Become Good Soil

 Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download “There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.” –Victor Hugo, Les Misérables You find yourself in a world gone mad. and You have a soul—or, more accurately, you are a soul—made by God, made for God, and made to need God. You've noticed by now that these two things, the world system and your soul, are constantly at war. But if the aim of the Gospel is the restoration of all creation, including your human soul, how do you avoid the tragedy that Jesus named as gaining the world and losing your soul (Mark 8:36)? What is the way back? How do we reestablish what has been lost, how do we replant what has been uprooted? Here’s what is giving me hope again today: the quest doesn't begin with us; it begins with God. Our job is to respond. There are practices in our power to do that accomplish in us what we never could on our own—small, consistent, but heroic acts that integrate our fractured souls and reconnect us supernaturally with our God. Join Cherie and me for a very practical discussion on being found by God through the formation of small and accessible practices. May this conversation—originally offered at our Homecoming event last fall—encourage you as you seek to arrange your days for union with God. Remember this: there is always a way forward, no matter how far into the weeds or off-track we might find ourselves today. The good news is this: our Father is more at work than we are. He is seeking us even now, finding us right where we are, and moving us forward in his story of healing us, restoring our sanity, cultivating our flourishing, and moving us into deeper union with him. For the Kingdom, Morgan

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Authenticity is a collection of choices we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen. –Brené Brown Courage begets courage.  That was my experience of Nancy Carmichael when she invited me to share a conversation on her podcast, Isle of Misfits. Her podcast predominantly serves a tribe of women; and truth be told, of the over 40 podcasts, interviews, radio shows, and events I’ve been invited to participate with regarding the launch of Becoming a King, Nancy was the only woman to bravely and boldly extend me an invitation.  All of the other communities, organizations, and tribes have been hosted by men.  Of course, on the surface, this ratio makes sense: Becoming a King appears to be a message for men.  Yet experience tells me it's more than that. My sense is that the lack of invitation reflects the aggregate negative impact of fallen masculinity upon women. Many women—perhaps especially those who have fought hard for a voice and presence as a cultural influencer—have been failed not only by the individual men in their lives, but also by long-standing cultural structures that, rather than holding esteem and respect for female influence and power, have brought contempt. Many women, if given a choice, would just as well choose to steer clear of masculinity.  Why would a woman risk opening her heart to masculinity when she has been failed for so long on so many levels? As the Spirit has been opening my eyes and allowing me to begin to see the depth and breadth of the degrading, harmful, and disempowering impact of broken masculinity upon women, what comes up for me is deep sorrow and a desire to be a part of what God is doing on the earth to turn the tide. I have seen many of your lives. I know you stand with me in wanting to be a humbled and strong-hearted portion of the restoration of all things, particularly as it relates to masculinity. Instead of unconsciously recirculating contempt and debasement, my desire is to take the lowest seat, hear from women, and listen and learn—then partner together to help restore masculinity as it was meant to be.  The privilege of engaging with Nancy and the Isle of Misfits was catalytic in my own relationship with God. In the hope of passing on what I recieved, I wanted to bring this episode to Become Good Soil for our mutual strengthening.  Here is Nancy’s reflection on the work of Isle of Misfits and on the conversation that we share in this episode: If you’ve hung around these parts for any length of time, you know that we hold dearly to our core principles, beginning with the dearest of the dear: the clarion call to “Own Your Awkward.” I gotta tell you, though, in this particular episode with Morgan Snyder from Wild at Heart and Become Good Soil, that little value of ours was put to the test, and I was tempted to edit the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks out of it. Don’t get me wrong. It was a great conversation, not just about Morgan’s new book, Becoming a King, but about, oh, a lot of things. The “new normal.” God as “genderful.” Acknowledging wounds and healing hurts.  There is deep insight, let me tell you. In fact, so much so, that at one point in the conversation it took a turn toward the vulnerable, and I had to make a choice as to whether I’d keep that part to myself or share it with you all.  In the end, I decided not to edit it out, ‘cause, well, sometimes a little vulnerability makes for a much more interesting conversation.  Friends, let’s dare greatly together and dive in. For the Kingdom, Morgan

