on the Lord. Taken as a checklist rather than as an invitation, these verses can become a theological argument against feeling anything difficult.

"From a church that I saw growing up," Peter reflected, "I got the message that Christians are not supposed to fear. We're not supposed to have anxiety. We're not supposed to be worried or concerned. And if you do feel those things, it's because you don't have a strong enough relationship with God. It's on you."

He paused. "I carried that for years. Probably still do, to some degree."

One man named the cultural dimension precisely: "I think the Western Church is very cerebral, very linear. It describes how we should be, how our culture is designed to think. But then you're still feeling things. And nobody's addressing what to do with that feeling. I feel pissed off. I feel like cussing. I'm mad at the world. Well, don't be — but what do I do with it? And that creates this whole dysfunctional way of dealing with pain."

The dysfunctionality compounds over time. It doesn't go away because we're not looking at it. It goes underground, and underground things have a way of finding pressure points to emerge through. They come out sideways — as irritability, as distance, as numbing, as an explosion that seems wildly disproportionate until you understand how long the fuel was accumulating.

One man described exactly that kind of detonation at work — a moment when years of suppressed grief over his mother's passing, layered over professional frustration and the relentless pressure of leadership, finally uncorked. "I don't care anymore," he had said, and meant it in a way that shocked even him. Looking back, he could see that grief and stress and unprocessed loss had pooled beneath the surface until the dam simply gave way. "I'm connecting the dots to grief," he said, "and it just exploded."

This is where unfelt grief eventually lands. Not in some tidy later that never comes, but in the unexpected ruptures of ordinary life — the outburst, the withdrawal, the numb going-through-the-motions that becomes indistinguishable from who we are.

The Comparison Trap

One of the most insidious tools we use against our own grief is comparison. Peter named this with characteristic honesty.

The very day he was let go from his job, he learned that a friend's fourteen-year-old son had been diagnosed with a neuroblastoma — a large, life-threatening brain tumor. "Okay," Peter reasoned in real time, "I lost my job. That's not that bad. This fourteen-year-old may lose his life. So I'm really good at comparing to something else that's more catastrophic and being like, okay, I should really grieve this? By comparison, this is nothing."

It sounds almost reasonable. It even sounds humble. But it is one of the subtler forms of self-abandonment. Because grief does not work on a relative scale. Your pain does not require a permission slip from someone who is suffering more. The loss you are carrying is real regardless of whether someone nearby is carrying something heavier.

Another man made the point directly: "I think comparison on anything is, at very best, not helpful — whether it's good things or bad things. We can't compare grief. It's not a matter of how big yours is. It's a matter of how does it affect you. I could lose my dog. You lost your wife to cancer. Who gives a crap about my dog? But no — it's affecting me."

He continued: "We never want to downplay our grief when we're comparing it to somebody else's, because that's not helpful. I think it's destructive. We have to embrace our grief and know that you losing your dog might not affect you the way it did me, but that doesn't change the fact that it devastated me."

Someone offered a simple reframe: "Maybe it was mistyped. It's not 'do not covet.' It's 'do not compare.'"

The laughter that followed was the kind that comes from recognition — the small, illuminating shock of seeing something true you hadn't quite seen before.

Comparison steals the permission we need to grieve. And without that permission, grief doesn't disappear. It simply goes somewhere else.

The Narrowing Heart

There is a particular kind of damage that comes from a lifetime of suppressed grief, and it is not always dramatic. It does not always announce itself as a breakdown or an addiction or a failed marriage, though it can become those things. Often it announces itself more quietly — as a narrowing.

Peter described it this way: men who do not process their grief don't become stronger. They become distant. They become people who know sad, mad, and glad, and that's it. Their emotional range gets narrower and narrower, and their capacity to connect — with their spouses, their children, their friends, their God — narrows right along with it.

One man had noticed exactly this pattern in himself and his son. He could see how his father's closed-off emotional world had shaped him, and how his own patterns had in turn shaped his son now in his late twenties. "He stuffs it. He can't express his emotions well. But he's working on it." There was grief in that observation too — a father reckoning honestly with what had been passed down, wishing he could have passed down something different, grateful it was not too late to change course.

Another man offered one of the most striking insights of the conversation. He had noticed that his emotional range — his capacity for both sorrow and joy — seemed to function as a single spectrum. "To the extent that you can allow yourself to feel sorrow," he said, "is also the extent to which you can allow yourself to feel joy."

He had experienced this directly. In seasons when his heart was locked down, when he could not grieve and could not cry, he had also found that he could not laugh freely, could not feel joy. And when something broke through — when laughter cracked open the sealed door — it would spill immediately into tears, because all of it was connected. The joy and the grief were not opposites. They were neighbors, and locking out one meant losing access to the other.

The image he offered is worth sitting with. Zero to ten on one side is joy. Zero to ten on the other is sorrow. You cannot expand one end of that spectrum without expanding the other. The man who will not grieve is also, in some real sense, the man who cannot fully celebrate. He has not built an armor against pain. He has built an armor against feeling.

In the times that my heart was locked down and I could not grieve, I could not cry, I could not access my pain — I also could not laugh and I could not feel joy.

Grieving the Positive

Somewhere in the conversation, the discussion took an unexpected turn. Someone raised the question of whether grief was only for losses in the traditional sense — deaths and endings and failures. One man, drawing on years of military chaplaincy and leadership coaching, pushed back gently on that assumption.

"I think there's a grieving process when somebody gets a promotion," he said. "That's why we have people who are micromanagers — they don't let go of what they were really good at doing before. Their role has changed, but they haven't grieved the old one. They're still doing what they were comfortable with."

He went further. Retirement carries its own grief — the loss of identity tied to a role, the disorientation of becoming, as he put it, "not a paid engineer anymore." Launching a child into adulthood. Completing a chapter that was important to you. These are gains, and they are also losses, and they deserve to be grieved.

"It's interesting that we tend to associate grief with things that are bad," someone said. "I never thought about grieving the positive."

Ecclesiastes understood this. There is a time for everything — a season for each experience along the arc of a life. The wisdom of that ancient book is not that we must feel nothing when seasons change, but that we must feel honestly what the changing requires. Holding on to what was, refusing to grieve the endings even of good things, is its own form of avoidance. It keeps us standing in the summer long after the autumn has arrived.

The Scriptures We Weaponized Against Ourselves

Peter came back, more than once, to the way scripture had been used — often unwittingly, sometimes systematically — to shut down the very emotional honesty it was meant to invite.

"Fear not, for I am with you."  — Isaiah 41:10

"Perfect love casts out fear."  — 1 John 4:18

"Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you."  — 1 Peter 5:7

"The joy of the Lord is your strength."  — Nehemiah 8:10

"Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials."  — James 1:2

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me."  — Psalm 23:4

Read as commands — as measuring sticks for the quality of your faith — these passages become a closed door. They say: if you are afraid, you have failed. If you are grieving, you are not trusting. If you are struggling, your relationship with God is insufficient. You should be doing better. Feel better. Try harder.

But that is not what they say. That is what we made them say, often because someone else taught us to hear them that way.

The man who did not find the Lord until he was forty-two said something important about this. He had not grown up inside a church that shaped his hearing of these verses. He came to them later, without as much of that particular kind of damage. And he had come to understand that what these passages offer is not a demand but an invitation — not "fear not, or else" but "fear not, because I am with you." The difference is everything.

Psalm 23 does not say we will bypass the valley. It says we will walk through it. The valley is real. The shadow is real. The threat is real. What the psalm promises is not that we will feel nothing but that we will not walk alone. That is a completely different comfort than the comfort of pretending the valley isn't there.

David soaked his bed with tears. He cried out in desperation from the depths of suffering. He wrote, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" and meant it. And he was called a man after God's own heart. Jesus, standing at the tomb of Lazarus, wept — even knowing what he was about to do, even knowing that death itself was about to be undone, he wept. The emotional range of scripture is not narrow. It is vast. And the God who inspired it is not frightened by our grief.

To sit with someone who is drowning in pain and tell them to feel the joy of the Lord is not ministry. It is avoidance dressed in theology. What the brokenhearted need — what God himself offers, according to the Psalms — is proximity. Presence. The assurance that our suffering has not made us invisible or embarrassing to the divine.

"God is close to the brokenhearted," Peter said near the end of his reflection. "I've used the Bible as a weapon against myself, and I need to delve into the truth."

When God Pursues the Heart

One of the men shared something that cut to the center of what grief avoidance ultimately looks like when it encounters the divine. He had noticed a pattern in himself: when going through something genuinely painful, his first instinct was not to run toward God but away.

Not into sin, he was careful to say. Not into anything dramatic. Just away. Off the trail. Out of the quiet. Away from the listening and the being heard. He stopped wanting to receive affection. He stopped showing up.

When he examined that pattern honestly, he found something surprising underneath it. The avoidance was not, at root, a failure of faith. It was something closer to a preemptive defense. Because when he did show up — when he did go out on the trail and sit in the stillness — God did not want to stay on the surface. God pursued his heart. And God's pursuit led directly to the places he most wanted to avoid.

He doesn't want to spend time on the surface stuff. He pursues my heart. He's the one who says, 'No, son, you need to grieve this.' I don't want to. And so I avoid him because he's going to make me go into my suffering where I need to go — because he wants to heal my heart.

There is a profound and humbling thing in that admission. He avoided God not because God was absent but because God was relentlessly present — present in the way that healing requires, which is not always comfortable. And the healing, when he let himself be led into it, was real. But the path to it went directly through the grief he had been sidestepping.

This is, perhaps, the most important thing this chapter can offer. Grief does not resolve itself by being set aside. It resolves — to the extent that it can be resolved this side of eternity — by being entered. And the One who invites us into it is not standing at the threshold with a stopwatch and a critique. He is already inside, waiting, the way a father waits for a child who has been afraid to come home.

The Man with Work to Do — Revisited

We return, now, to the man in the Costco aisle. To the batteries. To the phone call. To the conference call he took while his father's body was still being processed. To the airport, the daughter, the plane bound for China. To the car, finally, where perhaps he allowed himself a moment — he wasn't sure he had even done that much — before closing the lid on what had happened and moving on.

That man was forty-something years old, competent and capable and genuinely beloved by the people he served. He was good at his job. He was good at being a father. He was good at being the one people leaned on. He was terrible — by his own reckoning — at being the one who needed something.

Years later, sitting in a room with other men who were working through similar patterns, Peter looked back at that afternoon with new eyes. He had thought, for a long time, that what he'd done was manage his grief well. That he had given himself space. That eventually he had dealt with it. But the truth, as he came to see it, was simpler and harder than that: he had gone back to being the rock. He had patched the crack. He had made sure no one could see it. And then he had continued.

"I'm not sure I ever really let myself grieve that," he said. "I'm not sure later ever truly came."

What would it have looked like if Peter had let himself grieve? Not on the Costco floor, necessarily — there is something legitimate in the observation that men are often designed to secure the perimeter first and feel the feelings after. A battle is not the time to fall apart. But "after" cannot mean never. Later cannot mean buried.

Perhaps it would have looked like a conversation with his wife in the car before the airport. Perhaps a phone call to a brother or a friend. Perhaps a deliberate choice, that evening or the next day or the next week, to sit with what had happened. To say his father's name. To let whatever needed to come, come. Perhaps it would have looked like the kind of counseling session that Russell described — four hours over four months with a wise and unhurried woman who had been trained to help him find his way to his own heart.

Perhaps, with the permission he did not have then, it would have looked like this: a man who could receive the news of his father's death, allow the grief its rightful place, and still get on the plane. Not because he stuffed the grief, but because he honored it. Not because rocks don't crack, but because even a cracked rock can hold its shape when it knows what it is carrying.

Peter at the end of this conversation is not the same man who stood in the Costco aisle. He knows more now. He has sat in rooms like this one, has listened to other men tell their own versions of the same story, has felt something loosen in himself that had been cinched tight for years. He has not arrived anywhere in particular. But he has, perhaps, given himself permission to begin.

"I realized through this process," he said, "I have some things I have not allowed myself to grieve that I need to go back and reprocess."

That sentence, quiet and undramatic as it is, represents a kind of courage. It is not the courage of a man who has conquered his pain. It is the courage of a man who has decided to stop running from it. Who has decided that later can be now. Who has looked at the rock he was told to be and understood, finally, that Peter the rock only became who he was in combination with someone stronger — not alone, never alone, but in tandem with the One who walks through every valley alongside us.

Reflections: Questions for the Valley

Peter brought with him a set of questions he had prepared for this conversation — questions he admitted he would need weeks or months to sit with in his own journal. They are offered here not as a quiz but as an invitation. The kind of questions worth writing down, returning to, sitting with in the presence of God and trusted brothers.

Reflection: What losses — expected or unexpected, large or small — have you never fully allowed yourself to grieve?

Reflection: Is there a "later" in your life that never came? Something you told yourself you would deal with eventually, and didn't?

Reflection: How do you tend to respond when life does not go up and to the right — when the graph dips? Do you push through, compare, minimize, or something else?

Reflection: When did you last cry? What does that tell you about the current state of your heart?

Reflection: Do you have a brother — a real one, not just an acquaintance — to whom you can bring the unpolished version of your grief?

Reflection: Where have you heard scripture used as a reason not to feel? What would it mean to re-read those passages as invitations rather than commands?

Reflection: Is there a way you have been avoiding God specifically in your grief — staying on the surface, off the trail, out of the stillness?

Reflection: What would it look like to give yourself permission — today, not later — to grieve something you have been carrying?

A Closing Prayer

Father,

We come to you carrying things we have been too busy, too proud, or too afraid to set down. Things we filed under later. Things we told ourselves we had handled, when really we had only kept moving. Things we compared to other people's losses and decided didn't qualify. Things we were taught, by fathers and coaches and churches and cultures, were not ours to feel.

We confess that we have sometimes used your own word against ourselves — turning your invitations into indictments, your promises into proof of our failures. Forgive us for that. And teach us to hear what you are actually saying: that you are with us in the valley. Not watching from a distance. Not waiting for us to feel better. With us. Present. In the dark.

For the man who got the phone call in the Costco aisle and went back to his shopping list — meet him in the later that never came. For the man who watched his father model silence and passed it on to his son without meaning to — give him words and tears that can travel across generations and begin to heal what was sealed. For the man who lost children, who buried them in his own heart while he took care of his wife — hold him in the grief he carried alone. For the man navigating the ending of something good, wondering who he is now that the season has changed — give him courage to grieve the letting go.

For all of us who know sad, mad, and glad and not much else — expand our hearts. Teach us that the depth to which we can grieve is the depth to which we can also joy, and that both are gifts. That you are not threatened by our tears. That you are close to the brokenhearted — not nearby, not accessible upon request, but close. Right here.

Give us brothers who can sit with us in it. Give us the courage to be brothers who sit with others. Give us communities of men who have learned that strength is not the absence of grief but the willingness to enter it — together, honestly, without comparing or minimizing or rushing toward the resolution.

And for the man who is carrying something today that he hasn't told a single person — let this be the day that changes. Let him find one safe place. One honest hour. One crack in the rock where the light gets in.

You walk through every valley. We do not walk them alone.

In Jesus' name,

Amen.

—

Grief is the experience of loss — real or perceived.

Whatever you are carrying today — named or unnamed, large or small, long ago or just yesterday — it qualifies. You do not need to compare it to anything. You do not need to wait for later. You have permission.

CHAPTER THREE: Walking Through the Valley

Walking Through the Valley

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The summer of 1982, Tim was eighteen years old, alone in the wilderness of Alaska, ten miles from another human being, and very close to not caring whether he made it back.

He had crossed a glacial river at its narrowest point — not knowing that the narrowest crossing is always the deepest. The water was barely above freezing. He had stripped down, lashed his boots to his pack, and waded in. The current grabbed him. The water nearly won. He made it to the far bank dripping and shaking, and stood there looking at the nothing around him.

And the thoughts came. No one knows where you are. No one would come. You could stay. Let the river take you next time. Part of him that summer didn't care if it did.

But something else stirred. A small, stubborn flicker. He wanted to live.

He crossed back the next morning.

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The Valley Is Not an Accident

Every man in the room that morning carried a valley story. You could feel it — the weight that settles in a group of men when one of their own starts telling the truth about where he's been. Tim had organized his teaching around two models and four passages of Scripture. But what made the room lean in wasn't the framework. It was the honesty. Because valleys feel like accidents. They feel like detours, like failures, like evidence that something went terribly wrong.

The Scriptures tell a different story. Before Tim introduced either model, before he drew the diagrams or opened the Hebrew dictionary, he went to four passages and let them lay the foundation. Because any honest conversation about valleys has to start with what God actually says about them — not what we feel in the dark, not what our shame whispers at 2 a.m., but what the ancient text has been saying for thousands of years to men standing in their own low places.

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What Does Scripture Say About the Valley?

