Become Good Soil

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success. – Ad placed by Sir Ernest Shackleton, 1915 He would never tell you that he was the one who connected Eugene Peterson, author of The Message paraphrase of the Bible, with U2’s Bono and helped cultivate their enduring friendship. It’s reasonable to say that he has fostered more connections between leaders of leaders across the global Christian community than any other man in modern history. Peb Jackson is a living legend. Incurably positive, uncommonly attracted to risk, the core of Peb’s heart is wild and unfettered. His life inspires my curiosity: how does a man recover and fuel this quality of consecrated masculine strength over such a length of time?   Peb is slow to share about his extraordinary life because he is a man who listens far more than he talks. Through the practice of cultivating questions, he has recovered a disproportionate share of the map that leads to life for the masculine soul. And he shares this map with others with magnificent generosity.   Yet Peb’s most distinguishable and attractive quality is his practice of spending extended time with God his Father. With nothing else. No book, no phone, no people. Just God himself. His life embodies these words of A. W. Tozer: "The man who would know God must give time to him. He must count no time wasted which is spent in the cultivation of his acquaintance. He must give himself to meditation and prayer hours on end." This is Peb Jackson. Friends, slow down and receive with me the treasure of an intimate conversation with a man who has consented to becoming a king to whom God has entrusted much of his Kingdom. For the Kingdom, Morgan

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download In 70-year-old men, the number one factor in shaping who they had become was the presence or lack of strong emotional bonds with a single consistent feminine caregiver. – Robert Karen, Becoming Attached Where have you taken your soul’s need for feminine love? Have you ever considered your relationship with food and how that story has played out in your life over decades? How are you receiving daily feminine nourishment from the heart of God?  I am persuaded that our nagging experience of lack, our unsatisfied experiences in our bodies, our complex relationship with food, our addictions and commitments to feel good no matter the cost to ourselves or others, our dysfunctional relating in relationships with females, and our unshakable sense of disconnection from God are rooted at least in part to one core wound: maternal deprivation. If, as George MacDonald suggests, our central misery is our inability to turn to God for masculine validation, then our central anguish is our incapacity to receive feminine love from the heart of God.  But our woundedness need not have the final word. There is provision and promise in the rescuing, restoring love of the Trinity. We are invited to risk turning toward God as Mother to receive the maternal care, secure attachment, and feminine love we so desperately need.  Trusting Jesus’ leadership and authority over our lives, let’s take a closer look at the theme of maternal deprivation and explore how we can regularly receive feminine love and maternal care from the heart of God. Join me as we dive deep together. It’ll change everything. For the Kingdom, Morgan This podcast opens with a beautiful poem written and read by Rob Porter. Rob serves as a facilitator at the Become Good Soil Intensives and has been a faithful ally in this path and process of becoming for years. He is now offering what he has received to allies in New Zealand, the UK, and beyond. My deepest thanks for his contribution to this mission.

