Why Connection Beats Porn

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Husband Material podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa, and I'm here to show you how. Let's go.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Today's episode was special. Nate Larkin, founder of the Stanison Society, opens up about a season of relapse that took place in his life while he was a leader. And while Nate's story is uncomfortable and may be triggering for some listeners, I think it's really important for us to witness what can happen when a leader begins to drift and isolate and perform and pretend. And if you are a leader who is wrestling with whether or not to share your patterns of secrecy or sexually acting out, I encourage you to listen. And at the end of the episode, Nate talks about what went into his decision to go public with this and what we truly need in the end. If you're ready for a real, raw, deeply personal story of a leader relapsing and recovering, keep listening. Today we get the delight of hanging out with Nate Larkin, who is the founder of the Samson Society, author of Samson and the Pirate Monks, and also co-host of the Pirate Monk Podcast. YR! It's great to be with you, Drew. Thank you for the invitation. You're welcome. And I'm really excited about the Samson Society app, which just launched by the time this comes out.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. We're going to debut it at the National Summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the weekend of November 7, 8, and 9. Team's been working on it for quite a while. We actually followed your lead, Drew. You guys were the first we heard of to go with the Mighty Networks platform. And our web platform was getting a little antiquated, and we didn't have a workable app. So we really respect and admire what you guys are doing at Husband Material. So we shamelessly copied you. Great. We're just trying to make it easier than ever for men to connect. Because that's what it's all about, right? It's about authentic connection. It's what we're built for, what we're wired for, what we all desperately need. And when we can't get it safely, we're vulnerable to all kinds of workarounds that can lead to disastrous consequences.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

And when it comes to free, consistent opportunities for connection, I refer people to Samson Society. Every day of the week, anywhere in the world, you can go to a meeting and connect with men on the same journey.

SPEAKER_02 2:52

That's it, right there. Yeah. And we're really hoping

The Cost Of Leadership And Performance

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to ramp up. We've got lots of meetings every day, but we want to have even more meetings by the end of 2026. Our goal is to have at least one meeting every hour of every day.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

Wow. One of the things that I was immediately struck by when I first watched you tell your story in the I Am Second video, which is like legendary for me now, is just how vulnerable you are as a leader, and how much you know you need the things that you're offering. That has really influenced me.

SPEAKER_02 3:31

Here's the dangerous part that vulnerability becomes more and more difficult when you're in leadership. I mean, it it can, it doesn't have to, but it can, and it did for me. It is possible for us as leaders to start to imagine that so many people are depending on us, that their sobriety, their stability depends on our continued, unblemished, unvarnished success. That when we do start to slip, it just would be too discouraging, maybe even catastrophic for me to let anybody else know. And it's possible for us as leaders to start to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. Imagine that we're more vital to this process than we actually are, and we can start once again to perform. I was so good at performing that I hid my addiction for 20 years. Nobody knew I wasn't caught. I was really good at misdirection. I'm good on stage. I can freaking perform. That wiring is still intact. But performing is deadly for me. I have caught myself before performing in, you know, in a recovery meeting. I'm always inspired when somebody else does the brave thing to be brutally honest and exposes my own hypocrisy, and I realize I'm just taking the edge off the truth. I'm polishing things just a little bit. I'm really trying to appear a little better than I am. And so sometimes I'm just encouraged by the example of somebody else's vulnerability to get more vulnerable myself. But it is possible to go off the rails. And anybody who is a regular listener to the Pirate Monk podcast, if they've listened within the last month or so, six weeks, I don't know when it came out, they know that we had the Nate Larkin relapse episode where I talked about it. What I found out is that the message actually was a great encouragement to an awful lot of people. And we're still reaping good fruit from

Drifting, Resentment, And Isolation

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telling the truth.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Can you say more about what happened?