The Hebrew word for valley in Psalm 23 is gay — a plain, ancient word for the low places of the earth. Tim, being the kind of man who looks things up, had checked the original. Because knowing what a word actually means in the language it was first spoken changes the weight of a sentence you've heard a hundred times without really hearing.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.  — Psalm 23:4

Notice the verb: walking through. Not walking into and camping. Not pitching a tent in the shadow and calling it home. The grammar of Psalm 23 insists on movement. The valley is terrain to be traversed, not a destination to inhabit. And the shepherd is present precisely here — not waiting on the ridge with a rope to throw down, but walking in the low place with his sheep, rod and staff in hand. The first word of Scripture on the valley: God goes into it with you. And you are designed to come out the other side.

The second passage surprised the room. Hosea 2:15 — God speaking to Israel in the middle of her most spectacular failure:

There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.  — Hosea 2:15

Achor means trouble. This was the site of Israel's judgment — a place of consequence, a valley associated with things going terribly wrong. And into that specific valley of earned suffering, God speaks renewal. He does not wait until Israel has cleaned herself up and climbed back to high ground. He meets her in the valley of her trouble and transforms it into a threshold. Places of failure become entry points for renewal. The second word: God transforms the valley.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low; the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.  — Isaiah 40:4

This is the language of radical topographical reversal. Not just accompaniment, not just transformation — but elevation. The low place is raised. The terrain itself changes. What was a valley becomes level ground. Tim put it plainly: valleys are temporary landscapes. They are not the permanent address of any man who walks with the Shepherd. The third word: God lifts the valley.

Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision.  — Joel 3:14

This one Tim admitted he'd largely overlooked before. But the valley, Joel insists, is also a place of decision. The low place forces clarity that the ridge never requires. On the high ground, options feel optional. At the bottom of the valley, the question of which direction you will move becomes unavoidable. Danny would later name it from the New Testament: the Garden of Gethsemane sits in the valley of decision. Jesus was there. He could have refused the cup. He chose not to. The fourth word: God meets us in the decisions we make in the valley.

Four passages. Four anchors. God walks with us in the valley. God transforms the valley. God lifts the valley. God meets us in the valley's decisions. This is the theological ground Tim stood on before drawing a single diagram. The models that followed were built on this foundation — not as replacements for Scripture, but as lenses to help men see their own lives in its light.

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Model One: The Anatomy of the Valley

Tim called the first model the Anatomy of the Valley. It is not a model of failure. It is a map of what is actually happening — physically, emotionally, spiritually — when a man finds himself in the low place. And like any good anatomy, it names the parts so we can understand how they relate.

In a physical valley, everything flows to the bottom. Runoff from every surrounding elevation drains here. The debris, the cold air, the shadow — all of it settles at the floor. And for a man in a life valley, the experience is the same. The weight comes from every direction. Things that were held at a manageable distance on higher ground become impossible to avoid at the bottom.

Tim identified five movements in the anatomy of a valley. Not stages to be escaped as quickly as possible, but realities to be named, understood, and walked through with honesty. He drew from his own story, from Scripture, and from what Danny had taught the group in an earlier session about the cycles and rhythms of formation — the way God uses the low seasons not to punish but to prepare.

Stage 1 — Isolation: The valley narrows. The valley, by its very geography, cuts men off. The ridge was wide — there was room to move, to be seen, to function in a crowd. The valley walls press in. Connection becomes harder. Men who were relationally accessible on high ground find themselves pulling away in the low place. This is not always a conscious choice. It is the shape of the terrain. And for men especially, isolation is the valley's first and most dangerous feature — because it is the one that makes all the others worse. Tim sat alone in that house in Arkansas for a week. His kids were in Colorado. His wife had driven away. And the silence said what isolation always says: no one is coming. You are on your own.

Stage 2 — Stillness: The valley slows everything down. On the ridge, a man can stay in motion. There is always another meeting, another project, another conversation to move toward. The valley takes that away. The career that structured the week is gone. The role that gave the day its shape has ended. The relationship that provided rhythm has fractured. And what remains is a kind of enforced stillness that men are almost universally unprepared for. We are not trained for stillness. We are trained for output. But the valley insists. And in the stillness — which feels at first like emptiness, like failure, like wasted time — something else begins. Danny described it in his teaching on formation: the wilderness seasons are not unproductive seasons. They are the seasons where the soil of a man's soul is prepared for what cannot grow in the noise. Stillness in the valley is not God's absence. It is his workshop.

Stage 3 — Danger: The valley is not safe. This is not a comfortable truth, but it is an honest one. Tim knew it the moment he put his .45 in a box and locked it in the trunk. He knew what the valley was doing to him, and he knew himself well enough to know he needed to reduce the risk. The danger in the valley is both external and internal. External: circumstances compound. Job loss and marital crisis and children's pain and financial pressure do not typically arrive one at a time. They cluster. The valley seems to gather trouble. Internal: the enemy knows the terrain. He has worked it before. He knows which lies land hardest in the low place, which wounds to reopen, which fears to amplify. Tim named his: God is off doing great things for everybody else. But not for you. He's left you again. You're alone. The enemy doesn't invent new material. He finds the old wound and presses on it in the dark.

“Does the enemy know my song. He knows just what to sing.”
  — Tim

Stage 4 — Decay: This is the stage that sounds the most like defeat — and is actually the most formative. In the physical valley, decay is how life works. The organic matter that breaks down at the valley floor becomes the most fertile soil in the landscape. Tim had set up aquaponics projects in West Africa — systems built entirely on the principle that waste and decay produce life. The fish waste, the breakdown of organic matter, the ammonia and nitrates released in decomposition: these are not byproducts to be eliminated. They are the engine. In the valley of a man's life, the breakdown of what he built — the career, the identity, the plan, the version of himself he had curated — is not the end of the story. It is the composting of it. Danny described this in his framework as the breaking stage: the crushing that releases the oil. The things we built on the wrong foundation do not survive the valley. And that is not loss. That is preparation.

“Decay and life are sitting in the same place. How can light and darkness sit in the same place? Because the valley doesn't just hold death. It holds the conditions for everything that comes next.”
  — Tim

Stage 5 — Life and Lightness: The shift is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. But at some point in the valley — after the isolation has done its work, after the stillness has quieted the noise, after the danger has been faced with honesty, after the decay has broken down what needed to go — something new begins. A seed opens. A direction becomes clear. A man makes a decision — the valley of decision — and starts moving again. Tim described the ascent as slower than the descent. You can fall to the bottom of a valley quickly. You cannot fall your way back up. The climb requires intention, muscle, community, and time. But the life that emerges from a valley is different from the life that entered it. It is more rooted. It has been through the composting and come out with richer soil. It knows things about God that can only be learned at the bottom.

Danny's formation model from Chapter Two maps directly onto this anatomy. His six movements — Calling, Wilderness, Testing, Breaking, Promotion, Multiplication — are not a ladder that a man climbs once. They are circles of righteousness, spiraling upward through repetition. The valley is not a detour from that spiral. It is where the spiral bends. The wilderness and the breaking stages are the valley. And what Danny saw in Israel, watching sheep ascend a hillside in slow, winding paths rather than straight lines, is the same truth Tim was teaching: the long way through is the formative way through.

“You can be on multiple points of this at the same time. God is working on multiple fronts simultaneously — calling you forward in one area, crushing you in another, promoting you here while testing you there. The seasons overlap and inform one another.”
  — Danny, Chapter Two

The Anatomy of the Valley is not a promise that the valley will be short. It is a map that helps a man know where he is, what is happening to him, and what God may be doing in it. Isolation, stillness, danger, and decay are not signs of abandonment. They are the terrain of formation. And life and lightness are not distant hopes. They are the destination that the valley itself is preparing you to reach.

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Model Two: The Contours of Life

Tim's second model is a wave. Not a single wave, but a lifelong contour — the line that charts your actual lived experience across time. He called it the Contours of Life, or the Human Experience Spectrum. Imagine it as a graph, with time moving left to right and emotional-spiritual experience moving up and down. The line rises and falls, breathes and dips, traces the actual shape of a life fully lived.

Tim laid out five levels on this scale, running from the heights to the depths:

Level 1 — Euphoria (the peaks) — Moments of intense joy, celebration, achievement, profound spiritual experience. A daughter's wedding. A breakthrough. A season of abundance and clarity. These are real, and they are gifts. But euphoria, by its nature, is not a permanent altitude. It is a summit, not a plateau.

Level 2 — Comfort (the high midrange) — Life is going well. The career is productive, the marriage is warm, the faith feels alive. Not euphoric, but genuinely good. This is a sustainable range, and seasons here are not to be taken for granted.

Level 3 — Midline (the baseline) — The ordinary rhythm of a functional life. Not exceptional highs, not significant lows. The midline is home base — the calibration point we return to, the place against which everything else is measured. Most men, across most of their lives, orbit around the midline.

Level 4 — Discomfort (the low midrange) — Something has disrupted the midline. A job change, a relational conflict, a season of uncertainty, a loss. Life is hard but manageable. A man can still function, still show up, still move forward — but he is aware that something is wrong, something is missing, something is pressing in.

Level 5 — Pain (the valley floor) — The place Tim could not have described in his forties. The gut-wrenching, what-did-I-just-do-to-my-life, box-in-the-trunk place. Real crisis. Real grief. Real danger. The Year of the Basement.

The movement between these levels is not always slow. Tim was explicit about this: the descent is faster than the ascent. A man can fall from comfort to pain in a matter of weeks — a diagnosis, a betrayal, a catastrophic decision. Getting back up is slower. It requires intention. It requires muscle. It requires the kind of community that will walk the valley floor with you rather than throwing advice from the ridge.

We move through these levels in seasons or in days, depending on what we're facing. Russell captured this in the earlier conversation: in the course of a single day, a man can hold a newborn baby and attend a funeral. He can laugh his head off at lunch and weep in his truck on the way home. The Contours of Life are not only the macro map of a decade — they are the micro map of a Tuesday. The scale shifts, but the shape is the same.

“Just the juxtaposition of what happens in the course of a day — where you're having a conversation and laughing your head off, and then you're crying. The cycles of waves, but then recognizing how that hits in seasons. And if we ignore that, man, things don't go well.”
  — Russell

When We Hijack the Rhythms: Artificial Stimulation and the Sliding Baseline

The Contours of Life model becomes most critical — and most urgent — when Tim addresses what happens when men stop allowing the natural rhythms of their experience and instead reach for artificial ways to manage the line.

The movement is predictable. Something drops the line from midline into discomfort or pain. The drop is real. The pain is real. And in the pain, the natural human response is to reach for relief. This is not, in itself, wrong. God designed us to reach — for him, for community, for restoration, for hope. The Psalms are full of men reaching from the valley. The question is not whether we reach. The question is what we reach for.

When what we reach for is a substance — alcohol, drugs, pornography, food, screens, adrenaline, achievement — it works. In the short term, it works very well. It lifts the line. It produces a sensation of relief, elevation, even euphoria. And the problem is not that it feels good. The problem is what it does to the baseline over time.

Tim laid it out plainly. If a man begins at the midline and something drops him to discomfort — say he's operating at a level four — and he reaches for a substance that lifts him artificially to a level two, the relief is real. But the substance does not return him to his actual midline. It creates a false midline. And over time, as the reach becomes habit, the real baseline — the organic floor of his experience — begins to migrate downward. What once registered as pain now registers as ordinary. The man requires the substance not to reach euphoria but simply to feel normal. What once lifted him to the summit now barely gets him to the midline.

“If we take something into the euphoric when we're already in a challenging season, and we continue to do that, our new normal shifts down. And then we have to take something just to get back to where we used to just be. That's how addiction works. That's how we get caught.”
  — Tim

This is the anatomy of addiction — not a moral failure of willpower in isolation, but a physiological and spiritual recalibration of an entire system. The line that was meant to breathe naturally, to descend into valley seasons and ascend through formation, has been artificially flattened and then gradually depressed. The man is no longer experiencing the real contour of his life. He is experiencing the contour of his medication of it.

The spiritual consequences compound the physiological ones. A man who has been medicating his valleys is a man who has been avoiding the formation that happens in them. The isolation, stillness, danger, and decay of the valley — which were never designed to be escaped but to be walked through — have been short-circuited. The seed never went into the ground. The chrysalis never formed. The outer shell never broke down under the friction of honest engagement with God and with trusted men.

Tim did not say this to condemn. He said it because he had watched it happen. He had seen men who were brilliant, gifted, and genuinely loved by God spend decades managing the line rather than walking through the valley. And what they gained was the absence of acute pain. What they lost was the formation that was waiting for them on the other side of it.

The invitation of the Contours of Life model is not to manufacture suffering or to spiritualize unnecessary pain. It is to stop hijacking the rhythms. To let the line move as it will. To feel what you are actually feeling. And when the line drops — to reach for the right things. To reach for God, who walks into the valley with a rod and a staff. To reach for the men around the table, who have their own valley stories and will not be surprised by yours. To reach for the truth of what the season is forming rather than for the shortcut that avoids it.

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The Year of the Basement

Tim had a great career. Nine years at Compassion International, the last nine representing all of Africa — the only person without African heritage on a 700-person staff, trusted to carry the work of a continent. He went to Africa 49 times. He named a child in Togo — a boy named Micah, after Micah 6:8. He watched compassion change lives at scale. He was doing what he believed he was made to do.

Then the organization asked him to move to Africa permanently. His family discussed it for about eight seconds. His kids were unanimous: Right, Dad. We're not moving to Africa. So Tim stepped out of the role. And the line started dropping.

2020 arrived with its particular cruelty. Tim was home, unemployed, uncertain about what he'd just done to his career and his family's future. His son's best friend from high school died by suicide. His son stepped into a suicidal place himself. Tim and his wife were trying to hold each other and their children together in a pandemic — while Tim quietly came apart.

A position emerged — VP of Operations for a water mission organization based in Bentonville, Arkansas. Remote role. He accepted. Two days later they changed the terms: they needed him there. So Tim, who had just left one position that asked too much of his family, put his daughter through her senior year while commuting every two days from Arkansas for twelve months. He arrived at graduation, they loaded the truck, and moved to a dream property on Beaver Lake — a house with a boat slip, three-car garage, an acre of woods behind it. His wife had never seen it.

One month in, she packed the car. "The dog and I are going back to Colorado tomorrow," she said.

And she did.

Tim sat alone in that house for a week. Both kids were in basements in Colorado Springs, furious that their family home had been sold, furious that they didn't have a place to return to. His wife was depressed. The job was a nightmare. The dog had cancer. Tim put his .45 in a box and locked it in the trunk. He knew himself well enough to know he shouldn't have easy access to it that week.

"What did I just do to my life?" he asked the empty house. "I completely blew it up. I had a great job, a great family, everything was going so well — and now everything is blown up."

They moved back to Colorado. Into a friend's basement — four months, with cats (Tim is clear about his feelings toward cats), driving past his old house every time he went home. Unemployed. Estranged from his kids. Without a home of his own. Watching his wife grieve. They called it the Year of the Basement. And underneath all of it, the ancient lie the enemy had been singing since Tim was a pastor's kid watching his father leave for the next engagement: God is off doing great things for everybody else. But not for you. He's left you again.

“Does the enemy know my song. He knows just what to sing. And I've heard it again and again throughout my life when I go through a valley.”
  — Tim

Matt named the second layer — the one that comes after the first wound and makes it compound:

“When the valley comes and it's not my fault, I'm quick to go to God. But when it's my fault, I don't go to him — because I feel like he's going to say 'I told you so.' The enemy gets you twice. The first time you get yourself. The second time is the shame that says: don't go to him now. You used up your credit.”
  — Matt

This is the valley beneath the valley — the one where a man's own shame becomes a second wall. The terrain is hard enough already. The shame seals the exit. And the man who most needs to cry out to God finds himself convinced that this is the one valley God will not enter with him.

Hosea 2:15 speaks directly to this man. God is speaking to Israel — who did not stumble into her situation, who made a series of deliberate choices away from him, who has no one to blame but herself. And into that valley of earned trouble, he says: I will make this a door of hope. Not once you've sorted yourself out. Not once you've climbed back to respectability. Right here. In this.

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Why Life Happens in the Valley

Tim had originally planned to go deeper into the biology. He'd pulled up the equations. He'd wanted to trace the full chemistry of aquaponics — the fish waste becoming ammonia, the ammonia breaking into nitrites and nitrates, the nitrates feeding the plants, the plants purifying the water, the cycle sustaining itself. The full picture of how a system built on decay produces abundance. He let it go in the moment. But the image carried.

In a physical valley, everything moves to the bottom. The runoff, the organic matter, the cold air, the shadow. And the valley floor is the most fertile place in the landscape. The soil is richest at the bottom. The water is there. The seeds collect there. What looks like a gathering place of death is, in fact, the most concentrated source of life in the terrain. Decay and life sit in the same place. Light and darkness coexist at the valley floor.

“There had to be a death for there to be a life.”
  — The room

The biologist in the group pressed it further. Every seed carries within it enough internal nutrition to begin sprouting. But that initial energy only carries it so far. To truly flourish, the sprout needs external nutrition — the richness of the soil it is planted in. And to be planted, the seed must go into the ground. It must go into the dark. It must experience the friction of the soil breaking down its outer shell. Without that friction, the seed stays a seed indefinitely.

