Welcome And Why We Exist

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

Thank you for listening to my interview with Morgan Snyder. He is the author of Becoming a King, The Path to Restoring the Heart of a Man, and the founder of Become Good Soil. And our conversation on sonship, initiation, castration, and formation has changed me. The Holy Spirit spoke to me through this interview, and I have written down some of Morgan's words and placed them on my desk so I can see them every day. There is so much to learn from Morgan. There is so much to receive from God through him and through his story. You are going to hear what it looks like to move beyond intellectual theology into an embodied, secure attachment with God, how dormant parts of your soul that have fallen asleep can be fathered and recovered through initiation and apprenticeship. You'll hear Morgan share some vulnerable parts of his story, including his sexual story, and why real strength stems from dependency on Christ instead of self-help. But what impacted me most from this conversation was hearing how Morgan has now structured his life so that it reflects the kingdom of God. And I hope this episode speaks to you like it did to me. A reminder: the views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Husband Material Ministries. Featuring a guest is not an endorsement of their beliefs, methods, products, or services, or any content they may have created or promoted. We believe in discernment. So, as with any resource, listen thoughtfully, test everything against your own wisdom, take what's helpful, and leave the rest behind. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to Husband Material. I am absolutely delighted to have Morgan Snyder with us. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

Drew, thank you so much for the honor of getting to be in the space with men that are really curious and brave. And as I said offline, Drew, I'm so moved by your work in the world, by what you've stewarded, by who you've chosen to become, and the long obedience in the same direction, as Peterson would say. But but that word obedience is precarious because it's from the heart that you do this work. And I see it in your life and the lives of many that you have impacted. And so you have my attention, your work has my attention, your community has my attention, and it truly is an honor to be with you for some conversation.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Thank you so much.

Sonship As The Lens For Life

SPEAKER_01 2:44

So much of your work talks about sonship. What does that really mean?

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Boy, we could spend some time there, and it's worthy of campfire and a really good tour of something. That's the question. That's the question, Drew. You know, C.S. Lewis, I remember a quote from him where he said, I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun that has risen. Not only because I saw the sun rise, like we both did today here in Colorado Springs in the eastern plains, but by it I see everything else. And you think about that. Like this morning, my my little monastic cell, which is very small, in my suburban home, it looks east. And I saw the sunrise. This brilliant fireball crested the eastern plains. But right now, it's by the light of the sun, I see everything else. And in some ways, that's where what I have come to believe and become about sonship: that to become God's son and to be fathered by God and to be mothered by God is the deepest expression of the human experience. And therefore, to live in it is the pathway of human flourishing. It is the lens, the orientation, the interpretive grid. I have grown to see everything. My son is working, uh he's 22. He's young life, Malibu, running ropes course as a volunteer, and he's adulting. He's becoming his own man. And I don't mean that in independence from God, but independent from me. And he's gone to college and taken a gap initiation year, and he's moved away from me. And yet he knows I have his back 100%. He knows that he's a breath away from any need that he has. He knows that I have two phones, and one is my mission phone, and the other is my burner phone, my family phone. And my mission phone gets turned off often. But my family phone only does if I'm in the backcountry, and then I have a Garmin inreach. And that family phone is Abigail and Joshua and Cherry and my intercessors. And so I live in a posture of wild creativity, ready to serve him, ready to, and Abigail as well. But that idea that like they know sonship, it's in their body, something of I'm okay. I have enough. It's not up to me. And from that place of secure attachment with a mother and a father, I can take enormous risk. And so I think in some ways it's just the most fundamental nature of what it means to be human. And it's something that is profoundly assaulted. And it's something that God is advocating for its full recovery. And that gets me really excited. It didn't happen for me until into Christianity and way into my adulthood. So it gives me great hope.

Initiation And The Hidden Years

SPEAKER_01 6:19

And sometimes, in order to really experience that sonship and not just understand it intellectually, we need initiation. What does that look like?