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download It is profound how different our experiences can be inside our own skin. When it comes to sensations in the body, we are not on a level playing field. To love and be loved, to know and be known, it’s so important that we practice story-informed relating with ourselves and each other. Jesus is the most brilliant story-informed and trauma-sensitive teacher and friend who has ever lived. – Cherie Snyder Many of us—or those whom we love—have contended with the agonizing sensations of acute anxiety. In attempts to regulate these sensations, we often reach for substances, co-dependent relationships, or control over external circumstances to mitigate the pain and upheaval we feel on the inside. Sometimes the efforts we make to soothe our bodies end up causing harm to ourselves or to those we love. Friends, if acute anxiety has been a part of your story or the story of someone you love, there is reliable hope for encounter, comfort, and transformation. I can speak to this hope on a very personal level: over the past 18 months, God has been tending to the root of the anxiety in me and offering new freedom, restoration, and internal peace beyond what I ever dreamed was possible. My bride, Cherie, has her own story of acute anxiety. Out of her own story and path toward wholeness, she has consented to the slow and steady process of becoming a trauma-informed educator. She works regularly with fellow travelers to help listen for the sacred information that the body might be conveying and experience loving and compassionate transformation. Join her in this podcast as she shares a hopeful framework and practical steps to help us listen to our bodies, learn our stories, encounter God, and move compassionately from anxiety through transformation and toward greater peace. For the Kingdom, Morgan

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out. –Oliver Wendell Holmes I'm noticing questions along a particular theme surfacing more and more frequently these days. How do I find a mentor? What do I do with my disappointment in older men? How do I offer guidance, counsel, or simply "more" to younger men in my world?   Friends, these are central questions in masculine initiation, and yet we often find ourselves both mixed in our past experiences and perplexed or ambivalent about moving forward. Join me as we dive into a podcast that dips below the waterline, identifying questions and recovering a greater hope we can all share. For the Kingdom,

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download“Make margin in your life, or life will make margin for you.” –Chuck, from a federal prison cellNo one stops to think. These five words, spoken over two thousand years ago,1 have the potential to change your life more than any others. These five words are the headwaters from which a single idea is found, an idea that might be the universal narrow gate through which all like-hearted apprentices of the Kingdom of God must travel if we are to recover the Gospel in our age. Having nothing to do with COVID-19 or a pandemic, we find ourselves in an unprecedented time in the history of humanity in a wholly other respect. Thankfully, every unprecedented challenge comes with its own unprecedented possibility and particular provision, for such a time as this. Join me as we risk going after the deeper things of God and his Kingdom together. Below, you’ll find resources referenced in the podcast that will help you dive deeper. There is a revolution being seeded around the globe. It’s a revolution of the human heart. It’s taking hold. This is our hour. Let’s go. For the Kingdom, Linear vs. Exponential Growth Curve Human Function Curve 1Isaiah 44:19a NIV Reflections Questions: 1. Observe the current condition of the space that exists in your life between your load and your limits. What does this reveal, through your actions, about what you believe about margin? 2. Notice what has happened to your attention and your affection...      over the last year      over the last five years      over the last decade 3. What if this life we find ourselves in is not normal? Notice your capacity for adaptation. How has it been a blessing? How has it been a hindrance? Margin by Richard SwensonThe Overload Syndrome by Richard SwensonHurtling Toward Oblivion by Richard Swenson

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download The great problem of the earth and the great aim of the masculine journey boil down to this: when can you trust a man with power? – John Eldredge What’s the most important thing? Over two decades ago I set out on a relentless quest to find the answer. What I found was not what I expected, and where I found it was in the most unanticipated places. With it came a restored strength and an unshakable hope. The most important thing turned out not to be a thing at all, but rather a path. A path to becoming who God meant when he created each one of us. And it is my joy and sacred trust to share it with you. In this podcast, join John Eldredge and me as we explore the soul-strengthening themes in Becoming a King. A Joybomb with Becoming a King Pre-Orders As I recorded the audiobook for Becoming a King, I sensed that the most powerful way to communicate the impact of this message is through the stories of the men who have lived it. Specifically, I wanted to record a conversation with four of the men who have walked shoulder to shoulder with me along this way as each of us has consented to the process of becoming the kind of man to whom God can entrust the care of his Kingdom. But even more, I wanted to risk interviewing our wives and hear directly about what they have seen and experienced in us along the way of becoming a king.  So along with Cherie, my bride, I circled up with the wives of four of the men who have been living and forming this message at my side for over a decade in their own personal lives and in community. I asked these courageous and truth-telling women to share from their perspectives about what they’ve seen in their husbands along this journey. The conversation that transpired was raw, honest, and hope-infused, and I am thrilled to share it with you. For everyone who orders Becoming a King before May 26, we’re offering these bonuses: First access to the exclusive Wives Conversation Collection The first three sessions of the Becoming a King video series The first three chapters of the in-depth Becoming a King study guide You can find out more at BecomingAKing.com. Together, let’s reach the many, and find the few. For the Kingdom,