“What has to happen for a seed to sprout? It has to go in the dirt. It has to decay. The friction breaking down the outer shell — that's what opens it. Without that, there is no growth.”
  — Danny

The caterpillar completes the image. We speak of metamorphosis as a gradual process — a caterpillar slowly gaining wings, losing legs, becoming more refined. But that is not what happens. The caterpillar goes into the chrysalis and dissolves. Completely. If you opened the chrysalis in the middle of the process you would not find a caterpillar halfway to a butterfly. You would find goo. Undifferentiated biological material that has entirely surrendered its previous form in order to become something it could not have become by any other means.

“When you're in the middle of it, you don't know what's coming out on the other end. You're just goo. You don't know what that butterfly's going to be.”
  — The room

The valley is the chrysalis. The goo is not a sign that something went wrong. The goo is the process. And what comes out the other side will bear no resemblance to what went in — except that it is the same creature, now capable of things it could not have imagined from inside the cocoon.

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What God Forms in the Valley

Tim closed his teaching by pointing toward 2021 and what came after. Because the year of the basement was not the end of the story. God has provided, he said. God has brought back what was eaten by the locusts — and then some.

His kids are not just present — they are thriving. Leading Bible studies with their peers, starting groups in their churches, not just attending but actively investing. His wife and he are not the same couple who drove to Arkansas in a truck with a dog and a dream. They are a better one. They live next door to their old house now — the one they sold, the one they drove past for four months with their hearts in their throats. Close enough to knock on the door. Close enough to have become good friends with the family that bought it.

"I don't have the same wife I had before 2021," Tim said. "And I don't want that same wife." The valley formed them both. Individually and together.

Russell brought in one final image — the passage his wife Carrie had spoken over him in his own dark seasons:

Do not be afraid, you worm Jacob... I myself will help you. See, I will make you into a threshing sledge, new and sharp, with many teeth. You will thresh the mountains and crush them.  — Isaiah 41:14-15

You are a worm. In context, this is not an insult — it is an honest description of the creature's condition. Small. Vulnerable. Without much on its own. But the Lord himself will help. And what he is forming — through the friction of the soil, through the darkness of the chrysalis, through the descent to the valley floor — is a sharp instrument. A threshing sledge. Something useful in his hands precisely because of what it has been through.

“Whether caterpillar to butterfly, or worm to threshing sledge — the Lord is shaping us into a tool to be his instruments for the work he wants to do through us. The valley is not the interruption of that work. It is the heart of it.”
  — Russell

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Back to the River

In 2018, Tim took his family back to Alaska. He went back to that riverbank — the one he had crossed at eighteen, naked and barely surviving. He stood on that peninsula and wept.

His son gave him space. Leave him alone, he told the others. He needs some time.

Standing there, Tim saw what he could not see at eighteen: the river crossing at its narrowest point is also its deepest. The shortest distance was the most treacherous. He had not known that at eighteen. But he had crossed it. He had made it to the other bank. He had wanted to live, and that flicker had been enough.

Now he had a daughter and a son who were leading people toward God. A wife who was his partner in ways she had never been before the valley. A faith forged not in easy seasons but in the Year of the Basement, in the summer of 1982, in 49 trips to Africa, in the dark mornings on his knees in an empty house crying out loud enough to be hoarse when his wife came home.

The valley did not break him. The valley formed him.

It is forming you too.

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Questions for Reflection and Discussion

The following questions are designed for personal reflection, journaling, or honest conversation with a trusted group of men. Take your time. The valley is not a place for rushing.

1.  Looking at the Anatomy of the Valley — isolation, stillness, danger, decay, life and lightness — which stage are you currently in? Where have you been spending the most time?

2.  When the stillness of the valley comes, what do you typically do with it? Run from it, endure it, or begin to listen in it?

3.  On the Contours of Life scale — Euphoria, Comfort, Midline, Discomfort, Pain — where are you today? Where has your line been trending over the past six months?

4.  When the line drops, what do you typically reach for? Has that reach been lifting your real baseline, or has it been gradually pulling it down?

5.  Tim described the lie the enemy has been singing to him since childhood. What is the specific lie the enemy sings to you in your valley? Can you name it out loud?

6.  Matt named the double wound: the valley itself, and then the shame that says don't go to God now. Is there a valley you've been unable to bring to God because of shame? What would it look like to go to him anyway?

7.  Danny taught that the valley seasons are circles of righteousness — not detours but essential terrain in the spiral of formation. Looking at a past valley, what could not have been formed in you any other way?

8.  Who is in the valley with you right now? If no one — who could you call this week, not to fix anything, but simply so you are not alone?

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The Challenge

This week, draw your own Contours of Life. Not the ideal version — the real one. Mark the high seasons and the low ones across your life. Note what was happening at each elevation. Look for the patterns: what you reached for in the dips, what lifted you, what slowly pulled the baseline down.

Then, through the lens of the Anatomy of the Valley, identify which stage you are in right now — or which stage a past valley put you through that you've never fully named. Write down what you believe God was forming in that terrain that could not have been formed anywhere else.

Finally: if you are in pain right now — if the walls are high and the light is dim and you put something in the trunk this week — tell one man. Not to explain yourself, not to ask for advice, not to have it fixed. Just to say: I'm in the valley. Walk with me.

You were not designed to cross that river alone.

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A Closing Prayer

Lord, we come to you from wherever we are on the map. Some of us are in the comfort zone this morning, grateful and full. Some of us are in the discomfort, trying to hold the line. And some of us are at the bottom — in the pain, in the Year of the Basement — and it has been so long since the line moved that we've started to wonder if this is just where we live now.

We thank you for Psalm 23 — that you walk with us in the valley, that your rod and your staff are present precisely in the low place. We thank you for Hosea — that you transform the valley of trouble into a door of hope, that you give back what was lost. We thank you for Isaiah — that the valley is temporary, that you are actively lifting what has been brought low. And we thank you for Joel — that you meet us in the decisions we make at the bottom, just as you met Jesus in Gethsemane.

Father, for the man in this room who is in the decay stage — who feels like goo, who cannot see what he is becoming — would you make yourself known as the God who designed the chrysalis and knows exactly what will emerge from it. For the man who has been hijacking the rhythms, reaching for the wrong relief — give him the courage to stop. Give him men who will walk the valley floor with him. For the man beginning his ascent — strengthen his legs for the climb. Remind him that the soil he is climbing out of is the richest in the landscape.

You are the God who forms threshing sledges out of worms. Who makes butterflies out of goo. Who walks into every valley because that is where the sheep are.

Walk with us. Transform us. Lift us. Meet us in our decisions.

In the name of the one who stood in the valley and chose the cup that carried us all through.

Amen.

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For the Man Who Is in the Valley Right Now

If this chapter found you at the bottom — if the Anatomy of the Valley named your current address and the Contours of Life showed you a line that has been descending for longer than you'd like to admit — we want to be direct with you.

The valley is real. The weight is real. The isolation presses in from every side. The stillness feels like a punishment. The danger is not imaginary. And the decay — of the plan, the career, the version of yourself you worked so hard to build — is painful in a way that is hard to put into words.

But here is what is also true, and it is not a platitude: Tim sat in that house in Arkansas alone for a week, with his .45 in the trunk, and God was there. Not as an observer. As the shepherd who walks into the valley floor precisely because that is where the sheep are. The darkness did not reduce God's presence. It concentrated it. And what came out of that valley — the marriage, the kids, the faith forged at the bottom — could not have come from anywhere else.

The Anatomy of the Valley is not a map of failure. It is a map of formation. Isolation, stillness, danger, and decay are not signs of abandonment. They are the terrain of the chrysalis. And the line on the Contours of Life that has been dropping — that line is not the final word on your story. It is the current chapter of it.

You are not goo. You are becoming something that could not have been made any other way.

Walk through. Not in. Through.

He is with you.

CHAPTER FOUR - Whose Glory? Measuring What Matters in the Only Life You Have

Whose Glory?

Measuring What Matters in the Only Life You Have

“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”— Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647)

A Life That Didn’t Go Up and to the Right

Working the whiteboard with a stack of hand-drawn sketches, Rob has the look of a man who had been wrestling with something all week. He’s an engineer by training, precise and methodical, the kind of person who wants to understand how systems work. But what he brought to the group that morning wasn’t a systems diagram for a machine. It was a diagram for a life — specifically, his own.

Before Rob ever picked up a marker, he paused. There was something he needed to say first. Something he doesn’t often talk about.

Rob’s life, by most conventional measures, has not always gone “up and to the right.” There were seasons of professional disappointment, of feeling like the trajectory he’d worked toward and planned for simply didn’t materialize the way he’d imagined. There were years when the chart of his circumstances — his career, his sense of control, his understanding of where things were headed — pointed stubbornly sideways, or worse, downward. Dreams deferred. Expectations unmet. Paths that curved away from where he intended to go.

And yet, sitting in that room, Rob is a man of depth, wisdom, and remarkable perspective. The kind whose words carry weight not because he’s never struggled, but precisely because he has. His engineering mind never quit working, even in the valleys. It kept asking questions. And those questions — forged in seasons of disappointment and recalibration — are what he brought to the whiteboard that morning.

He said something like this: “All the sales guys are all about revenues going up, profits are going up. Everything about life is ‘up into the right’ when everything’s working right. But what if the graph we’re all trying to plot is the wrong graph entirely?”

That question hung in the air. What if the measurement itself is wrong? What if we’ve all been tracking the wrong data?

What Rob’s formative years taught him — the years that didn’t match the plan — is that God is not particularly interested in managing our quarterly performance review. He is interested in something far more durable, far more significant, and far more beautiful. He is interested in His glory and our transformation into people who reflect it.

That’s the chapter Rob opened up that morning. And it’s the chapter we want to walk through carefully here, because it may just change the way you understand the whole story of your life.

The Question Behind All Questions

For most of us who didn’t grow up in a Reformed theological tradition, the Westminster Shorter Catechism sounds like something dusty and distant, a relic of another era. But the first question and answer of that catechism is arguably the most clarifying sentence in the history of Christian thought outside of Scripture itself:

“What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”— Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 1

Let’s sit with that for a moment, because there’s more here than a quick reading reveals.

First, notice the word “chief.” Not the “only” end of man, but the chief end — the primary purpose, the organizing aim around which all other aims find their proper place. This tells us something important: life isn’t one-dimensional. We work, we eat, we love, we create, we rest, we make things and break things and repair them. All of that belongs to a full human life. But there is a chief aim, a north star, a supreme purpose that gives meaning and direction to everything else.

Second, notice that two things are named together: glorifying God and enjoying Him. Not glorifying God — period. Not enjoying God — period. Both. Together. Forever. This is not accidental. The catechism’s framers understood what our consumer culture constantly forgets: that true human joy is not found in competition with God’s glory, but in alignment with it. When we glorify God rightly, we are most fully ourselves. We are most fully alive. We are, in the deepest sense, most fully happy.

Rob put it this way: “The chief aim of man means there’s something it’s all for. There’s externally an objective, something to be accomplished out of all this.”

This is profoundly countercultural. The modern Western worldview tells us that we define our own purpose, that meaning is something we construct from within. The catechism tells us something radically different: meaning was already built into the structure of reality before we arrived. We don’t invent it. We discover it. We align with it. We participate in it.

The theological term for this is “doxology” — from the Greek word doxa, meaning glory. All of creation exists in a doxological relationship with God. The stars declare His glory (Psalm 19:1). The mountains and the oceans shout it. And human beings, made uniquely in His image, are designed to be the most articulate reflectors of His glory in all of creation.

But what does that actually mean? What does it look like to glorify God in a Tuesday afternoon meeting, in a season of disappointment, in a difficult marriage, in a body that’s aging, in work that feels ordinary? That’s where Rob’s engineering mind began to do something remarkable.

What the Scriptures Say About Glory

As Rob drew his diagrams, the group looked at several passages that informed everything to follow. These aren’t peripheral texts. They’re load-bearing walls in the architecture of biblical thought.

The Light of the Glory of God — 2 Corinthians 4:6

“For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”— 2 Corinthians 4:6

This passage does something stunning. It draws a direct line from the original act of creation — God speaking light into primordial darkness — to what God is doing in human hearts right now. The same creative, illuminating power that called the cosmos into being is the power at work in our inner transformation. The glory of God isn’t just something we see out there in sunsets and galaxies. It is something being formed in here, in us, through the knowledge of Christ. We are being lit from within.

The Image of the Invisible God — Colossians 1:15

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.”— Colossians 1:15

Christ is the image — the eikon, the perfect representation — of God. When the disciples asked Philip, “Show us the Father,” Jesus replied, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) Christ is God’s glory made visible, made human, made approachable. And since we are being conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29), we are being drawn into the orbit of that original glory — not as competitors with it, but as reflections of it.

Moses and the Face of God — Exodus 33:18–23

Rob pointed to the Exodus narrative, which his home church was preaching through at the time. Moses, after everything he had witnessed — the burning bush, the plagues, the parting of the sea, the giving of the Law — asks God one more audacious thing: “Show me your glory.” (Exodus 33:18)

God’s response is telling. He doesn’t deny the request. He says, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence.” But He also says, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” So God tucks Moses away in the cleft of a rock and covers him with His hand, and lets only His “back” — the trailing edge of His passing glory — be seen.

Even that partial exposure was enough to make Moses’ face radiant for days afterward, so much so that the Israelites were afraid to come near him. The glory of God is not a metaphor. It is a reality so concentrated, so luminous, so other than anything we are, that it can only be encountered in mediated form — at least for now.

Rob noted this and said: “There are even stories in the Bible about God’s glory being like this huge, super bright light.” That observation became the seed of his second model, which we’ll explore shortly.

Well Done, Good and Faithful Servant — Matthew 25:21

Rob also grounded the group in the Parable of the Talents. It’s a story about a master who entrusts his servants with resources while he travels, and then returns to settle accounts. Two servants invest well and hear the words every soul longs to hear: “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” (Matthew 25:21)

As Jeff observed, this parable used to scare him. It felt like a threat, a warning about what happens to those who don’t perform. But he came to see it differently: “I moved from it being my least favorite parable when I thought it was just a scary thing about how much God hates people and wants to punish them — to understanding it’s really about stewardship of our life and the opportunity we have to take whatever God’s given us and return it to him at the end. At the end of my life, I want to be able to say: here’s what you gave me, here’s what I’ve done.”

This is the theology beneath Rob’s graph. We are stewards of a life. The question is not whether we will give an account, but what that account will look like.

And here, with all the gentleness it deserves, we return to the central truth: God’s glory and human joy are not competing interests. They are the same direction. When we glorify God, we become most fully ourselves. When we enjoy Him forever, we are doing exactly what we were designed to do. The chief end of man is not a burden. It is an invitation.

The Left Board: Plotting Glory Over Time

Rob walked to the whiteboard and drew what he called the “left board” — a graph with time on the horizontal axis and something called “glory” on the vertical axis. Then he asked the group one of the most penetrating questions of the morning:

“What if your success in this life is directly correlated to the degree that you are glorifying God every moment — and over the course of a lifetime?”

If that’s true, then the graph of a life doesn’t plot net worth or physical health or career achievement. It plots something else entirely: our moment-by-moment participation in the glory of God.

Big G and Little g

Rob introduced an important distinction. There is God’s glory — what he called “Big G Glory” — which belongs to Him alone, the intrinsic, infinite, uncreated radiance of who God is. And then there is the glory we generate — “little g glory” — our participation in and reflection of His, the contribution we make to the great doxological tapestry of creation and history.

The Westminster Catechism says that man’s chief end is to glorify God. Rob’s insight is that this means something we do, something we generate, something we produce — even if only as reflectors of a light that is not our own. We are not the source of the glory. We are, by grace, participants in it.

The First Question: What Are We Actually Plotting?

Rob invited the group to sit with a question he’d been wrestling with since a previous session where Russell had led the group in a discussion about success:

“What world would we actually put on this graph? If God were actually measuring — like us trying to measure — what would He be measuring? And how would He define success?”

Is success the amount of pleasure or pain we’re in? Is it our weight, our bank account, our net worth? Every culture offers its own answer to this question, and most of those answers look remarkably like the sales charts Rob described — up and to the right means good, down means bad.

But Rob pushed deeper. What if God’s measurement is something altogether different? What if He is measuring the degree to which, at any given moment, we are functioning as what He made us to be — image-bearers, glory-reflectors, little-g participants in Big G glory?

The Second Question: Positive, Negative, or Neutral?

This is where the engineering mind really came alive. Rob asked:

“At any given instant — what we’re doing, what we’re thinking, what we’re seeing — are we in a positive glory state or a negative glory state? And is there somehow neutrality?”

This question may be the most practically transformative one in the chapter. Think about it. At this moment, as you read these words: is your inner orientation one that is moving toward God, reflecting something of His character, participating in His purposes? Or is it moving away — driven by pride, fear, self-sufficiency, lust, bitterness, or simple distraction?

Rob’s instinct was that true neutrality is rare. We are always oriented. We are always moving in some direction. The question is which direction.