SPEAKER_02 6:32

Yeah, that word is precarious, right? What is initiation? But what I would name is for most of human history, and depending on how you measure how long humans have been here, still in any framework, at least 95% of human existence built in, baked into culture, were certain things that aren't baked into culture anymore. It was primarily an agrarian culture, right? It was a non-modern, non-technical. So, Drew, when we think about that, people were dependent on each other. The community had to come first. Fathers and sons and mothers and daughters worked in close proximity with each other. There were intergenerational communities, and there were these marks of movement of God in someone's life, these rites of passage that actually were baked into culture. And there were in many cultures historically these rites of passage, R-I-T-E, were moments, markers of celebration, of you have passed through some phase, some stage of formation, and you carry that with you into the moor. And I love Paul's language in this in Philippians because it's fascinating. He was a highly skilled man. He's incredibly talented, incredibly gifted. And he used it to hate non-Jews, right? The scriptures say in Acts, he literally drug women by their hair out into streets because of their devotion to Jesus. And then he has this Damascus moment where he is brought down to utter humility. He doesn't eat, he doesn't drink, he can't see for three days. And so this powerful man is broken. He comes to Christ, there's this conversion. But the part we don't hear about is there's 14 years of silence.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

The hidden years.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

Yes. And think about your life, Drew, like how much God has done in the last 14 years, right? Like you think about your sons and your story and these young people becoming teenagers, like tweenagers. It's so holy. Well, 14 years we don't hear anything. And then he comes out, and things have happened in what we would say his formation. He has become initiated, so much so that he's actually able to articulate his brokenness. He has what you know you name it in your book, like that deep attunement, awareness. He says, What I want to do, I notice that I don't do. And what I don't want to do, I notice that I do. And it's naming there are two people within me, and there's a civil war. And he goes on in his language at 62 years now. We're moving through his lifespan in three minutes. He says, I've become a certain kind of person through these years of process of formation. Whether I'm well fed, and I know what it is to be well fed, people have given me beautiful meals, or I'm hungry. I know what it is to be hungry, whether I'm clothed or naked, whether I'm satisfied or in one, wherever I am and whatever I have, I can make it through anything in the one that makes me who I am. And so, Drew, what I love is initiation isn't independence, it's a declaration of dependency. He is declaring in the text, I am utterly dependent on God. And in the one who makes me who I am, I can handle everything. And Father Richard Rohr has beautiful language for this Philippians passage where he says, Now that I have become initiated, I am ready for anything anywhere. And so what I believe is when you meet a man, when you meet Drew Boa, when you meet Morgan Snyder, you meet a partly initiated man. You meet a man that's becoming more wholehearted, more mature, and more united in the one who makes us. I love in your book you use this word, I believe, but it was like a sense of homeness. It's the embodied experience of coming home. And so I believe that every man and woman is being led on an engendered arc, an orientation, a narrative arc, an interpretive grid that all of our life is a coming home. And all of our life is initiation. And so much of the importance in this moment then is for ourselves and others. How do we recover these rites of passage, these markers of initiation that say that mattered? God was in that. You're not the same person you were before that. And it's forming you to becoming who God meant when he meant you. And so initiation really becomes the framework of how I see all of life. And it really helps to put every small story, no matter how big it is, in the context of God's larger story. And then everything, everything becomes meaningful and sacred. And that's the magic of living in the kingdom of God, even when you go to Costco or Starbucks.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

I love this perspective of initiation as all of life. And it's a much bigger story than maybe some of the smaller ones we've settled for.

Sexuality, Shame, And Curiosity

SPEAKER_01 12:14

And one of those smaller stories in our lives is often a sexual story.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

What does sonship and initiation have to do with your sexual story?