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others. –Eugene Peterson Seventy-two years ago, a novel threat emerged on the earth, inciting a proportionate pandemic of fear around the globe. In that hour, it was the advent of the atomic bomb, a weapon whose potential for immediate and global destruction was unprecedented. The pressing and consequential question of that age was “How should we now live in light of this new and deadly threat?” C. S. Lewis wrote the following in response: In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds. “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays Following Lewis’s counsel, one of the “human things” we can do is gather, albeit virtually, to connect and be strengthened by the stories of others. Together, we can imagine, dream, question, and unite in prayer, and thereby enact a power beyond ourselves that will steady and focus us as we continue in the sacred and sometimes mundane work of being found at our post on any and every day. To this end, I have gathered some of my most trusted companions for mutual strengthening; we are inviting you to gather with us as well. Our hope is that as a global fellowship of like-hearted men, we can encourage each other in “sensible and human things,” and as one, bring more and more of the reign of Heaven to more and more of the domain of earth.   Our world is at a rare juncture; the global crisis of our age offers a fresh and remarkably accessible opportunity to return our need and our personal story back to the Hero and Author of the Larger Story from which we originated. There is so much goodness to fight for here. Long-standing strongholds can be broken. Shattered relationships and lives can be restored. Lost things can be found. Life can be recovered. Light shines brighter in darkness. Come, join us. We’re glad you’re here. For the Kingdom,

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | DownloadThe owner of the company maintained his poker face; it was not simply for the card game. This was the face he now donned for every public moment in these dark days. He was in trouble, and under no circumstances would he let it show. The investments he had made in the good times were now worthless. Ever since the waves of panic and the dread of complete collapse had gripped the region, commerce had careened to a violent stop; his tenants had no means of making money, much less paying him. Who knew when the next dollar would come? The economy was like concrete—it had moved well when it was wet, but now the scorching heat of oversupply, panic, and free-fall had dried it up overnight. Later, people would swear they had seen the terror behind his eyes. But in those first dreadful days, they had refused to admit it even to themselves. This story isn’t from 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a glimpse of the grim inner reality of a landlord and investor in 1931, a paraphrase from a story told by Timothy Egan in his brilliant and award-winning book The Worst Hard Time. In the early 1930s, a terrible collision of deadly drought, global economic instability, and the dire environmental consequences of man’s misuse of power gave rise to a cataclysm of dust storms that devastated the southern high plains of the U.S. Nothing like it had been seen before; and to this day, the total ruination of the ecosystem of the Great Plains is often credited as the worst environmental disaster of human history. Not surprisingly, few lived to tell the story, or if they did, it was a story too painful or shameful to recount. I can’t help but connect the stories in The Worst Hard Time with elements of our current global challenge. No one knows the outcome of these times in which we find ourselves. There is no crystal ball; there are no material guarantees. Yet by Grace there is a brilliant, kind Teacher who wants to guide us through all of it into Life. And there is a map of human history that can educate our souls to survive, to endure, and to make the way for future generations to thrive as a result of abiding wisdom applied in the midst of an unprecedented crisis. Which brings me to a question: In times of crisis, when life shifts in some distinct ways from normal to survival, who lives, who dies, and why? Laurence Gonzales wrote a compelling, research-based narrative exploring the mystery behind this question in his fascinating book Deep Survival. In the hope of offering some soul-strengthening counsel from shapers among us as well as shapers of old, my aim in this podcast is to pause and consider some very practical aspects of “surviving survival” that we could lean into today in order to become even more the kind of men who can receive life and bring life, in partnership with God, for such a time as this. Specifically, I highlight 10 ideas that can help us first receive love and then lead in love, even in this uncertain hour. Friends, let us stand together, holding onto the hope that Paul expressed to the community of God’s people in Galatia: the hope that we who have chosen to receive the gift of God’s generously available life are given the resources we need for union with God and to express our faith in love. Not in our own strength, but in union with the Trinity today. Paul assured us that we do have direct access to remarkable qualities of God’s own life and experience: Joy that overflows, Peace that subdues, Patience that endures, Kindness in action, a life full of virtue, Faith that prevails, Gentleness of heart, and Strength of spirit.(Galatians 5:22-23, The Passion Translation) And in the midst of these unique times, may we both receive and offer this kind of faith-filled life into our spheres of influence. May the fruit of our union with God be so nourishing and strengthening to those around us that the world will know that God is with us and we will not be shaken. As One, Morgan P.S. As shared in the podcast: Want to join Cherie and me for 30 minutes of refreshment and soul centering? It'd be a great gift to your spouse or nourishment for you or even a mid-day date! All you'll need is a quiet space where you can center in God and move your body in a comfortable space. Grab an exercise mat if you have one. Join us April 9th at 11:55am MT: https://zoom.us/j/425375870Meeting ID: 425 375 870 If you're new to Zoom, you can find helpful instructions HERE. In the podcast I reference the following books that I’ve found incredibly helpful: Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence GonzalesLife Without Lack, by Dallas WillardThe Worst Hard Time, by Tim EganIf the play button below does not work, use the following links instead: Play in new window | Download