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download You speak often of my drinking, but little of my thirst. – Scottish Proverb In seven years of crafting the Become Good Soil podcast for you, no episode has infused me with more JOY than my time with Winton Nicholson as we explored Slow Is Pro. Winton is a fiery, full-hearted Joy-Bringer who has found the treasure in the field and sold everything to possess it. He looks back to us from further down the narrow road and, with a wink and sparkle in his eye, says, “Buckle up…we’re in for a ride!” Winton’s is a story of a thirsty man who sought to slake his thirst in countless ways until God revealed that his real thirst was for the radical, unconditional Love of his Pursuing Father. Through his story, Winton guides us to deep and daring waters, inviting us to reconnect with our true thirst and dive in with reckless abandon. It was Brennan Manning who boldly asked, “Do you believe that the God of Jesus loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness? Beyond fidelity and infidelity...that he loves you in the morning sun and in the evening rain...that he loves you when your intellect denies it, your emotions refuse it, when your whole being rejects it? Do you believe that God loves you without condition and reservation and loves you in this moment as you are and not as you should be?” Both Brennan’s and Winton’s stories bring us to a point of decision. Will we risk believing and receiving more and more of the utterly unconditional and intense affection of our Father? And will we risk loving God and loving ourselves?  How we respond to this invitation will dramatically shape our decade of becoming the kind of kings to whom God gladly entrusts his Kingdom.  Winton’s story reminds us that we mustn’t minimize our sin nature that attempts in myriad ways to distance us from our pain and inhibit our transformation yet fails to satisfy our true thirst. Below our compulsive reaching for another drink, our overeating, our constancy of activity, or any other medicating behavior is an unmet need. Noticing these compulsions and becoming curious about what is underneath can reveal the next layer ready for excavation in our process of becoming wholehearted. Here is the good news: our medicators and their grip are not the truest thing about us. Our hidden self-hatred need not get the final word. There is a Father who is fiercely pursuing us, who loves us right now as we are and not as we should be. And none of the messes we have made in portions and seasons of our lives, nor the harm we have caused ourselves and others, are beyond the Love of our Father and his path forward to irrepressible joy and indestructible wholeness.  Join me and Winton in this episode of the Become Good Soil podcast as we courageously acknowledge the strategies of our sin—yet upend them, receiving the truth that the truest thing about us all is this: we are dearly loved sons.  You don’t want to miss this.  For the Kingdom, Morgan

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about. – N. T. Wright In The Second Mountain, David Brooks observes the inescapable fact that we all grow up in one moral ecology or another. Our moral ecology is the system of beliefs and behaviors that are often based in collective responses to big problems in a specific cultural moment. Recovering what is good, true, and beautiful often depends on identifying our current moral ecology and courageously asking, “Where have we gone astray, and how might we uncover the path forward to recover life in our age?” Brooks describes the pattern like this: “It usually starts with a subculture. A small group of creative individuals finds the current moral ecology oppressive and alienating. So they go back in history and update an old moral ecology that seems to provide a better way to live...” Were we to allow Jesus’ words to interrogate us, we may find ourselves asking courageous but uncomfortable questions: What do I need to unlearn? How is my current moral ecology getting in the way of seeing Jesus and his Kingdom as it really is? And how can I see Jesus and his Kingdom more clearly?  Often at first pass we see things not as they truly are, but only as we are. However, if we are willing, our distorted vision need not be the final verdict. If we will give our consent, Jesus and his disruptive Word can address and heal our blindness. His words and teaching can liberate us from our inherited, unconscious, or entrenched perspectives and deliver us into a new life and expanded vision. By his grace and transformative power, we can, in time, begin to see things more and more as they really are.  Join Cherie and me as we risk questioning our current moral ecology in light of the way of Jesus, opening ourselves to his interrogation so that our impoverished vision of his gospel of the Kingdom may be exchanged for a greater vision ablaze in Resurrection Light. For the Kingdom, Morgan I recommend a deep dive into these books we referenced:

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is men who have come alive. – Howard Thurman Over two decades ago through his book Wild at Heart, John Eldredge offered men the central thing they were missing: Permission. Permission to recover what God meant when he created masculinity. Permission to recover a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and the courage to fight for beauty with integrity and sacrifice. Permission for us to recover our hearts, as men.  The promise was this: through taking this masculine journey, we would be able in time to bring ourselves as whole-hearted men to the world and to our world.  Thoreau’s words from his seminal work Walden are so often quoted because they ring true: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Yet through the message and mission of Wild at Heart, that desperation has evaporated in hundreds of thousands of men and in its place has been sown a recovered strength and union with God.   As a result, a quiet and unshakable revolution is at hand. It’s a revolution of the human heart. Its epicenter is the restoration of men. And from there, communities, marriages, families, and kingdoms around the globe are being healed. And we’re just getting started. Friends, join John and me as we unpack the story of Wild at Heart, a story more than 25 years in the making. We reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going. Know this: where we are going will only happen if we lock shields and recover our hearts, together. So join us. Dream with us. Grow with us. And act with us to participate with God in rescuing and restoring the next generation. “Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is men who have come alive.” Let’s go. For the Kingdom, Morgan