SPEAKER_02 12:26

Oh man, we're in the deep end of the pool, buddy. Like this is the depth. And I know that you live here, which is very brave and very beautiful. I was at a swimming pool at a neighbor's house when I was maybe 10. And we were playing diving board. You know, I was just a kid, pure boyhood, thinking about what snacks we're going to get, where we're going to ride our bicycles, going off the diving board. Do I do a can opener or a cannonball? And I had to pee. And I was getting good at not peeing in the pool. And so I ran to the bathroom and I opened the door, and there is a woman on the toilet with her legs open, and I saw a vagina for the first time in my life. And I was not prepared for it. And I was not prepared. She was a high school age, so she was a goddess to a 10-year-old, right? I saw Eve. And William Blake says the naked body of a woman is too much of eternity for the soul of a man to take in. And Drew, I remember that moment. And in reading your book, and you you have that brilliant checklist of did you have these experiences? No safe place to talk about porn. No place to tend to your heart, feeling like it's magical, it's it's mystical, and it's secretive. And so I remember seeing a goddess, Eve. And I remember thinking about her body for days and weeks. And nobody was there to say, that's what's right with you. You were designed to respond. Your strength was should be evoked in the presence of beauty. What you want about her is God. You're looking for something that she's the biggest mythic picture that you've ever encountered. And instead, it gets hidden, it gets dark, and then as you talk about shame, just comes in and becomes the the narrative, right? And so what's fascinating is Sam Jolman, as you and I both know, his his amazing book, you know, The Sex Talk He Never Got, he he he he names this truth that sex is a want, but it's not a need. And and we really do think it's a need. And I would say the greatest shift in my marriage was when I consented to and went through a process and became the kind of person that didn't need sex and was able to renounce this posture of being a consumer of my wife's goods and all the subtle manipulation and the dance I do to look like a good man, but ultimately it's to fulfill a need. And so sexuality and masculine initiation are inseparable because sexuality embodies the window to the deepest things that make us human. I have infinite need, and my infinite need can only be matched by God's infinite desire and capacity to meet that need, right? And so to come home to the reality that He delights in meeting my needs. And so what I want in that vagina, in that goddess at that swimming pool, was what I was made to want. And it was something like beauty, tenderness, vulnerability, openness, reception, a place for my strength to be welcomed, risk, connection, friendship, warmth. God, I'm describing Jesus of Nazareth, the Holy Spirit and the Father, right? So I think that it's it's depth and it's mystery, but ultimately what I've come home to is they're inseparable. And so, like you share in your book, to have a posture of curiosity around my sexuality rather than indictment, to have exceeding kindness rather than cruelty or even judgment, it is the beginning of the curiosity of where does it fit? That that might be a place that I give 10, 20, or 30 years to that question to lead me deeper into the heart of God. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

This is the kind of wise, tested, trustworthy support and guidance that we all need in order to become mature, in order to grow into the character of Jesus. Like we need exactly what you just said to interpret our sexuality.

SPEAKER_02 17:51

And I want to say, Drew, like it's available. And so I think I want to just name and hope for our listeners like this has come for me from doing the work of becoming a student of my brokenness, my sin, my lack, and ultimately receiving God through men and through women and through community and direct discipleship and counseling and deliverance and integration and over by day and by decade, and this is the work of 30 years. And so, and I'm not there. I still have much more to to to go. But would you agree that this is something that's been cultivated, not something that you were simply born into?

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Absolutely. I haven't met anyone who was born in the Garden of Eden or who had what we need to sexually develop as God intended. I really appreciate you emphasizing the deeper, slower, more lasting work of ongoing formation.

Castration And Dormant Strength

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Some of the language that has really stood out to me from your material is the idea of castration.

SPEAKER_02 19:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Maybe as almost like the opposite of initiation, or the opposite of going into the world and being able to take on anything because we're secure. What does it mean to be castrated as a man?