The Formula: Instantaneous Glory

Rob reached back into his engineering training and introduced the concept in the language of physics. In Greek, the letter gamma (Γ/γ) represents what he called “instantaneous glory” — the amount of glory we are generating or reflecting at any single moment in time. He wrote something like this:

γ(t) = [Some Function of Our Christlikeness] × dt

The exact function remains, as Rob admitted, “undefined right now.” But the concept is clear: at every instant of time (dt), we are either contributing to or detracting from the glory of God. The instantaneous glory of any moment is a function of how much, in that moment, we are like Jesus.

He said it plainly: “I circled back around and said, this is really just how much we’re like Jesus at that moment in time.” Jesus was the perfect human glorifier. Fully surrendered to the Father’s will. Fully empowered by the Spirit. Fully present to whoever and whatever was in front of Him. He said, “My Father is at work and I too am working.” (John 5:17) Jesus was the living answer to the question: what does it look like to produce maximum instantaneous glory?

The Formula: Cumulative Glory Over a Lifetime

From instantaneous glory, Rob moved to something even more provocative: the cumulative glory of a life. Using the language of calculus, he described it this way:

Gₙₑₜ = ∫ [from Christ to End of Life] γ(t) dt

In plain language: the total glory of your life before God is the summation of all the instantaneous glory moments — every act of faithfulness, every moment of surrender, every decision made in alignment with the Spirit rather than the flesh — integrated across the entire span of your life after Christ.

Rob made an important pastoral note here. He said the calculation begins after Christ, not before. “What we did before Christ — we’re not going to penalize ourselves for that.” The cross covers the negative balance of our pre-Christ life. The graph of meaningful glory begins at the moment of our new birth.

What this model envisions is a life whose cumulative glory trend is “up and to the right” — not because our circumstances always improve, but because over time we are learning to glorify God more consistently, more deeply, with fewer negative spikes and more sustained faithfulness. As Rob put it: “At the end of life, the summation of our glory is the summation of all the instantaneous glory that we’ve generated over the course of our life.”

Danny brought this idea into sharp theological focus: “Peter’s change — when he had a heart change and a change in his actions — it was because of a revelation of truth. Jesus had told him: when the rooster crows, you’re going to deny me three times. The rooster crowed. And he had this collision with truth. And that prompted a heart change in him to go out and weep and repent for what he had done. All repentance and all of our heart changes come because we come face to face with truth. And it’s what we do in that moment that makes a difference for how things go after that.”

The left board is not a ledger of condemnation. It’s a vision of possibility. It’s a picture of what happens when a human life, redeemed and Spirit-empowered, progressively learns to reflect the glory of God.

The Third Question: What Goes in the Box?

Between the instantaneous glory of any given moment and the cumulative glory of a lifetime is what Rob called “the box” — the set of factors, practices, orientations, and realities that determine how much glory we generate at any given time. He asked the group: what belongs in this box?

The conversation that followed was rich. Here is a synthesis of what the men identified:

Christlikeness. At the most fundamental level, Rob said: “how much we are like Jesus at that moment in time.” Jesus is the template, the reference standard, the North Star of instantaneous glory. Every other variable in the box is downstream from this.

The totality of who we are. Thomas offered a sweeping insight: “I would have to say the totality of who we are in that box — everything — before Christ and after Christ.” God doesn’t discard who we were before we knew Him. He redeems it. He uses our whole story — including the years of wandering, failure, and searching — for His purposes and His glory.

The work we are called to do. Rob added work to the list — not in the abstract physics sense, but in the vocational sense. We each have specific assignments, roles, and responsibilities. Husbands have a husband’s calling. Fathers have a father’s calling. Professionals have a stewardship of their particular gifts. How we do what we do matters deeply.

Obedience. General obedience to Scripture. Role-specific obedience. And what Rob called “specific assignments” — particular things God has called each of us to that no one else can do.

Love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Rob referenced Mark 12 and Jesus’ summary of the law: the greatest commandment is to love God with everything we have. And Colossians adds: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord.” (Colossians 3:23) The heart — the center of our being — belongs in the box.

Sanctification. The ongoing process of being made holy, of having the flesh progressively submitted to the Spirit, belongs squarely in the box. Spiritual maturity doesn’t just mean more knowledge. It means fewer negative spikes on the glory graph.

Storing up treasure in heaven. Jesus said: “Don’t store up treasures on earth — store up treasures in heaven.” (Matthew 6:19–20) What we prioritize, what we invest in, what we treat as genuinely valuable — all of this feeds the box.

Seeking first the kingdom. Matthew 6:33: “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness.” The posture of our whole life — what we seek first, not second or third — belongs in the box.

Phil captured the integrating principle of all of this when he pointed out that the disciplines we practice, the habits we cultivate, are not the goal in themselves but the means by which we maintain our orientation toward God: “The renewing of our minds is actually the thing that allows us to keep our focus more on Him and to have our desires be His desires. If we’re not spending enough time in that, then our desires are going to be more like our desires, not His desires.”

The Right Board: The Solar System of Grace

Rob wasn’t done. He had a second model, one that emerged from his reading of the Corinthians and Colossians passages about light and glory. He set aside the left board and turned to what the group began calling the “right board.”

Here, Rob drew a solar system. In the center: the Sun — representing God, or more specifically, Jesus Christ, the radiant image of the invisible God. Orbiting around the sun: us. Every believer, every human soul, in orbit at some distance from the Source.

Rob said: “The idea of the sun and light and how light — the energy and power of light — gets reflected. So a different way of thinking about what God is doing with us: Is the glory about doing something for Him, or is it about getting closer to Him, such that we are radiating, reflecting the power that’s coming into play?”

The Physics of Closeness: The Inverse Square Law

Here is where Rob’s engineering background produced something genuinely illuminating. In physics, the intensity of light received from a source is governed by what is called the inverse square law:

Luminosity Received ∝ 1 / r²

In plain language: if you move twice as close to a light source, you receive four times the light. If you move three times closer, you receive nine times the light. The relationship between distance and illumination is not linear. It is exponential.

The theological implication is stunning. The closer we draw to Christ — the more we allow the gravitational pull of His love to bring us into tighter orbit — the more we reflect His light, not by a factor of two or three, but by the square of our closeness. Small steps toward God produce disproportionately large increases in the glory we reflect.

Rob made the application explicit: “Over time, if we are allowing the gravity of the love of God — the love of the Son, Jesus — to pull us into closer orbits, the closer we are, the more our reflection is radiating. It’s not just like a factor of one. It’s related to the square of the radius. If you get, let’s say this is a distance, and you move in half that distance, you’ve increased the radiation by four times.”

The Fourth Question: What Keeps Us in Orbit Instead of Falling In?

A beautiful question arose from the solar system model. If God is the Sun, drawing us in with gravitational love, why don’t we simply collapse into Him? Why is there still an orbit at all — still a distance, still resistance?

Matt offered the answer: “The only thing that’s keeping the orbiting body from colliding and being sucked into and becoming one with the sun is the momentum of the motion away. There’s a force coming from the center that’s drawing us in, but it’s our lack of surrender — the flesh — that is the momentum that keeps us continually wanting to go away. And if we can decrease that, the two become one.”

Thomas built on this: “The less we focus on the Sun, the smaller the mass of God, and therefore the speed takes us further from God. Not like there’s another body pulling us away — but the less we focus on God, the less mass the central body has, and therefore the further we drift.”

In other words: the flesh, the world, our self-sufficiency — these are not so much rival gravitational forces as they are simply the velocity of our old momentum, the habit of moving away from center. And what counters that momentum is not more effort but more surrender — yielding to the gravitational pull of the Holy Spirit drawing us inward.

The Fifth Question: Who Else Is in Our Orbit?

Rob introduced one more dimension to the solar system model that the group found particularly rich: “Okay, who else is in orbit with us, like in this… and how many people over the course of our lifetime is our being in the image of the sun pulling them in toward the sun?”

Our proximity to Christ doesn’t just affect us. It affects everyone in our orbit — our families, our friends, our colleagues, the people who watch our lives from the outside and notice something different about the way we carry ourselves. Before any of the men in the room knew Christ, others in closer orbit to Jesus were reflecting enough light to make them curious, to make them lean in, to make them wonder: what does that person have that I don’t?

As one of the men reflected: “A lot of people in our collective stories have been in a closer orbit, and we’ve observed and said they’ve got something that I don’t have. I want to emulate them. There’s some sort of glory of Christ reflecting off of them that is attractive — drawing others to let go of what’s keeping them away from Christ and coming to a closer orbit.”

This is the missionary implication of the solar system model. Becoming more like Jesus is not a private spiritual exercise. It is an act of public witness. The closer we are to the Son, the more light we reflect, and the more that light falls on the people around us, warming them, drawing them, illuminating for them a path they didn’t know existed.

NEED A PIC OF THE BOARD

Both Boards, One Truth

At some point in the morning, one of the men made an observation that brought both boards together: “I think the right side is what fuels the up and to the right on the left.”

Yes. Precisely.

The left board — the graph of instantaneous and cumulative glory — is the output. The right board — the solar system of closeness, surrender, and reflected light — is the input. The relationship is not the same as performance and production. It’s more like the sun and the plant: the plant doesn’t produce light. It receives it, responds to it, and grows toward it. The glory it displays is not its own achievement. It is the natural result of proximity to the source.

Danny captured the danger of emphasizing the left board without the right: “The left board, if you try to operate it without the right board, is Pharisaism. It’s like the 600-plus laws they ended up with, just trying to manage behavior from the outside. But through the relationship piece — through what happens on the right board — it’s what takes this and makes this about righteousness, about glorifying Him.”

And Yuri pointed to the neuroscience that confirms what theology has always known: “Left board is left brain — performance, fear-based. Right board is right brain, joy-based, relational, whole-brained. And the right brain is 200 times faster than the left brain.”

The left brain manages. The right brain relates. And it is in relationship — in nearness to God, in the warm orbit of His love — that transformation actually happens. As Jeff observed: “This is transactional. This is transformational.”

The best leaders, someone noted, are transformational rather than transactional. They develop people. They don’t just check boxes. And this is exactly how God leads us. He is not managing our behavior from the outside. He is transforming us from the inside, writing the law on our hearts (Jeremiah 31:33), making our desires match His desires, turning what once required gritted-teeth effort into the natural overflow of a life lived near the Son.

The Power Source: Walking by the Spirit

No conversation about glory and transformation is complete without addressing the question of power. We cannot will ourselves into Christlikeness. We cannot discipline ourselves into closer orbit. The effort matters — but the power is not ours.

Danny read from Galatians 5:16–23 in the Complete Jewish Bible:

“What I am saying is this: run your lives by the Spirit, then you won’t do what your old nature wants. For the old nature wants what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit wants what is contrary to the old nature... But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control.”— Galatians 5:16–23 (CJB)

And in the Passion Translation, from another member of the group:

“As you yield to the dynamic life and the power of the Holy Spirit, you will abandon the cravings of your self-life... the Holy Spirit’s intense cravings hinder your self-life from dominating you.”— Galatians 5:16–17 (TPT)

The key word in both translations is “yield.” This is Rob’s “surrender,” in Paul’s language. We don’t produce the fruit of the Spirit by trying harder. We yield to the One who produces it. We open ourselves to the gravitational pull. We stop fighting the inward orbit and let ourselves be drawn close.

But — and this is crucial — yielding is not passivity. Jeff articulated the tension beautifully: “There’s a cliché thing that’s been around: pray like it all depends on God and work like it all depends on you. We err when we fall to just one. I’m never going to try to do anything, I’ll just pray. Or — the one I’m tempted toward more — I’m just going to go out there and work really hard at being me today. But I do need to act, and I also need the Holy Spirit. It’s a tension — a partnership — I’m trying to enter into and navigate each day.”

Rob connected this back to Jesus: “If we look at Jesus — he was the perfect example of bringing glory to God as a human man. And Jesus was the perfect example of surrendering and following the lead and being empowered by the Holy Spirit. He said, ‘My Father is at work and I too am working.’”

We work. God empowers the work. The glory belongs to Him. This is the rhythm of a life well-lived.

An Unexpected Variable: What If Suffering Produces More Glory?

Rob raised one more question near the end of the morning, almost as an aside. But it was one of the most important questions of the day, and it serves as the bridge into the next chapter of this book:

“What if we are actually producing more glory during times of suffering and adversity in terms of how we respond to it? What if the downs on the chart are not a bummer — but actually produce a spike of glory? Like degree of difficulty in the Olympics. What if God gets more glory if we land it with a higher degree of difficulty?”

The room got quiet for a moment.

We have all been trained — by culture, by our pain-avoidance instincts, by the “up and to the right” framework — to treat suffering as the opposite of flourishing. But what if that’s wrong? What if, from God’s perspective, the valley is not merely something to be survived but something to be inhabited — because it is precisely in the valley that the most profound glory is produced?

Paul seemed to think so. “We have this treasure in jars of clay,” he wrote, “to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7) The vessel is deliberately fragile. The cracking of the clay is not a manufacturing defect. It is the design — because it is through the cracks that the light shines out.

And consider what Hebrews says about Jesus Himself: “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered.” (Hebrews 5:8) If the Son of God learned obedience — deepened His experiential knowledge of faithfulness — through suffering, why would we expect anything different for ourselves?

The Psalms, which Rob alluded to briefly, are the great biblical record of this reality. Two-thirds of the psalms are laments — the psalmist crying out from the valley, pouring out confusion and grief and fear, and then choosing — often against all apparent evidence — to trust. These psalms are not failures of faith. They are some of the most glorifying texts in Scripture, precisely because they capture a soul in the valley pressing toward the Sun.

As one of the men observed: “In the downtimes — it’s not so much when we’re suffering, but how we recover from when we’ve suffered that tells the story.”

This is the question that opens the next chapter. Because if suffering is not the absence of glory but potentially the context for its most powerful expression, then the valley is not a detour from the life well-lived. It is part of the road itself.

And that changes everything about how we face it.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

Take time individually or as a group to work through these questions. Don’t rush. The most important conversations often begin with the questions that make us uncomfortable.

1. What are you actually plotting on the graph of your life? What metric have you been using — consciously or unconsciously — to evaluate whether your life is going “up and to the right”? How does that compare to what this chapter suggests God might be measuring?

2. The catechism says man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. In your own life, do these two things feel like they are in competition or in alignment? When do you experience joy as an expression of glorifying God, rather than a distraction from it?

3. Thinking about your last 48 hours — your conversations, your decisions, your inner life — what would the glory graph look like? Where were the spikes (positive or negative)? What was driving them?

4. The solar system model suggests that closeness to Christ — not just effort or discipline — is the key variable in how much of God’s glory we reflect. What does your current orbit look like? What factors are creating momentum away from the center? What might it look like to decrease that velocity?

5. Describe the tension between working as if it all depends on you and yielding as if it all depends on God. Where do you tend to land on that spectrum? What would a more integrated “partnership with the Holy Spirit” look like in your daily rhythms?

6. Who else is in your orbit — and how your closeness to Christ affects them. Think about the people closest to you: your spouse, your children, your close friends, your colleagues. What is the quality of the light they’re receiving from your proximity to Jesus right now?

7. What if suffering produces more glory, not less? Can you look back at a season of difficulty or loss in your own life and see ways that God was producing something in you — or through you — that couldn’t have been produced any other way?

The Week’s Challenge

This week, try an experiment in awareness. Set a reminder on your phone — three times a day, at random moments — and when it goes off, pause and ask yourself a single question:

“Right now, in this moment, am I reflecting the light of Christ — or am I drifting away from it?”

You don’t need to be harsh with yourself. This isn’t about guilt or performance. It’s about awareness. The Aura Ring measures your heart rate. This is your glory check. You’re simply noticing where your orbit is in this moment.

At the end of the week, journal your observations. When were the moments of closest orbit? When did you drift? What was driving the drift? And — this is the important question — what pulled you back?

For some of you, the pull back will come through prayer. For others, through time in creation. For others still, through honest conversation with a brother who can speak truth into the moment. However it comes, pay attention to it. That pull is the Holy Spirit. That gravity is the love of God. And the more you yield to it, the closer you draw, the more of His light you will carry.

A Prayer to Close

Father,

We confess that we have spent too much of our lives plotting the wrong things on the wrong graph. We have measured net worth and waistlines and career trajectories and the approval of people whose names we won’t remember in eternity. Forgive us for mistaking those measurements for the ones that matter.

Teach us to want what You want for us. Teach us to see our lives through the lens of glory — Your Big G glory, and the little-g contribution we have the privilege of making to it. Help us to stop striving for a closer orbit through our own effort and instead to yield to the gravity of Your love, which is already drawing us in.

Where we have been living on the left board alone — performing, striving, checking boxes — meet us on the right board. Where we have drifted into wide outer orbits of distraction and self-sufficiency, let us feel the pull of Your nearness. Where we have been afraid of the valley, give us the courage to trust that You are there too — and that even in the valley, especially in the valley, Your glory can be displayed through us.

And at the end of our lives — when the graph is complete and the summation is calculated — may the words that matter most be spoken over us: Well done, good and faithful servant.

In the name of the One who is the image of Your glory,

Amen.

Chapter 4 Primer - Who’s Glory? Models to Consider

The Mathematical Models of Glory

Rob offered frameworks that added quantifiable precision to the discussion of spiritual formation—though both would be quick to note that God's work transcends all formulas.