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | Download Friends, it was Oswald Chambers who said, "We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all." This morning I was deeply moved in my own personal prayer time to contend for God's particular and wide-reaching provision in a world that, in this hour, has given itself over in significant ways to fear and chaos. I had the privilege of gathering (via Zoom) with a fellowship of like-hearted men from around the globe, to stand in agreement with God, praying wholeheartedly for his prevailing work in the hearts and lives in every nation impacted by coronavirus. During the prayer time, I sensed it would be a soul-strengthening blessing to share that prayer with you, inviting you to stand with us, as one. Our infinite need can only be matched by God's infinite capacity and joy to respond. Let's risk believing and trusting, together. As One, Morgan

Podcast: Subscribe in iTunes | Play in new window | DownloadStanding up and owning our reverberating pulses of passion rarely comes down to a singular event or momentary intersection with destiny. There is a daily-ness to our noble and sensible resignations. We dutifully go about our lives for years, decades even, and suddenly we look up to find ourselves with parts or whole swatches of our lives unlived. –Aaron McHughWhat if the current challenges you're facing could lead to an inner transformation that facilitates, over time, a flourishing finish to your story? Paul prayed this daring prayer for his like-hearted allies in a place called Philippi (Phil. 1:6). I too pray this regularly for the hearts of family and friends entrusted to my care. But sometimes in my own struggle, it is strengthening to see it being lived out by other climbing companions. Become Good Soil is about setting as paramount not what we do, but who we are becoming. The hope is that together we will be strengthened and guided more deeply into becoming the kind of men to whom God can gladly entrust to the care of his Kingdom. It takes the like-hearted to get there. Over the years, I’ve made it a priority to invest in friendships with men who are also risking it all on God and his Kingdom. In some upcoming podcasts, I hope to pull the curtain back on other men's lives so you can draw courage and strength from the fruit of their commitment to the slow and steady process of deep inner transformation. Aaron McHugh has been side by side with me in this since the beginning. He attended the first Become Good Soil Intensive (which was a dozen guys in camp chairs and sleeping bags at Bart’s ranch) and has helped provide leadership for every U.S. Intensive over the past decade. I’ve participated in and had the privilege of witnessing hundreds of Aaron's largely unseen choices where he gave a risky yes to God, allowing his apprenticeship in the Kingdom to be the primary driving force of his days and his last two decades. For years he’s been putting pen to paper the story of what it has looked like to live out this process in a corporate context. Part of Aaron’s mission as Kingdom ambassador has been to offer a framework for discovering the work you love without quitting your job. He tackles fear and self-preservation head on while mapping out philosophical, emotional, tactical, and heart-centered shifts that can help recover the narrow road in the context of work. Aaron's new book, Fire Your Boss: Discover Work You Love Without Quitting Your Job, launches January 14, and it’s with joy that I recommend it to you. Woven through its pages is living, breathing evidence of the slow and steady that leads to the life we were meant for, from the inside out. Two years ago I sat down to interview Aaron to celebrate a milestone in the stewardship of his podcast and to take a hidden look behind the scenes as he was steadily shaping what would become his new book. In the spirit of featuring soul-strengthening stories of the like-hearted, I wanted to bring some of that conversation to your heart in this episode. For the Kingdom, Morgan