SPEAKER_02 19:24

We should go to a ranch and watch it happen to a couple of young bulls. There's nothing, there's nothing like a little uh metaphor, you know. We all know what it feels like that moment of emasculation. And Lewis talks about it, where he says, we castrate the gelding and bid them be fruitful. And what that means, in words smarter than me, is we remove the organ and demand the function. So we say, take away the power, the strength, that thing that makes a man dangerous for good, and then ask him to rise up in courage, and heroism, and sacrifice and chivalry. But you can't have one without the other. And so what happens is men become atrophied, parts of them, and this is where the parts work, and I know that you dive deep into this. There can be part of me that's mature, alive even. And then there's a part of me that's maybe gone to sleep, whether it's surrendered or whether it's been harmed. And the message was that's dangerous. And it's like having your hand in a cast, you heal the bone, but when it comes out, those muscles have atrophied because they haven't been utilized. And so what we get when we meet a man often is parts of him are mature and parts of him are immature. They're atrophied because he has been castrated. And that's not to be derogatory. It's actually a very demonstrative term that the strength that once was in him has gone to sleep. It's dormant and it must be recovered. And God's work is to recover the whole of a man. And so that's where you know, every generation loses the gospel. Every generation is charged with its recovery, Chesterton said. And so the evangelical movement recovered some things of we can come home to Christ at the beginning of a prayer of confession and repentance in turn. But we lost the power of the apprenticeship. And Dallas Willard goes as far as say the greatest problem in the world, in all the earth, and we know a lot of problems, is that Christians have not come become disciples. Because discipleship, apprenticeship, masculine and feminine initiation. Into God. Use whatever term you want, is the process where the whole person comes home to the whole person of God. And so I was a Christian. I had a radical conversion in college. And it was passionate and it was real. And I left a life and I was born into a new life. I got married, pursued a woman, started recovering some of my sexual integrity. And then at one point we bought a townhome. We got married and the toilet was broken. And Drew, I grew up in a house that I was outsourced. My dad grew up poor. He became a rich doctor as sort of his salvation strategy. And so he was gone, and there was money to hire people. Well, I was not under that money. That money, you know, I had my new life, my own life, and I didn't have the money to get to hire someone, and I didn't know how to fix the toilet. And this was before YouTube, before the internet. And I was scared. I had an overreaction to the circumstances. And anytime there's an overreaction or an under-reaction, it's shining light on some part of our emasculated soul. And so I knew my overreaction was telling me something. And so I remember praying. I didn't even, I knew Jesus, but I didn't know God as Father. I never used the word father in prayers, which is interesting. But I knew what I needed was a dad. And I was scared and I was angry at how I scared I was. And what I didn't have compassion for at the time was I was 25, but there's an eight-year-old boy inside of me that never learned how to use tools. And there's a 13-year-old that never learned how to use a weapon, and a 16-year-old that never really learned how to read a book. And in love. And there was a short old gray-haired man, he looked like Yoda. And I he saw me confused. And I said, Sir, my toilet's broken. And there's a big box on the back of it that has stuff on it I don't understand. But I need help. And he looked at me and he said, son, I know what's wrong and I can help you. And I bought the parts. And through his help, I fixed the toilet. And that's one of hundreds of moments of going into the emasculated parts of me and healing the whole, initiating the whole of the man. And so, how do we recognize the parts of us that have gone to sleep? And how do we invite God to father us in every dimension and the places that we are most afraid of, the places that in relationship with people we feel the youngest and the most afraid or the most prone to get big and pose are often the trailheads for where we've been emasculated and where God wants to meet us most.

SPEAKER_01 25:06

Amen. I have no idea if this is onto something or not. But I wonder if part of your reaction to the toilet was also related to the other story you told about walking into that bathroom.

SPEAKER_02 25:25

I've never, ever thought about, and I've never told that story of seeing that woman ever in my life that I know publicly. That's wild. Because they're both dealing with a beautiful woman that I don't know what to do with, and I don't know how to handle this moment with her, right? I never, ever thought about that. I'm gonna have to ask the Holy Spirit like what's going on with that. That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Interesting. I mean, but that is so illustrative of all of our stories, you know, of like there's more to discover. And we all have those young places.

SPEAKER_02 26:03

And so what do you do with them? How do you recognize part of you is uninitiated? And what do you do with your soul when you notice that?

Powerlessness As Strength Through Dependency

SPEAKER_01 26:20

Well, the 12-step recovery movement historically has said that the first step is to admit that you're powerless. And I hear something very different in your writing that we actually need to find our power in a process of formation.

SPEAKER_02 26:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:45

So, like, what's your take on the idea that I have to admit that I'm powerless and that my life has become unmanageable?