Rob, the engineer, presented what he called "a super geeky engineering version of up and to the right." Drawing on a whiteboard, he explained: "The idea of glory being what this is all about for God—the amount of glory we're giving Him is proportional to the amount of time we're spending in the Spirit. So the Spirit is where all of peace, joy, love, all those characteristics are coming from. The amount of glory we're giving God at any given time is the amount of time we're spending in the Holy Spirit."

He continued building the model: "When we think about our life over time and we're looking at the cumulative glory that we're giving God at any given time on any given day, the amount of cumulative glory of our life is being added based on how much of the time that day we're walking in the Holy Spirit."

Then came the stunning insight: "Actually, we could be generating more glory for God here"—he pointed to the valley, the breaking stage—"because of our decision to spend more time in the Spirit through that. So we might actually be accelerating glory for God during those hardest things. But all along, this is all up into the right."

He added one final layer: "Every time temptation happens, we fall down or sin equals negative glory. So sin would be decreasing the glory of God. But this integral"—he drew the calculus symbol—"this is the idea of cumulative glory over time."

The room erupted in laughter and amazement. "We'll get all the engineers to read it at least," someone joked. But beneath the humor was profound truth: the valleys aren't wasted time in God's economy. If we walk in the Spirit through the breaking, we may actually multiply glory more in the depths than on the peaks.

Tom— offered an essential caveat: "I would add that I think I struggle with performance-based thinking, and the caveat of whether this is a good thing or not is whether we have an attitude of 'I have to' or 'I get to.' Because this could become performance-based, which is fear-based relationship rather than a joy-based relationship. The God of all grace who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ will Himself restore you and confirm you and strengthen you and establish you. The tendency of this, if we're not careful, is it's back to our performance."

The distinction mattered immensely. Rob's formula was true, but it could be weaponized by shame if divorced from grace. The goal isn't to white-knuckle our way through suffering to manufacture glory for God. The goal is to remain present to God in the suffering, to let Him restore our hearts in the breaking, to surrender to His formation even when it hurts. The glory is a byproduct of intimacy, not a product of performance.

Russell's voice carried both strength and tenderness: "Even in Scripture, in the gospels, it talks about standing before the Father. You want to hear, 'Well done, my good and faithful servant.' So there's still—even if you don't look at that as a performance-based thing, but as a relationship-based thing—what kid doesn't want to stand in front of their dad and hear, 'Hey, you did really good. Nice work.' Wow."

The math and the heart, the formula and the relationship, the quantifiable and the qualitative—all held together in tension. Glory for God's sake, yes. But also intimacy with the Father. Both. Always both.

Chapter 2: Circles of Righteousness - Understanding Life's Formative Patterns

"It's doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply." — A.W. Tozer

The Path That Wasn't Straight

Danny stood before the group of men that morning with a transparency that would set the tone for everything that followed. His story wasn't one of triumph in the conventional sense—it was something far more valuable. It was a story of formation through fracture, of becoming through breaking.

"At age 17, I went to a church camp and I had a very significant spiritual experience with the Lord I would consider to be my true conversion," Danny began, his voice carrying the weight of remembered conviction. "I also, at that time, sensed this calling on my life to be a pastor or minister of some kind. That's the trajectory that I was headed on from 17."

What unfolded from that moment was a masterclass in the difference between our plans and God's purposes. Danny had it all mapped out: get the Christian girlfriend (his youth pastor's daughter, no less), move back to Colorado Springs, attend Nazarene Bible College, earn his four-year degree, become a pastor. Linear. Logical. Destined.

"And it went nothing like that," he said with a rueful smile.

The girlfriend's family moved to Missouri. Danny followed—two weeks after high school graduation. They married young, had three children, and got stuck in Missouri for six years, tangled in conflicts with his father-in-law, wrestling with a wife who couldn't cut the apron strings. When Danny finally left, he left everything behind. The marriage eventually dissolved. The ministry trajectory derailed. The plan shattered.

But then came the pivot—the reframe that made the entire discussion possible.

"If I think about the potential for what life would've been if everything had gone the way that I thought it should, I don't have—I'm not the man I am today," Danny reflected. "I don't have the experiences and the raw relationship that I have with the Lord today when I did seven years of ministry to the homeless every Sunday night. I couldn't relate to that brokenness."

He paused, letting the room absorb the gravity of what he'd just articulated. "There's a lot of things that just wouldn't have worked out the way that they have—the good things that have come about in my life. Now do I recommend, hey, set your life on fire? No. But as Joseph summed things up in Genesis chapter 50: you meant all these things to hurt me and God meant it for good."

This wasn't a man minimizing his pain or spiritualizing his mistakes. This was a man who had walked through the wilderness long enough to recognize the shepherd's voice in it. And from that foundation of hard-won wisdom, Danny introduced a framework that would help the men understand the formative patterns woven throughout Scripture and their own lives.

The Six-Stage Cycle of Formation

Drawing from the lives of Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David, Peter, Paul, and even Jesus Himself, Danny outlined six distinct movements that appear repeatedly in the spiritual formation of God's leaders:

1. Calling — The initial summons, the burning bush, the divine invitation

2. Wilderness — The season of isolation, testing, and stripping

3. Testing — The proving ground where faith meets fire

4. Breaking — The crushing that releases the oil

5. Promotion — The elevation into greater responsibility

6. Multiplication — The fruit that reproduces and extends impact

But here's where Danny's insight transcended typical leadership development paradigms: these stages don't form a straight line. They form circles.

"When I was over in Israel in 2018 and 2019," Danny explained, "our guide pointed out on these hills where sheep go to pasture—it looks like eyes. It's the shape of an eye, and it goes all the way up to the top of the hill. When these sheep are making their way up the hill, they circle. They don't go straight, they circle."

His guide, a man named Ari, called them "circles of righteousness." Up a little bit, down a little bit, back a little bit, then up some more. Not the efficient path. Not the path that makes sense on paper. But the path that forms rather than merely transports.

"As we go through these cycles in our lives," Danny continued, "this pattern—calling, wilderness, testing, breaking, promotion, multiplication—it's circles of righteousness. You're called, you got a destination in mind. You go through the wilderness, you're gonna go through some testing, you might go through some breaking, you're likely gonna go through some breaking, you're gonna get promoted. And then the end result, hopefully, is there's multiplication."

Tom— "If you look at the physics of waves in the ocean, people think that waves are moving across like that, but they're actually circles. The energy goes down hundreds of feet and it goes like this, and it affects everything around it. It creates these cells that are side by side that look like it's moving across the surface, but it's not."

The image landed. Life's forward progress isn't actually forward—it's cyclical, spiraling, circling upward through repetition and rhythm. And critically, as one man observed, "Every time you hit this level of promotion, God's like, 'Yeah, you leveled up, but now you got the next level wilderness. You got the next level testing. I'm getting you ready for the next thing.'"

Question One: What Season Are You In?

The first question Danny posed to the group was deceptively simple: Can you identify which season you're currently in?

Russell immediately grasped the multi-layered nature of the question. "Just even as you were talking, it's like I can almost resonate just even in the course of a day," he said. "Just even looking at what happens in the course of a day—the way I would put language to even this week is I got to hold this sweet little chunky cute baby, and then at the same time I'm dealing with death and dying all within the same few hours."

He continued, his voice carrying pastoral wisdom: "Just the juxtaposition of what happens in the course of a day where you're having a conversation and you're laughing your head off about something, and then you're crying. Just the fullness—what happens even in the course of the day, whether it's an email exchange or text or just in life is so full of dynamic. And it doesn't always have to be that way, but it's just like the cycles of waves you're talking about. But then just recognizing how that hits in seasons. And if we ignore that, man, things don't go well."

Danny validated this observation immediately: "You can be on multiple points of this at the same time. There can be something really great that's going on—just like the reconciliation stuff. There was something great happening as I was having a relationship reconciled on one Sunday, and at the same time, and it didn't really manifest until the next Sunday, God's like, 'This is awesome, but hey, you got some work to do over here too.'"

One man synthesized the insight beautifully: "God is helping you see a principle that is truth, and then He's showing you how that can apply elsewhere. Which is multiplication, right? You're getting clarity and then you're looking for application."

The men began to recognize that God doesn't necessarily limit Himself to revealing one thing at a time in our lives. Rather, He works on multiple fronts simultaneously—calling us forward in one area while crushing us in another, promoting us here while testing us there. The seasons overlap, interpenetrate, and inform one another.

Jeff— "We live in Colorado, we talk about seasons," another man offered. "This is like microclimates—small iterations of a different season within the big season. And I was thinking of those times my wife and I have been in that horrible testing, breaking moment. But what comes from that? The promotion. What comes from that? If there's a healthy relationship—which, but that's grace—the intimacy that comes from that brokenness and the times where we're literally on our knees in our bedroom and we just hold each other. That promotion, that multiplication, because that intimacy is a completely different intimacy from the physical, sexual intimacy. The most powerful intimacy in my marriage has been those times when we're in the shit, we're in the worst place, but we come together."

Todd added a critical observation about proportionality—or the lack thereof: "It's important to realize these are not proportional usually. If we're going with the waves analogy, if you are in a really deep part of the ocean, you have a deep wave and that's going down deep into that test or wilderness area. But then you could have a tsunami where your multiplication and promotion is a very massive wave. It's not usually proportional at all. You'll have small waves that are closer to shore, you'll have deeper waves that are further out. There's not often where it's 'alright, five days of this and five days of that.'"

The seasons, the men were discovering, are both simultaneous and successive, both micro and macro, both personal and corporate. Recognizing which season you're in—or which seasons, plural—becomes an essential skill in spiritual navigation.

Question Two: Arrival Focus or Formation Focus?

The second question Danny posed struck at the heart of how men typically approach life: Are you arrival-focused or formation-focused?

"If all of this is about 'I want to arrive at this status, this place, this whatever,' then those cycles, those circles of righteousness are gonna feel like walls," Danny explained. "They're gonna feel like you're stuck. But if I realize that—if I have a perspective of that being one cycle in my formation, of God calling me into sonship, God developing me into the man that He wants me to be—that's not a wall, that's a lesson."

The distinction cut deep. Most men, if they're honest, are wired for arrival. We want the summit, the trophy, the title, the achievement. We want to cross the finish line, plant the flag, and move on to the next conquest. Formation, by contrast, requires staying in the fire long enough to be shaped. It means valuing who we're becoming over what we're accomplishing.

But Russell, with characteristic insight, refused to let the distinction become binary. "As I look around at you men and as y'all are all speaking, I think about Matthew 11: 'From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing and forceful men lay hold of it.' There are men here at this table who have a fire in their belly to advance the kingdom of God. Otherwise you wouldn't be putting on an event this fall, otherwise y'all wouldn't be doing some of the things that you're doing. There's something that God has put inside the hearts of men to go after the things that God has called them to do."

He leaned forward, his intensity palpable. "So there is an arrival focus that is anointed. There's things that stir in your bones at three in the morning. You wake up with a shuddering that God is calling me into something. He's anointed and called you to do it. And He's put men around you to be able to see the thing done. So it's not that being arrival-focused or being goal-oriented is bad—it's just a matter of what the aim is directed towards. At the same time, there's a work that's happening in us so it can happen through us."

Russell continued with fire: "I don't have a problem with that arrival focus, but I also recognize that if I'm just going out there to get mine or conquer that hill for the sake of my own pride or ego, man, I'm off. So there's a balance of both. And I just want to be mindful not to dumb this thing down or emasculate ourselves, if I can say it. Y'all are leaders. Every one of you. You have influence in your bones. You go out and—He's made you to be strong and courageous, to be more than conquerors. That's arrival focus."

The room held the tension. Yes to formation. Yes to the long obedience in the same direction. But also yes to holy ambition, to Spirit-led boldness, to the aggressive advancement of God's kingdom through surrendered men. The key, the men were discovering, wasn't choosing between arrival and formation—it was ensuring that the formation preceded and sustained the arrival, that the inner work enabled the outer work, that character kept pace with calling.

"The harder you push towards the summit, the harder it gets and the more you feel like you're punched in the gut, you lose your air. Just the reality—whatever goal, whether it's an Olympics metaphor, whatever race you're running, the harder you push towards that, the more exhausted you are. And so there has to be something that fuels you, that gives respite, whether it's a marathon mindset or a sprint mindset or just, again, the cycles and understanding the rhythms."

Question Three: What Do You Usually Try to Escape From?

Danny's third question brought the discussion into uncomfortable specificity: What do you usually try to escape from?

He offered his own answer first, vulnerably sharing about building his first house—a teenage dream finally realized—and the incredibly difficult homeowner who showed up every day, cycling between happiness and rage.

"There's something that God is doing in me in dealing with him in the midst of this thing that I've always wanted to do," Danny confessed. "He's saying, 'You gotta—I need to teach you how to deal with this guy. I gotta teach you how to relate to this guy and to work through this, even though you're doing this thing that you always wanted to do. There's something that I gotta work out in you, Danny, in dealing with this guy.'"

The vulnerability gave permission. Danny continued: "And He's using this guy to sharpen this iron and it sucks. And a couple of weeks ago, I came in here and I gave this maybe really lofty sounding idea—I could quote Jim Carrey in a joke: 'I wish everybody could make a lot of money so they realize it doesn't do anything for you.' And God convicted me after that. And He's like, 'No, I brought you here and this is the first of many houses you're gonna build. But in the middle of all that, I gotta teach you how to deal with difficult people. And I gotta teach you how to put your pride down so that you don't walk up here on your first house thinking you know everything.'"

The room recognized the pattern immediately. God wasn't withholding the dream—He was using the dream as the context for formation. The arrival and the formation weren't sequential; they were simultaneous. And Danny's first instinct had been escape.

“When I'm around you men, something—I get heart back. My heart, I'm encouraged. And there's things that trip me up along the way that keep me from that. But that's what's common to me—there's things that the enemy can take me out and heap this stuff that results in me being discouraged where it's just like I got no fuel in the tank. And that's my greatest strength of encouraging men, but my Achilles is that I get discouraged."

He named it clearly: "Being aware of the temptations that are common to man and temptations that every one of us—where some of us are strong in some areas, we're weak in others. And being aware of what that is so we just don't give the devil a foothold. And just being reconciled with myself, with Carrie, with you men—there's just some things that take me out. And that's where the enemy absolutely 100% wins the day. Come hell or high water, that better not be the thing that takes me out, which is why I'm sitting here this morning."

The men began naming their escape routes: isolation when feeling like a failure, numbing behaviors when overwhelmed, workaholism when facing relational pain, cynicism when hope feels too costly. Each man's pattern of escape was unique, yet universally recognizable. And beneath each pattern was the same core issue: the unwillingness to stay present to what God was doing in the difficulty.

"My most common area that I have to watch out for leads to massive discouragement," 

"It just takes me out. I lose all my fuel, lose all my energy. I have no interest in doing anything. And the root of that is I lose heart. I lose heart. And so when I'm around you men, I get heart back."

The antidote to escape, the men were discovering, wasn't simply willpower or determination. It was presence—the presence of God and the presence of brothers who could carry hope when you couldn't see it yourself.

The Wall and the Breakwater

One of the newer members, Matt, brought a diagram to life that captured a struggle many men experience but few articulate. He drew on Danny's journal, creating a visual representation of his experience with the cycle.

"I don't see those things happening necessarily all the time in that order," Matt explained. "There's—like you said, you can be in two different seasons. But what I've struggled with over the years is that I get here"—he pointed to the breaking stage—"and then that season becomes a sentence on my life. And there's a wall here that prevents this movement to the next season because I lose identity, worth, value. I'm failing. Or it's just there's this space of being alone, isolated."

He continued, his honesty creating space: "Getting through the season usually is okay, but then it's like, I gotta face another freaking season and I've lost some things in the midst of some of these processes. And I don't know which—all of those things that I feel, that I've lost in the midst of that season, I have to restore that. My identity, I have to restore that. And for me, it's like this thing is a big piece of what finding all of those things is about. Because I can't do it on my own. It's gotta be with other guys. It's gotta be in that space where if my identity isn't straight with the Lord and my value isn't right, then I want to isolate. I feel like I'm failing."

Ron offered a stunning reframe: "It may not be failure per se, but using an ancient term—a breakwater. A breakwater breaks the energy so that you can find this rest, this joy. So that—see, that's interesting. God is calming you or us to be able to focus on these things. Like I said, He's not gonna show us everything all at once. Maybe He's giving us one thing at a time that we can handle to get to the next."

Matt's response was immediate and visceral: "So I see that wall as like a complete monster and a detriment. But when you look at it as just a place where it's calming the storm for the next tide to come in—wow. Ron, that one freaking hit me."

The conversation had shifted from viewing obstacles as evidence of failure to seeing them as instruments of formation. The wall wasn't blocking progress—it was creating the conditions for transformation. The breakwater wasn't stopping the journey—it was making the journey sustainable.