SPEAKER_02 5:51

Here's the thing: relapses don't happen suddenly, they evolve, right? It's a misstep followed by another misstep by another. A slip is not immediately a slide. But a slip seen, admitted, corrected, is inevitable. None of us walk this recovery journey perfectly. All of us lose our footing from time to time. And so it's absolutely essential that we be walking with other people, that we disclose what we're doing, that they're watchful to what's going on, so we don't wander too far. But if we start to imagine that we're a little bit above the crowd, if we're performing a little bit, it is possible for us to fool ourselves and fool other people. So in my case, uh Allie and I, you know, we started the Samson Society in 2004 in Franklin, Tennessee. At that point, I was six years into my own recovery from porn and sex addiction, and I'd worked with a sponsor who introduced me early to going on walks. There's something magical about going on a walk with another man. It's got a little easier to talk when we're outside. And, you know, and I also think that there's something to the bilateral stimulation of walking that I think helps the thinking process and the learning process. So when we started Samson, by the time we started Samson, I was already walking with guys. I'd been walking with guys for a while. And I walked the streets of Franklin, Tennessee for more than 20 years. I was a fixture downtown. I had friends everywhere. I know that town. I know every crack in the sidewalk, right? And it's to me, it's a sacred place. And we lived right downtown in a hundred-year-old two-story house with the master bedroom on the second floor. Now, my wife, who I dearly love, is 10 years older than I am, and now is experiencing some of the joys of aging. And it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to make her up the very make her way up the steep steps to the bedroom. And I'm gone a lot. And one of my nightmares was her falling down those stairs when I was gone. Our daughter had, who had lived for many years in Franklin, was finally priced out of the market, and she moved an hour away to a little town called Mount Pleasant. When it became clear that we had to move, we decided to move to Mount Pleasant. And I told myself and everybody else that it was no big deal. Yes, I'm moving away from all my friends. Yes, I'm moving away from my routines. Yes, I'm moving away from all my connections, but I'm a good husband. I love my wife. We're moving to be four doors away from our daughter and our grandkids. It's no big deal. It's actually a good thing. I was lying to myself and I was lying to other people. The resentment

The First Slip And The Spiral

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was starting to build. I was doing a few things. I was playing bigger than I am. I didn't want to own the sadness and the reluctance and the grief or admit the resentment to myself or anybody else. But we put the house up for sale. I did all the preparation, the packing for moving. We bought a house in Mount Pleasant, but it wasn't going to be ready for months. So we had to pack everything for storage, and I did that myself. I could have asked for help. I didn't. And then we decided to spend the intervening months with my son and his family in Amelia Island, Florida. And now we're going to be able to stay longer. Now, Allie can't make that drive anymore. So the plan was we would do the final packing, we'd go to the closing on the house, I would take Allie to the airport, put her on a plane, my son would pick her up in Jacksonville, and I'd bring the dog and our suitcases and I would drive. As I dropped Allie off that afternoon, it was already afternoon by the time, I put her on the plane. She said, Hey, don't try to don't be a hero. Don't try to drive straight through. When you get tired, stop. And I told her I would. My back was killing me. I was exhausted. I was driving away from Franklin and my friends. And anyway, I stopped south of Atlanta. And during this time, by the way, my drinking had been accelerating. I was medicating my resentment with alcohol. Stopped that night south of Atlanta, had dinner at a Mexican restaurant. I had one beer that turned into two beers and I don't know, maybe three beers. But I was clearly out of one beer territory by then. All I know is when I came out of the restaurant, I looked across the parking lot and saw a massage parlor. And I hadn't been in a massage parlor in 20 years. And suddenly it seemed like a good idea. My back hurt. I deserved it. I told myself it was just a massage, but I knew I knew better. But I went in. And I had the massage complete with a happy ending, right? Well, as you can imagine coming out of that, I just felt absolutely horrible. And my first thought was, oh, I can't tell anybody this. I can't tell Allie. She trusts me implicitly. I'm she's struggling, I'm her rock. It would shake her world. I just can't tell her. And I can't tell the guys either, because they're all dependent on me. If word ever got out, it would probably destroy the Samson Society. So this is one and done. It will never happen again. I'm gonna suck it up, I'm done. And I didn't do it again right away. But the next time I had to go out of town to speak, I did it again. Well, then I really gave myself a good talking to. And, you know, got serious, got back into just doing some journaling and all that kind of stuff. All the private disciplines that are necessary, but not sufficient to keep us sober, right? I was neglecting this vital ingredient called honesty and brotherhood. But I tried to do it myself. And I did succeed for the next couple opportunities I passed. That's the tricky thing. If it's it's tougher for those of us who the alcoholics call the periodic drinks, uh drunks to get sober, because every time we manage to pass up the opportunity, it feeds the illusion that we have the capacity to be sober. And then when we finally do fail, the condemnation is twice as bad because the message we hear is you low down. You didn't have to do that.