SPEAKER_02 26:53

The 12-step program has been profoundly helpful to so many people. Like, it's an extraordinary tool for many to bring forth some of their work to become restored. I'm a huge fan, advocate. It's time-tested, it's community-based, which is so precious and precarious in a hyper-individualized culture. And even when we talk about sexuality, none of this work can be done in isolation, period. Period. Me, Jesus, in my Bible is not sufficient to heal my sexuality. It's helpful, but it's not sufficient. And so if we were with some people that were Christ followers and deeply in the 12-step work, I think they would name that it's semantics. It's the use of language, because that declaration of I'm powerless, what I understand that to mean is in my own power, in my own strength. That with, as I said, that declaration of dependency is our greatest strength. I believe that masculinity is strength through dependency. And that's why Paul says, I'm ready for anything anywhere. That can be really arrogant. You go, I don't want to hang out with that guy, but that's not the end of the sentence. He says, I'm ready for anything anywhere in the one, out of union, from abiding. I have an artesian well. I will never run dry, right? That's why Jesus can say, Jesus was hungry. Jesus was thirsty. I feel like it's very fair from the text to believe that he was pretty disappointed in his knucklehead brothers that just keep like, they can't even hit the low bar of uh on a human level of like understanding the gospel of the mustard seed and the fishes and the loaves, and they're complaining and bickering and fighting over who should be first when he's modeling last and how they'll be fed, where their food will come, when he models, it's always provided. He is hungry. He has a lonely ache. He has a needy ache. And he meets a goddess. He meets Eve at the well. She's available. She's evocative, just based on the context of her story. It's very fair to say she knows how to get from men what she needs and use their strength. And he ends up not being a consumer, but instead from overflow, he's able to give her the gift of life because he has this well spring, artesian spring, Peterson calls it, that never runs dry. So even in his hunger, even in his thirst, he's okay. He has more than enough. And so that idea of powerlessness is I can't do it on my own. I confess I can't figure it out. I can't solve this, I can't think my way through it. I can't use money or time or power to overcome this deficiency. I'm bankrupt. Dallas Willard says, if you want to find Jesus, his address is the end of your rope. I love that. That's good. That's right. So Dallas is effectively saying Jesus waits for the place where we are powerless to say, I am the power. And that's where Ephesians says this insurpassable power. And so what my curiosity with that is what if it's meant to lead us away from a self-salvation project? Ultimately, the self-help movement is centered in self, whereas the kingdom of God is centered on God. God is the epicenter, God is the power, God is the source. And when we fall into that, we have a strength that's unstoppable. And so even in my sin, even in my shortcomings, even in my failures as a parent, as a husband, as an organizational leader, which I'm failing every day, it's no longer an indictment. Because that need is the place that I can most be curious and turn to how God wants to be my strength. So I end up actually being quite powerful, right? Moving towards my wife sexually this morning in some beautiful strength because I'm not consuming her. I'm able to move sexually towards her because I don't need it. Five years ago, which was 20 years into our marriage, we were at my the low for me. And I remember this decision of who do I want to be in this marriage? And my disappointment is directly correlated to me and my need that I'm attaching to this marriage that's unfulfilled. And I made some really radical changes and did the slow and steady work. And now we're not only in love, but we just really like each other. We laughed together and we're at our all-time best. And it's it's the slow work of apprenticeship. And so that is harnessed strength. That's strength through dependency, that's declaration of dependency. It's a different, it's a biblical version of powerlessness. That's what I'd say.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Wow. A biblical version of powerlessness and the true power that comes from God.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

Right. You think of your life, Drew, like you can do hard things. I just look at your ministry, your work in the world, all the visibility that I have of you. Like you can do hard things. And we get trained to do hard. Like this world's hard. Like there's no easy days, right? The Navy SEALs say the only easy day was yesterday. I mean, you spend a lot of time like outdoors doing certain things, physical adventures. Like suffering is part of life. But what I've noticed, I've been trained to do hard. Where I want to live is impossible. And here's the distinction. There's no like bait my chest and false heroism. I can do hard things. I can manage my schedule and come through for so many people heroically. That's really hard, and I can do it. But the message of my life and my wound is I am loved when I come through. Fundamentally, in my false self, the core of my ego and my life without God is I find love when I come through. So I hate disappointing people, and I'm the most responsible person I know to a fault. Like I don't say that proudly. I say that as a confession. My sin is responsibility. And so the impossible thing for me is to disappoint people without explanation. That's impossible. And so I don't want the hard life that I can live in sophisticated versions of my ego and my false self. I want the impossible life where I can walk away from people's needs, like Jesus did in Mark chapter one, and actually be okay because I trust that what they need is God. And I'm not the savior. I'm just one person. That's impossible, and that's where I'm living.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

And that is absolutely amazing at multiple levels. Can you say more about what that meant for you this past year?