Todd added crucial theology: "It's important to realize who is behind this cycle, and it's not me, it's not life—it's the Father. So this cycle, it's His work in us. So the point is not to get from this point to this point. The point is to get right there"—he pointed to the breaking stage. "That's where you're at. The Lord is taking your identity to a more true and deeper level of identity. That's the whole point. You are the son of God who loves you. Your self-worth, everything you just said, everything comes from that. That's in your heart and that's what the Lord is after. It's your heart."

Matthias synthesized powerfully: "Those dips are pauses, those are times to pause. And He's given you that opportunity to reflect on what's your identity, what's your worth, what's your value. You're my son. I love you. Your identity is in me. Reflect on that. Look at that. Live on that. Soak on that. And the enemy can steal that and say, 'Oh, I'm just gonna get stuck. I'm just gonna isolate myself.' Or we could let Him step into that season or that moment."

Tom added: "We've talked about this in previous sessions—could it be that you're not losing identity? God's telling you what you don't know about yourself and stripping away what you thought was—false identities you built it on. You're not losing anything. You're gaining."

The wall, the men were discovering, was actually a classroom. The breakwater was actually a sanctuary. The pause that felt like death was actually preparation for resurrection.

Where Does the Enemy Fit In?

Rob raised a question that had been hovering over the entire discussion: "Where does interaction with the enemy and the spiritual war interface with this?"

It was a crucial question. Job's testing, after all, was permitted by God but executed by the devil. The wilderness where Jesus was tested was the same wilderness where Satan showed up to tempt. How do we understand the interplay between God's formative work and Satan's destructive agenda?

Rob offered the most comprehensive response: "I think it's important to realize—I don't think we should sell ourselves short by saying that those are the only places within those circles that the enemy works. Because for this arrogant, prideful man, I promise you, he works in the promotion just as much as he works in the wilderness and testing. That's where it gets real easy to say, 'Look what I just did. Look who I am. God really thinks I'm the stuff. He needs me. Watch me tear it up.'"

The insight shifted the framework. The question wasn't "where does the enemy fit in this cycle?" The question was "where isn't the enemy active in this cycle?" As another man said, "The question isn't where does it come in here—it's like, where is it evident in every single one of these?"

Todd added theological precision: "The Lord is after the restoration of our hearts, the transformation of our hearts. And the enemy is about the exact same thing. He's trying to tear down our identity. He's trying to strip us of our intimacy with the Father. And so at the very same time that the enemy is doing that, he doesn't realize that he's setting the Father up for a grand rescue and then greater restoration. The enemy often attacks us in our wounds—that's our vulnerability. And then our idolatry often comes out of our wounds. So the enemy attacks us in the vulnerability of our wounds. That's the exact same thing that the Father is after—the healing of our wounds and our hearts so we can be more wholehearted and more like Him. So they could be happening at the exact same time."

The men sat with this. God's agenda and Satan's agenda target the same territory—our hearts, our identity, our intimacy with the Father. But their purposes couldn't be more opposite. Satan attacks to destroy; God allows the attack to restore. Satan aims to isolate; God uses the isolation to create intimacy. Satan seeks to shame; God transforms the shame into humility that can receive grace.

Russell brought it back to practical vigilance: "Being aware of the temptations that are common to man—where some of us are strong in some areas, we're weak in others. And being aware of what that is so we just don't give the devil a foothold. Come hell or high water, that better not be the thing that takes me out."

The spiritual warfare isn't ancillary to the formation cycle—it's integral. Every stage of growth invites both divine development and demonic opposition. The key is learning to discern which voice is which and to align ourselves with the Father's purposes even when the enemy is active.

The Crushing That Releases the Oil

As the discussion deepened, Danny brought the group to Gethsemane—literally and metaphorically. "There's this really encouraging quote by A.W. Tozer at the bottom here," he said, reading from his notes. "'It's doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply.'"

He continued: "Wrapped up in all of this, if we go to Gethsemane and Jesus praying in the garden and asking, 'Hey, if there's another way can we do that?' There was a crushing. The Garden of Gethsemane is an olive grove, and there's 800 to 1,000-year-old olive trees, maybe older, growing there. And when you put olives into a press to get the oil out, there's actually like a weeping sound that they make. It sounds like wailing, like crying loudly. And that's exactly what was going on with Jesus to get the oil out. He was being crushed to get the acceptance of the cross. He was being crushed and hurt deeply."

The image landed with visceral power. Scripture says Jesus was sweating blood—the physiological manifestation of stress so extreme the capillaries burst. He was being pressed to the point of breaking to yield the oil that would anoint the entire world.

"In order for us to give God the glory, to be transformed into what He wants us to be," Danny concluded, "there is a crushing that has to take place. And we, like Jesus, have to say, 'Hey, not my will, but Yours be done.'"

The crushing isn't incidental to the formation—it's essential. The oil that brings healing, that lights the lamps, that consecrates the priests, only comes through the press. And the sound of that pressing is weeping. There's no shortcut. There's no crushing-lite option. There's only surrender: "Not my will, but Yours."

One man added from his own tradition: "In some translations of 2 Corinthians 3:18, it says we are being taken from glory to glory. That is through the transformation and seeing Him, His face with unveiled faces. We're going from glory to glory."

Sheldon—  "That's also in Romans 5. Going through the transformation—nobody really wants the suffering, but the discipline leads to a harvest of righteousness."

The Biblical witnesses were unanimous: suffering precedes glory, crushing precedes anointing, breaking precedes multiplication. Not because God is sadistic, but because our hearts are stubborn, our false selves are entrenched, and our deepest healing requires the kind of surgery that only happens under extreme pressure.

The Miracle - Peace in the Middle of the War

As the men wrestled with the reality of crushing and breaking, a word that felt like oxygen in a smoke-filled room: "Even in the midst of all of this turmoil, somehow there's still this unbelievable miracle that we can have peace in the midst of it. And that's an amazing thing—that while we're even sleeping at night when all this war is going on, there's still peace in the middle of it. That is the miracle, because God is who He is. And that in the midst of all of this pattern, there still can be peace. That is a miracle."

He pressed the point: "It is a miracle. And it's the exception. Because where do you go buy peace? Do you take a pill? Sign up for a program? Somehow there can be peace in the midst of all of this. That is the good news. Because everything else is hell and crazy."

The men felt the truth of it. Peace isn't the absence of the storm—it's the presence of the Shepherd in the storm. It's Psalm 23 lived out: green pastures and still waters, but also the valley of the shadow of death. A table prepared in the presence of enemies. A rod and a staff that both comfort and correct. All of it, simultaneously. All of it, held by the One who sees the end from the beginning.

"I think the key with that," one man offered, "is it's despite the situation. The struggle we get caught up in is feeling like we're supposed to have peace, and the tension is that it doesn't eliminate the difficulty."

Another added: "I think the downside of focusing on any part of the cycle—whether it's the peak or the valley—is it shifts our focus away from what we should be focused on."

And what should we be focused on? Not the circumstance, but the Companion. Not the stage of the cycle, but the Shepherd who guides through all stages. Not our performance in the season, but His presence in every season.

Todd brought it back to Psalm 23 with surgical precision: "If you really take some time and dissect every single part of what the psalm is actually saying—the fact that, okay, You lead me to green pastures, You lead me to still waters, to the quiet waters. But there's also a valley. There's also a rod and the staff, which is correction and protection both. There's a table with bounty on it—awesome. But my enemy's sitting right next to me. There, like, who's already eating? Who gets to enjoy the same meal I get to enjoy? You're kidding me. But that's the invitation—into the fullness of life. All of these things are happening at the same exact time. And above it and outside of it and carrying it and leading us through is the Lord, the Shepherd, who sees something—who sees the hand already healed."

The peace, the men were discovering, isn't found by escaping the complexity. It's found by embracing the presence of the One who holds the complexity without being overwhelmed by it. He sees the healed hand before we do. He sees the restored heart before we do. He sees the multiplied impact before we do. And He invites us to trust Him in the not-yet, to rest in Him in the in-between, to abide in Him through all the circles of righteousness.

The Arrival Mindset and the Enemy at the Table

One man offered a confession that many could relate to: "I tend towards that arrival mindset, and so as such, I am constantly striving for the next peak. That's all I seem to care about if I'm not paying attention to myself. But what that means is I have to realize that when I get to that next peak—there's a table with an enemy sitting right there on the other side. There's a valley on the other side of it. If I'm racing forward and I'm peak-minded, then the valley is gonna shock me and hurt me because I'm not expecting it."

The insight was profound. The arrival mindset doesn't just miss the formation in the valley—it makes the inevitable valley more painful because it arrives unexpected. When we're fixated on summits, we're perpetually disappointed by descents. We experience the valleys as failure rather than formation, as setbacks rather than setups for the next ascent.

But there's another danger to the arrival mindset that the psalm makes clear: even at the peak, the enemy is present. The table is prepared, the cup overflows, the head is anointed—and right there, in the presence of all that blessing, sits the adversary. Pride, self-sufficiency, the subtle shift from "God did this" to "I did this," the temptation to forget the wilderness that preceded the promotion.

Danny had named it earlier: "For this arrogant, prideful man, the enemy works in the promotion just as much as he works in the wilderness." The summit isn't safe. The multiplication isn't the end. Every stage is spiritual warfare, and every stage requires vigilance, humility, and dependence on the Shepherd.

The only solution the men could identify was what they were doing in that very room: showing up, speaking truth, carrying hope for each other, refusing to let anyone walk the cycle alone. "As leaders, we all end up having moments where we have to be the carriers of hope for the cause that we're on," one man said. "Sometimes if no one else is gonna do it, you have to carry the hope. You have to carry the vision. But we can also be carriers of hope for each other on our walks. Because when I can't see clearly what God's doing or recognize that I'm loved and being around other people that are carrying hope—it is contagious. And I think we can do that for each other, but really only if we're able to be vulnerable."

Suffering, Perseverance, Character, Hope

As the discussion wound toward its conclusion, the men turned to the New Testament passages that frame suffering not as interruption but as instrument. Romans 5:3-5 became a touchstone: "Rejoice in your sufferings, because suffering produces perseverance; perseverance produces character; and character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame."

"That's Tom's favorite verse for the year," someone joked, referencing the man who'd chosen 1 Peter 5:10 as his theme: "After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you."

The laughter was knowing. Nobody wakes up excited about suffering. Nobody volunteers for the wilderness. But the men around that table were beginning to grasp what James meant when he wrote, "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything" (James 1:2-4).

Joy in the trial isn't joy about the trial—it's joy in the purpose behind the trial, joy in the Father's commitment to our completeness, joy in the certainty that He who began a good work will carry it to completion. The suffering is real, the pain is real, the crushing is real. But so is the formation, the transformation, the glory-to-glory progression.

One man summarized it perfectly: "I think when we're in the trials, if we can remember the whole point is up to the right—the Lord says in 2 Corinthians 3:18, 'And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.' In some translations it says we're being taken from glory to glory."

Glory to glory. Not peak to peak, but glory to glory. Because the glory isn't only at the summit—it's in the surrender at every stage. It's in the abiding through the valley. It's in the breaking that releases the oil. It's in the crushing that produces the wine. It's in the death that precedes resurrection.

Up and to the right doesn't mean avoiding the down. It means trusting that the down is part of the up, that the circles are how the climb happens, that the Shepherd knows the path even when it feels like we're going backward.

Questions for Reflection

1. Which of the six stages (calling, wilderness, testing, breaking, promotion, multiplication) do you find yourself in right now? Can you identify multiple stages happening simultaneously in different areas of your life?
   
   
   

2. Danny's story demonstrates how God's plans often diverge radically from our own—yet produce deeper formation. Where in your life has a "failed plan" actually become the context for your greatest growth?
   
   
   

3. Are you more naturally arrival-focused or formation-focused? How might you need to grow in embracing the other? How can holy ambition and humble formation coexist in your life?
   
   
   

4. What do you typically try to escape from? What patterns of avoidance (isolation, numbing, workaholism, cynicism) show up when you hit a wall in the formation cycle?
   
   
   

5. Matt described the wall between breaking and promotion as a "sentence on my life" where he loses identity and worth. Have you experienced this? How does Ron's reframe of the wall as a "breakwater" shift your perspective?
   
   
   

6. Where is the enemy most active in your current stage of the cycle? How might his attacks in your strength areas (promotion, multiplication) be as dangerous as his attacks in your weak areas (wilderness, breaking)?
   
   
   

7. The men identified that peace in the storm is a miracle, not an achievement. Where do you need to stop striving for peace and instead receive it as God's presence with you in the chaos?
   
   
   

8. "It's doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply" (A.W. Tozer). How does the image of Gethsemane—the crushing that releases the oil—help you understand and embrace your own seasons of breaking?
   
   
   

9. Who in your life carries hope for you when you can't see clearly? Who are you positioned to carry hope for? What makes vulnerability possible in those relationships?
   
   
   

The Challenge

This week, do two things:

First, map your current position. Take an honest inventory of where you are in the formation cycle—not where you wish you were, not where you think you should be, but where you actually are. Name the season (or seasons) without judgment. Just observe: This is wilderness. This is testing. This is breaking. This is promotion. Write it down. Share it with someone who can carry hope for you.

Second, choose one area where you've been trying to escape. Maybe it's a difficult relationship like Danny's challenging homeowner. Maybe it's a financial pressure that makes you want to quit. Maybe it's a health issue that feels like a sentence. Whatever it is, instead of strategizing your exit, ask God: "What are You trying to form in me through this? What false identity are You stripping away? What deeper truth are You revealing about who I am as Your son?"

Then—and this is critical—don't just ask the question and move on. Stay in it. Journal about it. Pray through it. Let the question work on you rather than working to find a quick answer. Formation takes time. The sheep circle up the hill slowly. The wave goes deep before it crests. The oil comes only through the crushing.

The goal isn't to arrive faster. The goal is to stay present longer—present to God, present to your brothers, present to the transformation happening beneath the surface of your circumstances.

Remember: circles of righteousness. Up a little, down a little, back a little, then up some more. Not efficient. Not comfortable. But formative. Always formative.

And remember Acts 18:9-10, the verse that grounds Matt: "Do not be afraid, but speak and do not keep silent. For I am with you, and no one will attack you to hurt you, for I have many people in this city."

You're not alone in this. The Shepherd is with you. Your brothers are with you. The Spirit is forming you. And what God begins, He completes.

From glory to glory, brothers. Not despite the valleys, but through them.

Closing Prayer

Jeff's voice carried the weight of the morning as he prayed the group into the rest of their day:

"Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for these men, for Matt being able to come join us for the first time. We pray, Lord, we don't scare him off. Just pray Your blessings on these guys, that we can just wrestle well as men, and that somehow we'll be undergirded through it. And somehow through the forge of all this, that we would stand as men full of character and that we would be formed to be more like You, Christ. And that we would not be alone, but we would be able to stand with one another through all of this.

"Guide us in our discussions. Guide us, Lord, where You want us to go for our encouragement, but also for the building up of others. And as was said today, this is gonna be for Your glory, Lord. So we just release that to You in Jesus' name. Amen."

Mission Men 2026 Book Project

Up and To The Right: Navigating Life's Unexpected Peaks and Valleys

"Up and To The Right" reframes our success criteria. Exploring life's inevitable rises and falls, written by the Mission Men—a group of faithful brothers who gather each Friday morning to share their journeys with raw honesty and biblical wisdom. Drawing from the biblical truth and personal testimonies of divorce, illness, career setbacks, and spiritual drought, this book reframes our understanding of success beyond worldly metrics. 

The Mission Men tell their collective stories that reveal how God works through both mountain peaks and valley lows, teaching us to quiet our souls like David, remember God's faithfulness when He seems distant, and find our identity not in circumstances but in Christ. Through vulnerable storytelling and practical spiritual disciplines, readers will discover that true growth isn't a straight line upward but rather a series of death-resurrection cycles that, when viewed from eternity's perspective, reveal an unmistakable trajectory of transformation into Christ's image.