unknown 13:02

You know.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

What I did tell myself, I know I had to talk about this, but what I told myself was, you know, the reason I did it was because I

Naming Alcohol And Minimizing Truth

SPEAKER_02 13:10

was drinking. I need to stop drinking. So I resolved to stop drinking, which turned out to be much more difficult than I thought. And I that was a safe thing to talk about. I started talking about drinking to my friends. I talked about drinking on the podcast. I talked about, and eventually, uh what's called uh Deer Camp. I was a men's fellowship retreat thing out in the woods in Mississippi, and it wasn't a Samson thing, and I wasn't in charge, and I was just one of the initiates, just one of the guys, completely safe. Up until that, yeah, I did tell guys I wanted to stop drinking, but I wasn't being completely honest about the amount of alcohol I was consuming or the frequency with which I was drinking. I kept minimizing publicly. The drinking was worse than I was telling anybody, and it kept getting worse. But that night out in the woods, I just decided just to dump the truck, and I told every ugly detail about my alcohol. And amazingly, the urge to drink disappeared. This was amazing. I got back home and I'm not drinking anymore. Fantastic. We've got this thing, and then I found out I could still act out sober. I did it again. That's just awful. And now I'm back in the spot where it's hard to look at myself in the mirror. If I go out to speak, I know what the things I'm saying are true, but I'm not being truthful. I am charting the road to recovery, and I am telling the story, but I'm not telling the whole story. And that's a rotten place to be, let me tell you. I went, as to the best of my recollection, I went to massage parlors a total of seven times. Finally, uh, some of the Samson guys had gone to a really high intensity intensive with a guy named Andrew Bowman out in Washington State. And I decided, you know what, I'm gonna go there. And I'm gonna get honest there. It's not a Samson thing. I'm not in charge. These guys are safe. I'm gonna, I've gotta tell, I've got to spill the beans, I'll tell them. So I register for the treat. I actually stop in Denver on the way to act out one last time. Just like a final toot, you know, before going into rehab, you know, like any good addict. And it was stupid. That last one, that last one I planned. I planned every detail. The other ones, yes, I planned, but I didn't admit to myself that I was planning. I just happened to bump into those

Full Disclosure At Deer Camp

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ones, right? But this one was planned, start to finish, consciously planned. And I was it was such a relief when I got to Seattle to be able to tell these guys what I've done. Now, what I was expecting was kind of some soft, kind understanding and some comfort. Oh man! He just confronted me with the ugliness, not only of what I'd done, but of this pattern of lying, all this deceit, just how ugly it was. And then they told me, okay, you got to tell your wife, and I went, no way, absolutely no, absolutely not. You do not understand. You don't understand how vulnerable Allie is, you don't understand the dynamics of our relationship, you don't know the destruction it'll cause. No, absolutely not. I said, you owe it to her, you owe it to yourself, you know, I get free, you don't tell her. I wrestled and wrestled with that. Then they said, I said, look, I will tell my closest guys in Samson, and I'll tell the members of my board. I'll tell the guys who I owe it to tell because I've been lying to them all this time. But I'm not going to make a general announcement, and I and the word better not get out. Because, and I actually said this, this will tell you how sick I was, Drew. I said, the Samson Society is the bridge to recovery for millions of Christian men, and I am the symbol of that bridge. If word gets out that I have relapsed, it will blow up the bridge, and millions of men will perish. But I was convinced it was true. I'm indispensable.