Endings, Elders, And The Second Half

SPEAKER_02 34:56

Yeah. So where I find myself, I'm 50 years old, been married for 25 years to my bride, Sherry, have two awesome children, 19 and 22, Abigail and Joshua. And I have been in service alongside John Eldridge and Wild Ahart for 26 years. I met him when I was my son's age. And we, he was my professor, and he introduced me to a gospel big enough to live in and inner healing and spiritual warfare and masculine initiation. And I came home. It was the biggest store I'd ever come into. And so I asked him if I could be discipled. And next thing you know, I came in with him and built Wild at Heart, the organization, and served there and was formed there, and then began offering in ways. I took the low seat at the table, but over time God made it impossible to stay in that place. And I began teaching my passion of the thirsty core apprentices, people that are organizing their entire life around their apprenticeship to Jesus. And so I've had the last 15 years, I spent my life with the thirsty few. And what I noticed was as Americans, as Westerners, and as men, we are particularly terrible at endings. We're good at starting stuff. And it takes, you know, something audacious to start it, something of a tenacity to sustain it. But it takes something like sacrificial love to end things. And Jesus showed me that season was coming to an end. And there's a long story behind it, but work I had to do to get to that point where he said, this was part of your apprenticeship, but I actually have to be uprooted out of Wad at Heart and replant alongside it what's been entrusted to me. My season of service to John is over. And my season of partnership as a outpost, become good soil alongside the outpost of Wad at Heart has begun. And we're stepping into the second half of life. And so what we notice is I asked the question for 20 years, where are the fathers? Where are the fathers? Because I was so lacking in that place of sonship. And that was my journey of becoming a son. And I noticed at 50 Drew, a different question emerged. It was something like, where are the fathers for the fathers? Where are the sages? How do we become those kind of people that are the elders, the fathers, the stabilizing presence, the non-anxious presence for a community, the kind of people that have enough, that are okay, that are decentering themselves, that have been filled by God and formed like an hourglass filled with sand, and now can be turned over and spend the rest of their life pouring out into others. How do I spend the best strength I have left at the sort of peak of my momentum, career, influence, as it were, and instead of becoming a bigger deal, deleverage and serve the next generation and cultivate that the what I believe is the greatest form of maturity in the body and that siblinghood, where I can turn to the younger brothers and sisters and say, I'm here in service, that Trinitarian model of how can I be of service? And I couldn't find those. I followed older men for the last 20 years, and and the my peers have done the work for 20 years and they have matured. But a lot of those older men plateaued. And I see them still in some identity crisis, not all, but many, because our Western world is so much about up and to the right more and more. And we have a crisis of identity, and we don't have a culture that honors elders and esteems those to say, your greatest service is in your great is in your final years, and it's to be the wise elders at the gate. And so I'm in this macro transition to the second half of life where I'm shifting from those years of becoming a king to orienting my soul to becoming a sage. I don't know that I'll ever get there, but I know that that's my direction. And I've positioned myself where I don't need money and I don't need to sell books, and I don't need to make a name for myself or get something going. But I know my vocational call is to be a warrior shepherd and to be relational and live on a human scale with these people in this place and to be available where Christ actually increases in me and I decrease. And so, all that to say, that was prologue to say the Jubilee year. You know, the 50th year biblically is a year of a holy rest where there's this great redistribution of wealth and forgiveness of debts and free of slaveries, or freedom to slaves and land going back to its original owners and this great resting of land and people and animals. And it's a practice that's been lost, but it's meant to be the way of being in the world. We were meant to be people who live from Sabbath, from overflow and not for Sabbath, that our apprenticeship begins with step A, and that's God coming for us, not step B, us loving God. It's being loved by God. So we're meant to practice it every week. We're meant to have a particular celebration every seven years, and seven times seven years on the 49th year is the deepest Jubilee. And so I just risked it. And I said, if it's biblical, it's practical. I'm gonna try. And I only found three or four people that ever did it. It was really ballsy. And financially, I didn't know if I could do it, but I said, I need to recover the ancient path, and this is the next step. And so I stopped everything that I possibly could. I entered into a posture of soul's rest, and it was so un-American, unmasculine, un-Western. And my neighbors and my friends still don't understand it. I don't really understand it, but it was holy. It was a recovery of something, and it actually set up a way of being and normalizing the second half of life for me to be a man who lives from overflow. And it's possible, but it's radical, and it's never meant to be done alone. And so I'm just coming out of that. And there's lots of stories of what I wish it could have been that it wasn't. And also God meets us right where we are, and He knows what we need more than we need it. And it was in many ways, therefore, perfect for what I needed.

SPEAKER_01 42:10

That's incredibly beautiful. My heart burns within me as I hear you talk for anyone who's listening to this, feeling like part of them is coming alive as we talk about sonship and initiation and fathers of the fathers and being able to step into the power of being powerless.

Jubilee Rest And Practical Next Steps

SPEAKER_02 42:31

Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 42:32

Where would you like to invite people to take a next step?