Book Outline

Introduction: ReDefining Success

Chapter 1: The Journey of Rises and Falls - Russell 2/6

Listen to the MM Group Discussion - Audio

• The misconception of linear growth in life

• Introduction to the "Up and to the Right" framework

• How success, failure, hopes, and disappointments create our life's trajectory

Chapter 2: Understanding the Pattern of Life- Danny 2/13

• The reality of peaks and valleys

• How life naturally cycles through order, disorder, and reorder

• Reframing our understanding of progress: death, burial, and resurrection

Chapter 3: The Anatomy of the Spiral 

• Recognizing when you're in a downward trajectory

• Biblical study: The Psalmist's despair in Psalm 77

• The physical and emotional symptoms of being in a valley

• Permission to acknowledge pain and suffering

Chapter 4: The Practice of Remembering

• How remembering God's faithfulness provides strength in difficult times

• Creating meaningful memorials and markers of significant moments

• The importance of storytelling in preserving our journey

• Practical exercises for intentional remembering

Chapter 5: Transparency and Vulnerability

• Breaking the masculine stereotype of emotional stoicism

• The healing power of tears and emotional expression

• Creating safe spaces for authentic sharing

• How vulnerability connects us to others and to God

Chapter 6: Living Well in the Mystery

• Learning to be comfortable with unanswered questions

• The wisdom of acknowledging our limitations

• The difference between being content and being complacent

• Persisting in relationship with God despite uncertainty

Chapter 7: Humility in Success and Failure

• The danger of pride in both the rises and falls

• Self-awareness and the circle of control vs. circle of concern

• How to quiet your soul and mind in times of anxiety

• Finding contentment like a "weaned child"

Chapter 8: Identity Beyond Circumstances

• Separating who you are from what happens to you

• Finding your steady line in relationship with Christ

• Moving beyond measuring success through worldly metrics

• Character formation as the true measurement of growth

Chapter 9: The Power of Community

• Why we need others to navigate our peaks and valleys

• Creating a culture of authentic sharing

• How to respond when others are vulnerable with you

• Celebrating and remembering together

Chapter 10: Hope as an Anchor

• Finding hope in the midst of disappointment

• The difference between optimism and biblical hope

• Learning to trust beyond what you can see or understand

• Placing your hope in the Lord "now and forevermore"

Conclusion: The Upward Trajectory

• Recognizing growth even through painful experiences

• How our series of falls and rises create an overall upward path

• Measuring growth by the person you're becoming

• Embracing both the highs and lows as essential parts of your story

Project Timeline and Publishing Plan

Jan-Feb 2026

• Initial planning: Mission Men to refine vision, target audience, and chapter assignments

• Establish writing guidelines and theological foundation

• Each author commits to writing one primary chapter/section and contributing stories to others

• Set up shared digital workspace for collaboration

Feb-May

• Authors research biblical foundations for their assigned chapters

• First round of personal story collection through recorded Friday sessions

• Transcribe and organize testimonies for potential inclusion

• Weekly check-ins during regular Friday meetings

May

• Complete first drafts of all chapters

• Begin peer review process within the group

• Engage professional editor for structural review

• Create initial design concepts for cover and interior layout

May-June

• Authors revise chapters based on peer and editorial feedback

• Begin compilation of supplementary materials: discussion questions, reflection exercises

• Develop marketing strategy and identify endorsement opportunities

• Establish partnership with Christian publisher or prepare self-publishing plan

July

• Complete second drafts with incorporated stories and testimonies

• Final theological review to ensure biblical accuracy and consistency

• Begin formal editing process: content, copy, and line editing

• Finalize book design elements and cover artwork

Aug 

• Final manuscript revisions complete

• Send to proofreader for final polish

• Begin premarketing through Mission Men networks

• Prepare website and social media presence for book launch

July-Sept

• Complete final formatting and design

• Submit for printing and digital conversion

• Develop launch events calendar

• Create promotional materials and press kits

• Receive advance copies for review

• Send copies to endorsers and reviewers

• Finalize launch events

• Begin pre-orders through website and partner channels

Sept 

• Official book launch with release event

• Begin marketing campaign across multiple platforms

• Authors available for interviews, podcasts, and speaking engagements

• Implementation of small group study curriculum based on the book

Introduction: The Illusion of Up and To the Right

I'll be honest with you—I hate health-n-wealth prosperity conferences.

The messaging promises something rarely delivered… if ever! It’s not because I don't believe in personal growth or professional development. I do. It’s actually my vocational job coaching entrepreneurs, emerging leaders, and executives leaders. But there's something about those glossy presentations, the promised silver bullets, and the inevitable graph showing someone's exponential success trajectory that makes me want to throw something. You know the graph I'm talking about—the one that starts at the bottom left corner and shoots confidently toward the upper right, depicting a life or business or portfolio that just keeps climbing. Up and to the right. Always ascending. Never plateauing. Certainly never declining.

It's a lie.

Or at the very least, it's profoundly incomplete.

The real story of our lives—yours, mine, the guys I meet with every Friday morning—looks more like an EKG readout than a hockey stick graph. Peaks and valleys. Rises and falls. Moments when we're crushing it followed by seasons when we're getting crushed. Days when God feels close enough to touch and months when He seems to have left the building entirely.

And here's what makes it worse: we've been sold a version of success that not only ignores these valleys but actually shames us for experiencing them. We're told that if we just work harder, pray more, hustle better, optimize our morning routine, and download the right productivity app, we can finally achieve that elusive upward trajectory. We can finally arrive.

But what happens when we get there and discover it's not what we thought? What happens when we check all the boxes—the career milestone, the financial goal, the family achievement—and still feel empty? Or worse, what happens when life doesn't cooperate with our carefully crafted plans at all? When the diagnosis comes. When the marriage crumbles. When the business fails. When the dream dies.

Most of us respond in one of two ways.

Some of us double down. We become more ambitious, more driven, more obsessed with achievement. We convince ourselves that we just haven't succeeded enough yet. If we can just push a little harder, climb a little higher, earn a little more, then we'll find what we're looking for. This path leads to burnout, broken relationships, and a quiet desperation that we're terrified to acknowledge because slowing down feels like failure.

Others of us make a different kind of bargain. We compromise. We lower our expectations. We tell ourselves we're being "realistic" when really we're just protecting ourselves from more disappointment. We settle for less—less joy, less purpose, less engagement with life—and call it wisdom. This path leads to a different kind of death: the slow suffocation of dreams deferred and potential unrealized. We survive, but we don't truly live.

The writer of Ecclesiastes knew this tension intimately. After pursuing every conceivable measure of worldly success—wealth, pleasure, wisdom, achievement—he arrived at a brutal conclusion: "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity." Everything he'd chased, everything he'd built, everything he'd accomplished—when viewed from the perspective of mortality and meaning, it all seemed like grasping at the wind.

But here's what's remarkable: Ecclesiastes doesn't end there. Neither does the biblical story. Neither, if you're willing to stay with me, does your story.

What if the problem isn't our ambition or our dreams? What if the problem is how we've been taught to measure success in the first place?

This book was born from a crisis. Actually, several crises. Mine included.

Every Friday morning, a group of us men gather around coffee that's honestly not that great (sorry, guys) to talk about our lives. We call ourselves the Mission Men, though that name makes us sound more organized and impressive than we actually are. We're businessmen and tradesmen, fathers and husbands, Christ-followers trying to figure out what it means to live faithfully in a world that seems increasingly hostile to faith.

We don't have it figured out. That's kind of the point.

Over the past year, we've watched each other navigate divorces and diagnoses, financial setbacks and spiritual droughts, teenage rebellion and midlife reckonings. We've celebrated wins and mourned losses. We've prayed together, laughed together, and occasionally wanted to punch each other in the face (we're still working on our sanctification).

And somewhere in the midst of all that messy, beautiful community, we started asking different questions about success. Not the sanitized, Instagram-ready questions posed at leadership conferences, but the raw, 3 AM questions that wake you up in a cold sweat:

• What is success, really? How would you even define it?

• What does the world tell us success looks like, and is that actually true?

• What does the Bible say about success—and does it even use that word the way we do?

• How have your biggest failures and setbacks reframed your understanding of success?

• From where you sit today, with all you've experienced, what are the actual criteria for a successful life?

These aren't rhetorical questions. They're not meant to prompt easy answers or produce neat conclusions. They're meant to make you uncomfortable, to challenge the unexamined assumptions you've been carrying about what makes a life well-lived.

Because here's what we've discovered: when you scratch beneath the surface of most men's lives, you find a quiet desperation born from trying to measure up to metrics that were never meant to measure what actually matters.

The American Dream promised us that if we worked hard and played by the rules, we could achieve prosperity, security, and happiness. Our constitutional rights enshrined "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as foundational to our identity. The capitalist system that shapes our economy rewards efficiency, productivity, and growth—always growth, always more, always upward and to the right.

And for a while, many of us believed it. We ran the race. We climbed the ladder. We checked the boxes.

But somewhere along the way, we started to notice something troubling: the treadmill keeps speeding up. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls this phenomenon "social acceleration"—the relentless quickening of the pace of life that leaves us feeling perpetually behind, perpetually inadequate, perpetually striving without ever arriving. Rosa argues that we're caught in a "frenetic standstill," working harder and faster while somehow feeling like we're getting nowhere.

The answer, he suggests, isn't simply to slow down (though that helps). It's to cultivate what he calls "resonance"—building meaningful, responsive, and emotionally engaged relationships with the world around us, relationships that actually nourish our souls rather than simply checking another optimization box.

In other words, the cure for our success addiction isn't to succeed better or work harder. It's to redefine what we're actually pursuing in the first place.

This isn't just an American problem, though our particular cultural moment intensifies it. Talk to someone born in a different cultural context—where success might be measured by family honor, or community contribution, or spiritual devotion—and you'll hear different stories about the pressure to perform, the fear of failure, the exhausting burden of other people's expectations.

The tyranny of achievement is a human problem, not just a Western one.

But it is a problem that demands a solution. Or perhaps better said: it's a crisis that demands a reframing.

What you're holding is not a fix-it book. I'm not going to sell you a new system for achieving success or promise that if you follow these seven steps, your life will finally work out the way you hoped.

What I am going to do is invite you into a conversation—the same conversation we've been having on Friday mornings, the same conversation that's been challenging and changing us from the inside out.

This is a book about redefining success criteria for your life. Not according to the world's standards or your father's expectations or your own anxious striving, but according to something deeper, truer, and ultimately more hopeful.

Each chapter of this book will explore a different dimension of what it means to live well—not perfectly, not without struggle, but well—in a world that's constantly trying to convince you that who you are and what you have isn't enough.

You'll hear stories from the Mission Men, raw and unfiltered accounts of our own journeys through peaks and valleys. Some of these stories will make you uncomfortable. Good. Comfort isn't what you need right now.

You'll also find biblical wisdom—not platitudes or easy answers, but the kind of hard-won, ancient truth that has sustained God's people through every imaginable crisis for thousands of years. Scripture has a lot to say about success, failure, suffering, and hope, but it rarely says what we expect it to say.

At the end of each chapter, you'll find questions for reflection. I encourage you not to skip these. The goal isn't just to read about a different way of thinking about success—it's to actually examine your own life through a different lens. That requires honest self-examination, and honest self-examination requires time and space and a willingness to sit with uncomfortable questions.

You'll also find a challenge—something concrete to do, to practice, to implement. Because theology without practice is just philosophy, and philosophy without application is just entertainment.

Here's what this journey will look like:

Chapter 1 explores the journey of rises and falls itself—the unavoidable reality that life doesn't move in a straight line upward. We'll examine what success actually is, how the world defines it versus how God might define it, and how our setbacks and failures often teach us more about true success than our victories ever could.

Chapter 2 dives deeper into understanding the pattern of life—the cycles of order, disorder, and reorder that characterize every human journey. We'll explore the biblical pattern of death, burial, and resurrection as the actual shape of transformation, not the sanitized "up and to the right" trajectory we've been sold.

Chapter 3 focuses on what I call "the anatomy of the spiral"—recognizing when you're in a downward trajectory and learning to name it honestly. We'll sit with the Psalmist's despair and discover that permission to acknowledge pain is itself a form of spiritual health.

Chapter 4 is about the practice of remembering—how intentionally recalling God's faithfulness in the past provides strength for navigating uncertainty in the present. We'll talk about creating memorials, telling stories, and building a personal history of God's presence in both the peaks and the valleys.

Chapter 5 tackles transparency and vulnerability—breaking the masculine stereotype of emotional stoicism and discovering the healing power of actually letting others see us. This isn't weakness; it's courage. And it's essential for the kind of transformation we're pursuing.

Chapter 6 addresses living well in the mystery—learning to be comfortable with unanswered questions and acknowledging our limitations without abandoning faith. The difference between contentment and complacency might be smaller than you think, but it's more important than you realize.

Chapter 7 explores humility in both success and failure, examining how pride can corrupt us whether we're on top of the world or flat on our backs. We'll talk about self-awareness, the circle of control, and what it means to quiet your soul like a weaned child.

Chapter 8 is perhaps the most important: identity beyond circumstances. How do you separate who you are from what happens to you? How do you find your steady line when everything else is fluctuating? Character formation, not circumstantial achievement, is the true measure of growth.

Chapter 9 makes the case that you can't do this alone. Community isn't optional; it's essential. We'll explore how to create cultures of authentic sharing and how to respond when someone trusts you with their story.

Chapter 10 ends with hope—not the cheap optimism that pretends everything will work out fine, but the biblical hope that anchors us even when we can't see the shore. This is hope that persists, hope that trusts, hope that waits "now and forevermore."

And in the Conclusion, we'll look back at the whole journey and recognize that even through all the valleys, even through all the failures and setbacks and disappointments, there actually is an upward trajectory. Not the one we expected. Not the one we planned. But an upward trajectory nonetheless—the transformation into Christlikeness that happens not despite our struggles but often because of them.

I don't know where you are as you read this. Maybe you're on top of the world, crushing your goals, checking boxes, feeling like you've finally figured it out. If so, I celebrate with you. But I also invite you to consider whether the metrics you're using to measure success are actually measuring what matters.

Or maybe you're in a valley—one of those dark nights of the soul where God seems silent and your dreams seem dead and you're just trying to survive another day. If that's you, I want you to know: you're not alone. You're not a failure. And this valley might be exactly where God does His deepest, most transformative work in you.

Most likely, you're somewhere in between. Most of us are. We're navigating the ordinary chaos of real life—work stress and marriage tension and financial pressure and health scares and aging parents and struggling kids and all the thousand small deaths that never make it onto our highlight reels.

This book is for all of us. Because all of us need to reckon with the gap between the life we expected and the life we're actually living. All of us need to question whether we've been climbing a ladder that's leaning against the wrong wall. All of us need the courage to redefine success according to something deeper and truer than the world's scorecards.

So here's my invitation: Let's stop pretending that life moves smoothly upward and to the right. Let's acknowledge the valleys. Let's name the failures. Let's admit the disappointments. Let's sit with the mystery and the unanswered questions.

And then, with honesty and humility and hope, let's discover together what it actually means to live a successful life—not by the world's standards, but by God's.

The journey starts here. And I promise you, it won't be what you expected.

But it might be exactly what you need.

Chapter 1: The Journey of Rises and Falls

I want to open with a story. There are lots of stories I could tell, but one in particular captures the moment when my entire understanding of success collapsed in on itself.

Cari and I recently celebrated our 32nd anniversary. I want to take you back to our second anniversary. We married in 1994, both still finishing college through night school while I was running eighty hours a week doing landscaping. I can still see myself in that beat-up truck with Elias and Diego, doing apartment complexes all over Atlanta. I actually drove past some of those same complexes last weekend—a little trip down memory lane that stirred up more emotions than I expected.

I had a business idea in college. Wrote a whole business plan with the help of a couple of mentors. Graduated in '96, went down to the Cobb County courthouse on October 1st, 1996, got a business license, and started making phone calls.

I made 1,200 phone calls in 100 days.

"Smiling and dialing," we called it. There was also this little technological innovation back then called a fax machine, and you could send faxes from your computer. Sprint had this promotion called Free Fridays where any calls or faxes you sent on Friday were free. So every Friday at 12:01 AM, my computer started faxing office furniture information to every dealer and wholesaler across the United States.

This was what they called "permission-based marketing"—I'd called each of them first. "Hey, I'm Russell, I'm a nice guy. Can I send you some information on office furniture?" They said yes, so they got a fax. Simple as that.

After 1,200 phone calls and 100 days of hustle, starting my business with nothing but a credit card to buy a computer, I got my first $5,000 sale in December '96. Three months later, my first $50,000 commission deal. And then it just took off.

Fast forward to 2000. My girls were born. We were still living in this quaint little 85-year-old farmhouse. Our mortgage—just for context—was $762 a month for the house and two acres. One vacuum cord could reach the whole house, that's how small it was. We couldn't even get a traditional mortgage at first because the land was worth more than the house. The house was a dump.

But we fixed it up. Remodeled it. Got it featured on HGTV, which was surreal.

We started a young married couples group that grew to 150 couples. At one point, 27 women in that group were pregnant at the same time. There was definitely something in the water. We were doing father-son and father-daughter retreats, men's retreats. I was living the entrepreneurial dream that people had been speaking over me since I was young.

By 2000, I was surrounded by dot-com customers flush with venture capital cash. They were growing like crazy, and I was selling office furniture left and right. I crossed over a million dollars in sales. 

And then, almost overnight, everything changed.

You might remember the dot-com bust. In 2001, things started shuttering. Companies that seemed invincible were collapsing. And then one seismic event happened that nearly destroyed me.

We shipped 12 truckloads of office furniture to Dallas, Texas. I know exactly where that building is. I can still see the guy's face who shook my hand. All our trucks showed up, and they closed the gates and locked everything up. The bank had seized the entire building and everything in it.

Including all my inventory.

After about 90 days of trying to work through it, trying to salvage something, I was upside down over $125,000 in cash. Just gone. I was 28 years old.

More than the money, though—and the money was crushing—I was scared. Really, deeply scared in a way I'd never experienced before.

You see, up until that point, I had experienced success in every measurable category of life. My marriage was strong. Our church involvement was meaningful. We were giving generously to missions. We had money going into retirement accounts. By every metric I knew, I was winning.

And a huge part of my identity—maybe too much of my identity—was wrapped up in being Russell the Entrepreneur. Russell the Success Story. Russell the Guy Who Makes Things Happen.