Acting Out Sober And Hitting Bottom

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And I owe it to these people to lie. It's not the first time in my life when I've lied for Jesus' sake, right? But at any rate, they kept it up. So it's Saturday night, I'm absolutely exhausted. I finally decide to call Allie. I decide, all right, I get maybe they're right. Maybe they're right. I need to tell her. So I get her on the phone, she says, How's it going? I says, Man, this is this is it's quite a quite a weekend. I said, Look, when I get back home, I need to tell you something. And she said, Well, last time you started a conversation like that, it was Hooker's. I said, Well, it's it's not Hooker's exactly. She said, just come on home. We'll be okay. And at that moment I knew I had totally misjudged this woman. I had totally discounted the fruit of 27 years of recovery. That there was a foundation there that wasn't there at first disclosure. But this woman has some maturity and some experience. She's she's done a lot of work herself. She understands that it's not about her. And she has a genuine concern for me and my health. And they also told me, Nate, you need to step back from Samson and you need to go to treatment. And I'd never been to treatment, Drew. When I got started, treatment wasn't even a freaking option, right? And I didn't have the money anyway. So I've never been to treatment. So anyway, I'm Just crying my eyes out, trying to. I had a big meeting scheduled for right after. Big right after I canceled that meeting. And trying to drive through tears, and I'm calling the members of my my close friends and the guys on the Samson board, and I call my chairman and say, look, there's a meeting next Tuesday. I'm not going to be there. I can't be there. I have to step back. I've had her, I tell him the story, and I say, Look, I owe you the biggest apology. I dishonored our friendship. I didn't trust you. I'm sorry. And I had a lot of those conversations. And oddly, nobody pulled back. The amazing thing was they all leaned in. And actually, in many cases, our relationship went deeper at that moment. Well, one guy did really get angry. A couple guys, I mean, they were disappointed, but they understood and they s they processed it. One guy did say, I'm pissed at you. He's a good friend. I'm pissed at you. What made you think you couldn't tell me? Don't ever lie to me like that again. And then he said, you know, how much

Confrontation, Confession, And Telling Allie

SPEAKER_02 21:22

is it going to cost to go to treatment? I didn't know how I was going to. And he wrote a big check to help pay for it. So the treatment place I was going to go to, I found it's a very intense, very professional. I couldn't do 30 days. This is a week, but man, it is an intense week with a whole team of therapists and psychiatrists and 16-hour days. They wouldn't accept me until I had a therapist. So I called Roan Hunter, asked for a therapist. I said, Roan, you're my friend. You can't be my therapist. Who would you recommend? He says, Well, my therapist is Eli Mage, and he's and he's a legend. Eli's been around for freaking ever. He knows this territory. He's also very busy. But Roan made the call, and Eli said he would he would see Allie and me for three days of intensive work. So we went to Asheville for that. And then he conferred with the team at PCS in Scottsdale, and I went. And I went and cried for a week, true. And I want to tell you, I hadn't cried in 50 years. More than 50 years. I hadn't cried at my mother's funeral, and I hadn't cried since. I've been told all along that grief is a major part of recovery. And I tried to think my way through grief, but I'd never experienced, never processed, never experienced loss. I hadn't been allowed to as a kid, and then never allowed myself to do it as an adult. Man, it was so deep and so healing. It's amazing, Allie and I, you know, we got so much closer. And I we were close already. But Allie had seen that there'd been kind of a distance, because I was hiding from her, right? And that distance was over. And I I had been humbled. I hadn't been humiliated, but I had been humbled, and I needed that humbling desperately. I also needed to become more emotionally alive and more emotionally available. And all of that happened only because I was finally pushed to the point of desperation by a relapse. Allie now says, and I agree with her, the relapse was the best thing that's happened to us in a long time. It was freaking necessary. I wasn't going to get the help any other way. I was concerned about going public with it. And I waited a year before I told the story on the podcast. My dip friends did caution me not to do it too early. I still had a little bit of trepidation, although I'd gotten so much positive. I'm fine, you know, talking with guys, whether they were my close friends or not, even disclosed, I started disclosing it in newcomer meetings and things like that, small venues. And I found that every time I did, it tended to make the room a little safer and the conversation a little more honest. Yeah. And as it turns out, talking about it on the podcast was a good decision. I will tell you this, I've gotten a lot of visits and a lot of phone calls since that episode aired. People have driven or flown considerable

Stepping Back And Seeking Treatment

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distances to come and tell me things they didn't think they could tell anybody else in order to break a cycle that was killing them. So now I'm actually working on a second book, almost 20 years after the first, a story. I'm writing the story of Allie and me. I want to give hope to other couples, right? That you can actually more than survive, you can thrive in recovery. So I'm working on a memoir. It's actually an instructional book, inspirational book disguised as a memoir, but I'm telling our story, right? I've decided that the story has to include the relapse. That may come as a disappointment to people who want the Hollywood ending. They want the turn to happen permanently early on, so that we just ride off into the sunset and there's never a problem again. The problem with that is it isn't true. And that fable sets up so many people for despair. So it's going to be a good book. It'll be funny and it'll be heart-touching and it'll be informative and it'll be tragic and it'll be true.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