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download I haven't made all A's in the art of living. But I give a damn. And I'll take an experienced C over an ignorant A any day. – Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights  In Backpacking with the Saints, Belden Lane captures a fundamental mystery of masculine initiation: “What does [a man] do when there’s nothing he can do, when there’s no audience to applaud his performance, when he faces a cold, silent indifference, if not hostility? His world falls to pieces. The soul hungry for approval starves in a desert like that. It reduces the compulsive achiever to something little, utterly ordinary. Only then is he able to be loved.” Masculine initiation has as much to do with unlearning as it does with learning, as much to do with powerlessness as it does with power. How do we attune our hearts, minds, and imaginations to the path of masculine initiation that God is orchestrating right here and now? Friends, join me for an interview on initiation hosted by Nick Carlile on Life Enchanted. For the Kingdom, Morgan

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download To an unaccustomed onlooker, the ancient practices, set prayers, bells, and incense of formal liturgy may seem perplexing or even bizarre. But as I've gone through another round of unlearning and relearning rightly, I've begun to grasp—with the help of longtime ally Simon Kyne—that liturgy was intended to be a grace and essential stream to draw near to God and access the full breadth and depth of his Kingdom. And as is often the case with any structure or institution, the heart of God can get lost in the debris. How do we recover these sacred practices that have stood the test of time? How do we receive afresh the Life of God through the symbols, ceremony, and traditions that anchor us in the past, present, and future reality of God's Kingdom? What can we learn from the labor and love of thousands of years of apprentices who have gone before us? How do we recover an annual rhythm and liturgical calendar that guides us through our months and years and centers it all upon the resurrection of the King of kings and the hope of the Restoration of All Things?  Friends, I want to welcome you to the deep end of the pool with Simon, this faithful guide who has cultivated personal and corporate liturgical practices for four decades. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. Let's dive in. For the Kingdom, Morgan In the podcast we reference several tools as an onramp into a deeper liturgical practice. You can find those here.

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download “I have not failed. I've just found 1000 ways that won't work.” –Thomas Edison, inventor of electric light What is the path of inner transformation and becoming like Christ? Is such transformation even possible?  Dallas Willard assures us it is readily available.  We can, in time, become the kind of people who naturally bless those who curse us and love our enemies as our normal reaction. However, he presses that it happens only with a compelling vision of the Kingdom, a deliberate decision to seek it, and the engagement of effective means through which the Grace of God can flow as the rushing River of Life that Jesus has promised. Dallas refers to this pattern of human transformation as VIM:  Vision, Intention, and Means.  He argues that we can see the pattern of VIM at work in any effective human endeavor. When it comes to the reformation of our humanity into the image and likeness of Jesus, Dallas argues that “if we are to be spiritually formed in Christ, we must have and must implement the appropriate vision, intention, and means. Not just any path we take will do. [Without these,] Christ simply will not be formed in us.”  (Renovation of the Heart, p. 87) How is the VIM pattern relevant in our quest to become the kind of men to whom our Father can gladly entrust his Kingdom?  Join Cherie and me as we explore the significance of vision, intention, and means more closely. For the Kingdom, Morgan For more, check out Renovation of the Heart by Dallas Willard:

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Thinking about something rather than trying not to think about something is much more successful. Walking toward rather than away from something allows us to get where we want to go. – Bill Lokey Jesus has an uncanny way of pulling that singular string that, over time, unravels the well-woven fig leaf we use to insulate our true self from being found and restored. One day he uses merciful deliverance; the next, an exacting question. One day he speaks words of life; the next, he allows us to walk away for a time. He is brilliant in modeling distinct streams through which the River of Life can graciously flow. His ways of healing our broken hearts and setting our captive places free seem boundless. Always imaginative, always personal, and always in love.  Among these streams, experiential therapy has been a profound conduit of the River of Life for me and for many; it is one of the great modalities of therapy and healing to consider in our toolbox for the restoration of the masculine soul.   Few in this country are as equipped and experienced in this modality as Bill Lokey. I first came under Bill’s care while he served as Senior Clinical Director at Onsite Workshops for ten years. At Onsite, Bill supervised over 70 therapists throughout the U.S., training them in experiential therapy and designing transforming emotional wellness and recovery programs that have drawn people from all over the world. Bill is most renowned as the loving husband of Laurie and as a beloved father and grandfather. Professionally, he offers learning opportunities and counsel on the topics of trauma, rising through adversity, overcoming codependency, connection in relationships, the impact of a self-protective culture in the workplace, burnout in helping professionals, sexual intimacy in relationships, and more. He and Laurie co-facilitate experiential workshops for churches and organizations to repair their cultures and strengthen their trust, as well as marriage workshops and intensives for couples and groups.   Licensed as a senior psychological examiner for over 23 years and certified as a level-3 experiential therapist with the American Society of Experiential Therapists, Bill stewards a private practice to help clients recover from the the effects of trauma, feeling stuck, relational damage, anxiety, grief, loss, spiritual disconnection, and burnout in life.  His passion is to help leaders whose lives have been broken or impaired find the hope of a tenaciously loving God and the healing that leads them to serve the world from a place of wholeness and integrity. As apprentices of the King and his Kingdom, let’s take a dive into the modality of experiential therapy with the help of this faithful guide. If you're interested in learning more from Bill, connect with him through BillandLaurieLokey.com. In the spirit of shared support, I also want to pass on to you a short list of experiential therapists who've been recommended to us, in case one of them might be a fit along this quest of becoming. I have not personally worked with any of them, so I leave it to you to do your own research and exploration. Bill and Laurie Lokey Abbe Barclay (emphasis: sex addiction and couples) James Horne  Angela Thompson Pina Newman (emphasis: couples) For the Kingdom, Morgan

Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | DownloadTo love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. – C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves“If you want to know how well you are doing as a parent, you can gently begin to ask that question when your kids turn 40. In the meantime, today, risk love.” They were generous words spoken to my soul by a wise guide years ago. Dan Allender is wise when he suggests that children really raise parents. Nothing in the world has the power to form us into loving parents like the steady act of parenting through the days and decades. In How Children Raise Parents, Dan goes on to say, “We often realize that we learn as much from our children as they learn from us. So why don’t parents approach the task of child-rearing as a learning experience, rather than a mandate to make sure their kids succeed in life? To reduce the pressure and enjoy greater closeness in your family, turn your parenting upside-down by allowing God to use your children to help you grow up. Imagine what would happen if you began to prize what you’re being taught by your children’s quirks, failures, and normal childhood dilemmas, rather than worrying about whether you’re doing everything right as a parent.” Friends, with a posture of joyfully embracing the “task of child-rearing as a learning experience,” we turn to part two of a conversation Cherie and I hosted with our mentor, counselor, and dear friend, Gary Unruh. His five decades of work with children and families have recovered some of the relational keys that can turn a catastrophe in relationship into a story that will bring us to tears with gratitude in decades to come. In part one, we explored themes from Golden Rule Parenting. In this episode, we dive into LIFT for Children – Love Infusing Fear Therapy. It’s practical, accessible, and a brilliant onramp to recapture the hearts of children and deepen any other relationship entrusted to your care. To love is to be vulnerable. Having faithful, wise guides like Gary can help us keep risking in love. Let’s dive in. For the Kingdom, Morgan For Gary’s counseling services you can connect with him at GaryUnruhTherapy.com.