Suddenly, that identity was under threat. My success criteria was collapsing. And for the first time in my life, I had a genuine identity crisis.

Out of compassion—and this changed our family dynamics—my father-in-law loaned me $250,000. We're still friends today! But that loan, while generous and necessary, fundamentally altered our relationship. There's something about owing a quarter million dollars to your wife's father that shifts the dynamics at Thanksgiving dinner.

Because we'd been so financially successful, the bank gave me all the credit I wanted. I started building infrastructure to protect myself from this kind of disaster happening again. Warehouses. Trucks. Employees. Within a year, I had almost 80,000 square feet of warehouse space and a bunch of guys running around managing inventory.

I propped up my business through debt. I was trying to create systems and structures to manage risk, but here's the thing: I'm not wired that way. I'm an entrepreneur, not a systems manager. And more importantly, I was running. I was scared. And I was trying to build my way out of fear instead of dealing with what was actually happening in my heart.

That business wasn't sustainable. It was funded by debt and fear, and both of those are terrible foundations for anything that's supposed to last.

But more than the business failure, I was experiencing a complete loss of orientation. What was God doing? What was I supposed to be doing? How was I supposed to sustain this? I couldn't pay my bills anymore. I was drowning in debt. I was trying to face my family, face my father-in-law to whom I owed money that was connected to his father through a family trust.

I was a mess.

I was dealing with emotions I didn't have categories for. My entire paradigm of how life worked, how success worked, how I worked—all of it was falling apart. And I didn't know how to stop the spiral.

I got help from some mentors, guys who could walk with me through it. But that next year was dark. Really dark. I kept asking myself: What am I running from? What am I running to? What kind of performance mindset has me on this treadmill where I'm terrified to get off because all I know how to do is double down and run faster, run harder?

I was heading for total collapse.

And then came June 8th, 2002.

I had what I can only describe as my "Oh God" moment in the backyard. I sensed—and I mean sensed in a way that was unmistakable—the Lord calling me to a place of rest. A place of restoration. Time to reset on life.

In that moment, I heard it clearly: "I'm inviting you to Colorado. Time to reset."

We moved 100 days later.

Our house sold within five days of putting up a "For Sale By Owner" sign. Someone paid cash. We had this beautiful property we were going to build on—million-dollar row, big plans for a big house. That sold for cash within five days too. Some guy literally called and said, "Hey, you want to come over to the house? We'll have drinks. I'll just give you a check."

It was like the Lord was physically ushering us toward something new.

I share this story because I know what it feels like to be "up and to the right" for a season—in every category of life. Family, ministry, finances, all of it pointing upward.

And I know what it feels like when it all collapses. When your criteria for success crumbles. When your identity—the story you've been telling yourself about who you are—gets called into question.

Many of you have similar stories. Maybe not the same details, but the same pattern. You had a definition of success. You were pursuing it. And then life happened, and suddenly that definition didn't hold up anymore.

That's what we're going to explore together in this chapter: What is success? How do we define it? And why do the definitions we've been handed so often fail us when we need them most?

What Is Success? The Question That Won't Go Away

Rob— helped get us grounded with the dictionary definition, because it's actually helpful: Success is "the accomplishment of an aim or purpose."

Simple enough, right? You have a goal. You take action toward that goal. You achieve the goal. Success.

But here's where it gets complicated: What's the goal? Who determined the goal? And what happens when you achieve the goal and discover it doesn't satisfy you the way you thought it would?

When we sat around discussing this on a Friday morning, one of the guys, Tom—pointed out that success is inherently tied to action and outcome. You don't go into battle wanting to lose. You go in wanting to win. That's the success outcome. The question is: What are you aiming at?

Andy—made a brilliant observation about the Hebrew text in Joshua 1:8-9. The NIV translation just says "success," but the Hebrew actually includes the word tov—"good success." Which implies there's such a thing as bad success.

Think about that. You can achieve your aim. You can accomplish your purpose. You can "succeed" by every measurable standard. And it can still be the wrong kind of success. Rob— the ladder your climbing maybe leaning on the wrong wall.

Or as several of the guys pointed out, other people might look at your life and say, "Wow, how successful!" while you're dying inside, knowing the success is hollow. The inverse is also true: you might feel deeply fulfilled and purposeful while everyone around you thinks you're underachieving.

The gap between external metrics and internal reality is where most of us live. And it's brutal.

Thomas—-  reminds us of Ecclesiastes 5:18-19: "I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him—for this is his lot. Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work—this is a gift of God."

There's something profound there about being able to enjoy whatever success you have. Not always wanting more. Not measuring yourself against someone else's highlight reel. Just being able to say, "This is good. This is enough."

But our culture doesn't reward "enough." Our culture rewards "more."

The World's View of Success: The Treadmill That Never Stops

Let's be honest about the water we're swimming in.

If you're American, you've been marinated from birth in a particular set of assumptions about success. The American Dream promised that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could achieve prosperity, security, and happiness. Our Declaration of Independence enshrined "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as inalienable rights.

Notice that: the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself. The pursuit. The chase. The striving.

The capitalist system that undergirds our economy rewards productivity, efficiency, and growth. Always growth. Always more. Always upward and to the right. If your business isn't growing, it's dying. If your portfolio isn't increasing, you're falling behind. If your career isn't advancing, you're stagnating.

The treadmill keeps speeding up. And if you can't keep pace, you're a failure.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has written extensively about what he calls "social acceleration"—the phenomenon of life moving faster and faster, creating a sense that we're perpetually behind, perpetually inadequate, perpetually striving without ever arriving. Rosa calls this the "frenetic standstill"—we're working harder and moving faster, but somehow getting nowhere.

Here's what's insidious about this: the problem isn't just that we can't keep up. The problem is that we've internalized the idea that we should keep up. That if we're not constantly optimizing, constantly improving, constantly achieving more, something is fundamentally wrong with us.

Rosa argues that the antidote isn't simply slowing down (though that helps). It's cultivating what he calls "resonance"—building meaningful, responsive, emotionally engaged relationships with the world around you. Relationships that actually nourish your soul instead of just adding another optimization strategy to your productivity stack.

In other words, the cure for our success addiction isn't to succeed better. It's to fundamentally rethink what we're pursuing.

This isn't just an American problem, though our particular cultural moment intensifies it. Talk to someone from a collectivist culture—where success is measured by family honor or community contribution rather than individual achievement—and you'll hear different stories about pressure and expectation. But the tyranny is the same: perform or be ashamed. Achieve or be worthless. Succeed or be forgotten.

The metrics change, but the burden doesn't.

The Biblical View of Success: A Radically Different Scoreboard

So what does the Bible say about success?

Interestingly, Scripture doesn't shy away from the concept. But it measures success by a completely different set of criteria than the world does.

Let's start with Joshua 1:6-9, which several of the guys brought up in our discussion:

"Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them. Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go."

Notice what God defines as the path to success: Courage. Obedience. Meditation on Scripture. Following God's commands.

Not productivity metrics. Not financial benchmarks. Not climbing the org chart.

Courage, obedience, and staying connected to God's Word.

Psalm 20 takes it even further:

"May the LORD answer you when you are in distress; may the name of the God of Jacob protect you... Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God. They are brought to their knees and fall, but we rise up and stand firm."

Here's the contrast: some people trust in their resources, their capabilities, their strategies (chariots and horses). They fall. But those who trust in the Lord's name—they stand firm.

Success, biblically defined, is about where you place your trust, not what you achieve.

Proverbs 16:3 says simply: "Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and he will establish your plans."

And James 1:22-25 turns everything upside down:

"Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do."

Matthias— read that passage from The Passion Translation, and it hit differently: "But those who set their gaze deeply into the perfecting law of liberty are fascinated by and respond to the truth they hear and are strengthened by it. They experience God's blessing in all they do."

Setting your gaze deeply. Being fascinated by truth. Responding to it. Being strengthened by it.

That's success.

Not achievement. Not accumulation. Not advancement.

Fascination with God's truth and faithful response to it.

How Setbacks Reframe Success: Lessons from the Valley

Here's what we've all discovered, sitting around that table on Friday mornings: our biggest failures have taught us more about success than our biggest wins ever did.

Sheldon— said it plainly: "What I've really learned was through the suffering and my failures."

He quoted Hebrews 12:11: "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

That harvest of righteousness—that's what God is after. Not a bunch of money in the bank or an impressive title. A harvest of righteousness.

Sheldon— continued with his stunning observation from Hebrews 5:8: "Although he was a son, [Jesus] learned obedience from what he suffered."

Read that again. Jesus—the Son of God, perfect and sinless—learned obedience through suffering.

If Jesus had to learn through suffering, what makes us think we can shortcut that path?

John 15:2 talks about how God is the gardener and we are the branches. Every branch that bears fruit, He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. Pruning is extraordinarily painful. But it's also how we actually grow.

As one of the guys put it: "I don't think success is necessarily put together perfectly. It's the man that we're becoming."

Andy— shared Psalm 73, which captures the crisis many of us have faced. The psalmist looks around and sees wicked people prospering. They have no struggles. Their bodies are healthy and strong. They're free from common burdens. They're always carefree, increasing in wealth.

Meanwhile, he's trying to live righteously and it feels like it's all for nothing: "Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure; in vain have I washed my hands in innocence. All day long I have been afflicted, and every morning brings new punishments."

The turning point comes in verse 17: "When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny."

And then in verse 26: "My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever... But as for me, it is good to be near God."

It is good to be near God. Not to have what others have. Not to achieve what others achieve. To be near God.

That's the reframe. That's what our setbacks teach us if we're willing to learn.

The Criteria for a Successful Life: Five Markers That Actually Matter

After wrestling with all of this—the stories, the Scripture, the tension between worldly metrics and biblical wisdom—I've landed on five criteria that I believe define a successful life. Not perfectly. I'm still working this out myself. But these are the markers I'm using to measure whether I'm actually heading in the right direction.

1. Character Over Cash Flow

I can speak and preach and write about character all day long, but when push comes to shove, what trips me up? What distracts me? What pulls my focus away from who I'm becoming and redirects it toward what I'm accumulating?

Cash flow.

Financial pressure has a way of revealing what we actually believe about God's provision, about our identity, about what truly matters. When the bank account is flush, it's easy to talk about character. When you can't make payroll or cover the mortgage, character suddenly feels like a luxury you can't afford.

But here's the truth: character is the only thing you're taking with you when you die. Your portfolio stays here. Your achievements stay here. Your reputation stays here. The man you've become—that goes with you into eternity.

Character over cash flow means prioritizing who you're becoming over what you're earning. It means making decisions based on integrity rather than opportunity. It means being willing to take a financial hit rather than compromise your values.

It means remembering that God measures success differently than Wall Street does.

2. Commitments in the Crucible

It's easy to keep your commitments when life is smooth. It's easy to let your yes be yes and your no be no when there's no pressure, no competing demands, no crisis forcing you to choose.

The crucible is different. The crucible is when life squeezes you, when the pressure is intense, when keeping your word will cost you something significant.

That's when your commitments reveal who you actually are.

I'm thinking about marriage vows when the marriage gets hard. Parenting commitments when your kid is breaking your heart. Business partnerships when the profit margins disappear. Ministry promises when you're exhausted and under-resourced.

Commitments in the crucible means showing up even when you don't feel like it. Following through even when it's costly. Staying faithful even when no one would blame you for walking away.

It's the difference between fair-weather faith and the kind of faithfulness that builds something lasting.

3. Champions of Others' Success Above My Own

This one cuts against every competitive instinct I have. I like to win. I want to be the best. There's a part of me that gets energized by being at the top of the leaderboard.

But here's what I'm learning: there's a deeper, more satisfying success in helping others achieve their dreams than in achieving my own.

This is what servant leadership actually looks like—not in some sanitized, theoretical way, but in the daily choice to prioritize someone else's advancement over your own. To celebrate their wins genuinely. To invest in their growth even when it doesn't benefit you directly.

Jesus modeled this perfectly. Philippians 2:3-4 says: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others."

That's radically countercultural. Our world says: look out for yourself, because no one else will. Jesus says: look out for others, because that's what I did for you.

Championing others' success doesn't mean neglecting your own growth or responsibilities. It means holding your own success with an open hand, willing to sacrifice it for the sake of someone else's flourishing.

4. Capacity for Service Beyond Yourself

My father-in-law used to say, "Yeah, he doesn't have a pot to pee in." It was his way of describing someone with nothing to give, nothing to offer, no capacity to help anyone else.

Here's the truth: you have to have something in order to give something. You have to build capacity—financial, emotional, mental, spiritual—if you're going to serve others well.

This isn't about hoarding resources. It's about stewardship. It's about building infrastructure in your life so that when someone needs help, you actually have something to offer. When someone needs encouragement, you have emotional bandwidth to give it. When someone needs financial assistance, you have margin to provide it.

Jesus spent 30 years preparing for three years of public ministry. That's building capacity.

Paul talks about this in 2 Corinthians 9:8: "And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work."

Having all that you need isn't about luxury. It's about having enough capacity to abound in good works. To serve. To give. To help. To show up for others in meaningful ways.

Building capacity for service might mean getting out of debt so you have financial freedom to be generous. It might mean developing emotional health so you can be present for someone in crisis. It might mean growing in wisdom so you can offer counsel when asked.

Whatever form it takes, the goal is the same: cultivating the resources—internal and external—that allow you to bless others beyond yourself.

5. Consider It Joy in the Midst of Hell

Everyone faces some version of hell. Cancer diagnoses. Financial ruin. Relational betrayal. Professional failure. Crushing disappointment.

The question isn't whether you'll face hell. The question is: what will you be like when you're in it?

Can you still show up with kindness? Can you still find moments of laughter? Can you resist the bitterness that wants to consume you?

James 1:2-4 says: "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything."

Consider it pure joy. Not fake happiness. Not pretending everything is fine. Pure joy—the deep-down assurance that God is with you and working through even this hellish experience for your ultimate good.

This is where the fruits of the Spirit become desperately real: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

When hell is breaking loose around you and you can still manifest these qualities, that's a miracle. That's the testimony of God's transforming work in your life. That's maturity.

It doesn't mean you're not hurting. It doesn't mean you're not grieving. It means that even in your hurt and grief, the Spirit of God is producing fruit that wouldn't grow any other way.

A Note to the Man Wrestling with His Paradigm

If you've made it this far, I'm guessing something in this chapter resonated with you. Maybe you're recognizing your own story in mine. Maybe you're in your own crisis, watching your definition of success crumble in real time.

Maybe you're exhausted from running the treadmill. Maybe you've achieved everything you thought you wanted and discovered it's not what you needed. Maybe you're flat on your back in a valley, wondering if you'll ever climb out.

Here's what I want you to know: you're not alone. You're not crazy. And the fact that you're wrestling with these questions—that you're willing to examine your assumptions about success instead of just mindlessly pursuing the next goal—that's actually evidence of growth.

The journey of rises and falls is universal. No one escapes it. But most people never stop to ask whether the ladder they're climbing is leaning against the right wall.

You're asking that question. That takes courage.

There's a scene in Psalm 131 that keeps coming back to me:

"My heart is not proud, LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content."

A weaned child isn't anxiously demanding more. A weaned child has learned to rest in the mother's presence without needing constant feeding. There's contentment there. Peace. A quieted soul.

That's what we're after. Not achievement for achievement's sake. Not success that impresses others but hollows us out.

We're after a quieted soul. A character formed in the image of Christ. A life that matters not because of what we've accumulated but because of who we've become and how we've loved.

The rises and falls will keep coming. That's life. But if we can learn to measure success by the right criteria—character, faithfulness, service, joy—then even the valleys become places of transformation rather than mere tragedy.

The journey continues. The next chapter explores the actual pattern of life—the cycles of order, disorder, and reorder that characterize every human journey. Because if we're going to navigate the rises and falls with any kind of wisdom, we need to understand the rhythm we're dancing to.

But for now, sit with these questions:

What criteria are you actually using to measure success in your life right now?

Where did those criteria come from—and are they serving you well?

What would it look like to redefine success according to biblical wisdom rather than worldly metrics?

Which of the five criteria—character, commitments, championing others, capacity, or joy—feels most challenging for you right now?

What's one small step you could take this week to align your life more closely with what actually matters?

Don't rush past these questions. Sit with them. Journal about them. Pray through them.

Because the examined life, as Socrates said, is the only one worth living.

And the redefined life—success measured by God's standards rather than the world's—is the only one that will satisfy your soul.

Welcome to the journey. It's going to be harder than you expected.

But it's also going to be better.

Chapter Challenge:

This week, I want you to do something concrete. Take 30 minutes—uninterrupted, no phone, no distractions—and write your own definition of success. Not what you think you're supposed to say. Not what would sound good on social media. What you actually believe, deep down, constitutes a life well-lived.

Then, next to that definition, write down five specific ways you're currently measuring success in your daily life. What are you actually tracking? What gets your attention? What drives your decisions?

Finally, compare the two lists. Are you living according to your stated definition, or are you being driven by metrics that don't align with what you say you believe?

The gap between those two lists is where the real work begins.