It'll be true. Thank you, Nate. Yeah. How are you feeling right now after sharing? Oh, I feel good. For anyone listening to this in a leadership position, secretly wrestling with how much to share, who to share it with, what's going to happen if I share? It seems like there are so many leaders who are wondering, how do I be vulnerable? Can I be vulnerable? Is it a good idea? What would you say to that person? Be careful.

SPEAKER_02 26:52

You don't cast your pearls before swine, right? You don't have to go out and make a grand announcement to everybody necessarily. You don't have to climb up on the cross and volunteer for crucifixion. But if you are in recovery, there are safe places and safe people. It's absolutely fatal to continue to try to do the impossible and climb out of that ditch alone. And actually, I mean, we live in this crazy upside-down gospel world. Our instincts are wrong. It's only things that die that live. Whoever tries to preserve his life will lose it. Whoever tries to preserve his ministry will lose it. I was absolutely haunted by the story of Rabbi Zacharias, who managed to maintain a reputation all the way through death, but the whole thing blew up when word got out after he passed. And it was absolutely tragic. He didn't believe it at the time, but I know there were men in Robbie's life who he could have told. And it wouldn't have destroyed his ministry.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

At what point should a leader go public?

SPEAKER_02 28:10

I really leaned on my brothers for that. I have a bit of an exhibitionist streak in me. And having told the initial story of my addiction

Grief, Tears, And Real Healing

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so many times, I can sometimes get a bit of a perverse out of making people uncomfortable because I know this is surgery that's desperately needed anyway. So I kind of have that heartless surgeon's approach, right? Yeah, I don't think there's a one-size fits-all story. But I think, first of all, I think it's a mistake to try to get forgiveness from everybody by making this public apology right away as a way to get everybody's forgiveness. We've seen a lot of guys make that mistake. I don't know. The church at large is not really good at forgiving failed leaders. I think it's absolutely essential to face fully the facts of what you've done, how it went down, who it affected. I'll tell you what, Andrew and Trent were right. I needed to step back. I needed to go to treatment. And then I needed some time to internalize what I learned in treatment, to walk it out, you know, to get back solid on a good road before I stepped back into leading Samson. So I did, I stepped back. It was just kind of my unexplained absence from podcast for a while, and Aaron Porter just carried. We had some I had a bunch of episodes already in the can, so they went for a while, and then Aaron just took over. And I just stopped going out and speaking, and I just stayed here and did my work. Here's the thing. I got reckless, man. Before the slip. Early on in Samson, I had a policy. Nate never travels alone. And so Allie had the first shot at every trip, and if she didn't want to go, then one of my brothers went with me. And I maintained that policy for, oh, 15 years. And then I started, you know, it started to get expensive. Allie couldn't always go with me, and it wasn't always easy to find a guy, and it got expensive, and I was doing fine. So I dropped that policy. I uh was not good at making myself visible and accountable. There were times when nobody knew where I was. And I was okay with that. I excused it. Having had this wake-up call, I mean, when I got back, we put the old, I put, I put the old guardrails back in place. I don't travel alone anymore. I've got 360, you know, life 360 on my phone and two different circles, I got friends watching me, I got my family watching me. Everybody knows where I am at all times. And I feel safe with that. By the time I was stable, and when I knew that my disclosing it publicly would be good for the public and not for me. I wasn't doing it for

Guardrails, Accountability, And Return

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personal reasons. I wasn't doing it to try to salvage a reputation. I was doing it to try to strengthen a brotherhood and encourage other people to some badly needed healing. Then it was an appropriate time for me to say it.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

I can see how going public with a relapse or a pattern of secrecy could be serving a leader's own agenda rather than for the good of others.

SPEAKER_02 31:46

Right.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

Yeah. So you had to discern that.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't just my discernment. I mean, Allie was in on the decision. My close friends were in on the decision.

SPEAKER_01 31:58

What did Allie need from you after she found out?