SPEAKER_02 42:35

Well, Drew, first off, I love what you're doing. For men, for wives, like I hope every woman reads your book because it's so humble to choose to come to the center of another person and understand oh, I don't think that way. That's really helpful to me in learning how to love. And so there's so many amazing resources out there. But the work that I'm entrusted with, uh, becoming a king, is the published book that I've uh written. And I really think it's worth the time to immerse yourself in it. And the spoiler is it's an invitation to a decade of organizing your life around being apprenticed to Christ. And I just did a recording of a podcast with two men in 2016. They were part of our 80-person class at our Become Good Soil Intensive that committed to a decade. And now it's 2026, a decade later, and I interviewed them and I said, It's a decade. What's the fruit? And I surprised them and I got audio recordings of their wives reflecting on the decade, and I played it for them in the podcast. They were wrecked. It it works. You will know it by its fruit. And so I would encourage people to consider because. And then the Become Good Soil podcast that was born out of the very first small, intimate, intensive 14, 15 years ago, where we took 12 men, we wrestled with these questions, we sat at the feet of wise older guides, and we consented to do the work. And so the podcast began this slow invitation to deeper and deeper apprenticeship. And so for men that are really thirsty, I invite them to start at number one from 14 years ago and listen to one a week. And there's, you know, over 200 that are very curated. But Cherry and I just finished a beautiful series on the foundations of our faith of as we're replanting Become Good Soil, which incubated inside Wild at Heart and now is standing alongside. So I think the podcast and the book is a good place to start. But the last thing that I would add to that, as you talk about in your book, your BOA acronym. I love it. Breathe, observe, attune. Where you start is where you are. Because there's no place that God wants to meet us more than right here. It's not our past and perhaps regrets. It's not our future with any anxieties. The present place is the place that God is alive and active. And what's happening in your life, in my life, Drew, in your life, in every listener's life, is the best and holiest thing that could be happening for the apprenticeship that God has for the formation into our full flourishing. It doesn't mean that we may or may not have wanted to choose this moment, but in God's heart, in his intention, in his dynamic sovereignty, this moment is perfect. It has the potential to be the best and holiest thing. And so that idea of breathe, just slow down for a moment. My encouragement would be after this podcast, do nothing for five minutes except breathe and observe. What do you notice? You notice your heart burning within you. I believe that's the Holy Spirit wanting to bring attention, right? So before we race to something else, what has our attention? And then attuning to God. God, how do you want to meet with me in this particular reality? And that cultivates that conversation with God, that relationship with God. The thing God loves most is access to our soul. And so whether it's with you know husband material in your book, or whether it's become good soil and becoming a king, the work is to see God seeing us. And so it begins.

SPEAKER_01 47:07

Amen. That's amazing. Guys, you can find all of the links to becoming a king, the book, Become Good Soil, the podcast, and Morgan's website and his information in the show notes. So go down to the description. I encourage you to take that next

Loved, Seen, And Sent Back Out

SPEAKER_01 47:25

step. Morgan, what is your favorite thing about being God's beloved son?

SPEAKER_02 47:31

Oh man. My favorite thing today. How about that?

SPEAKER_01 47:35

Sounds good.

SPEAKER_02 47:36

My favorite thing today is I had a call this morning that I was going to be at my desk and I have uh several interviews today. I felt like the Holy Spirit said, This one you can do on audio, not video. So put on the AirPods and take a walk. And so I'm walking and I'm talking and praying, and my head's kind of down because I'm praying. And I look up on the sidewalk, and there are six enormous rams, bighorn sheep, rams on the sidewalk. And I've lived in this space in seven years, and I have never seen rams in this place on the sidewalk. And that's my love language. Wild animals. And my favorite thing is God knows us. There's a love language he's cultivating. So even on this day of meetings and interviews, there's this intimacy, there's this nuance, there's this conversation, relationship. And I believe he did that because he knows I love it and he wants me to know he sees me. And it was this feast on this day that just strengthened me. And if I he can be with me today in the ordinary, then in those moments that are extraordinary, I will have practiced a life with God and be show up united with him and not trying to do it on my own. So he's with us here and now. That's something I love.

SPEAKER_01 48:58

Speaking our love languages.

SPEAKER_02 48:59

Amen. Thanks, Drew. I'm so proud of you. Keep going. Let's do this again.

SPEAKER_01 49:04

Thank you, Morgan. Sounds good. Gentlemen, always remember you are God's beloved son, and you, he is well pleased.