SPEAKER_02 32:03

It was amazing, man. She just needed me to be close. That's all. She knew I was wrecked. She knew I was sorry. The crazy thing is she didn't need anything. She just wanted me.

SPEAKER_01 32:20

And it would have been okay if she needed something else.

SPEAKER_02 32:26

She didn't ask me to, you know, put the location thing on my phone, but I wanted to give it to her, right? She didn't ask me to, you know, put my my old guardrails back in place. But I was already, you know, wanting to do that. How beautiful that she wanted you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The instinct to hide is an old instinct. It runs deep. Because I'll tell you what, I grew up in Christian environments that were not safe to tell the truth. I learned to lie out of self-preservation. We're wired for survival. I learned to lie to survive. And there's still this part of my brain that says it's too dangerous to tell the truth. You have to lie to survive. But I live in a world today where it is not necessary for me to lie, and I forgot that. You know, I go to a wonderful church, but I did tell the pastor, and I got kind of this. The way he responded was just a little, I thought he doesn't really get it. But I have entire communities. I got the Samson Society community. It's safe. Husband material, I know, is safe. I'm in a pure desire group. It's safe. I don't have to lie anymore. I don't have to lie to my wife. I don't have to lie to my friends. I don't have to lie to myself. And unfortunately, I forgot that for a while.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

What does it feel like to be telling the truth again?

Safe Spaces Versus Comfortable Spaces

SPEAKER_02 34:10

Oh, it's uh yeah. Yeah. But anybody who's, you know, has experienced getting honest knows what a great relief it is.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

And your fears didn't come true? Living a lie is a hard thing to do. The bridge is still intact.

SPEAKER_02 34:25

Yeah. And you know what? Even if I had lost some relationships, regaining my integrity would have been worth it. But the amazing thing is, I really didn't lose any relationships. If anything, they got deeper.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

That's what I see in husband material as well. Whenever one of our leaders gets to the point where there's something really significant that they need to disclose to the community, the outpouring of love is just an avalanche of appreciation.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

Yeah, yeah. We have to keep pushing back against this diabolical, perfectionistic, demanding version of recovery that in the end is legalistic, that is ungracious, that takes us away from the healing love of a compassionate and understanding Heavenly Father.

SPEAKER_01 35:27

Amen. Yeah. A father who says, Come home. Yeah. Yeah.

unknown 35:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:35

Just like Ali told you, come home. That's what it was. Maybe God was speaking through her.

SPEAKER_02 35:41

Yeah. You think? Holy slow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

And I also appreciate you sharing your experience at the intensive because sometimes we need to be confronted.

SPEAKER_02 35:56

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't like to be confronted, but my ego is strong enough. There are times when I require it.

SPEAKER_01 36:04

And there's a way of confronting with compassion and curiosity. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:11

I really was resistant when they came at. They were not being cruel, but they were being firm. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

And sometimes if I had to critique my own community, we could probably grow in being firm.

SPEAKER_02 36:30

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Because we don't want to become comfortable.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

Right, right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

I think there's a difference between a safe space and a comfortable space. Very good. That is a vital distinction right there. Yeah. And something I've learned from Andrew Bauman is maybe we should call it a brave space. Because it won't be comfortable.

SPEAKER_02 36:53

Yeah. I always want to think that it's my brilliant ideas and it's my great successes

Boasting In Weakness And Hope

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that are going to make a difference in this world. When Paul always talks about being a fool for Christ, and this idea, as it turns out, it's my failures that are most useful.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

That's true. Right? He says, I will boast about my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may rest on me. Not my strengths. Yeah, not my performance. Yeah. Not my good morals or Christian reputation. It's like, no. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:39

I'm making a run at that chief of sinners thing that Paul has claimed. You know what I mean? Yeah. And he was still an apostle.

SPEAKER_01 37:51

Yeah. Thank you for your vulnerability and your leadership in how you have responded to this relapse.

SPEAKER_02 38:00

I'm in the company of good men who helped me do the right thing.

SPEAKER_01 38:04

Well, guys, if you want to connect with Nate and if you want to go to the Samson Society and find more safe spaces to be truly honest and vulnerable so that you can be held, so that you can be healed, go down to the links in the show notes and always remember you are God's beloved son. And you, he is well pleased.