Neglect, Marginalization, Orphan Spirit After Hours

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Enjoy it, share it. But most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. In this episode, we're going to get a chance to see Sam baked. Possibly. Yeah, possibly. If you can see with your ears.

Yeah, just close your eyes and imagine. Anyway, we are continuing our episode, Rodney, on The Tools of the Enemy. One of the many, many pillars of the enemy. And today's tool?

Today's tool is neglect, marginalization, and leading into the orphan spirit. Yeah. And so, Sam, you know, when you pick this category and then you bail on us, I don't know.

I partially bailed, if you want the truth. Oh, that's true. You do have a clip and you are here.

I am here and I do have a clip. You know, unlike Andy, who usually just picks the topic and leaves and he doesn't have a microphone. Or Robby, yeah. Yeah, that's why I'm picking on him. Yeah.

Because he didn't have to get off the couch. That's probably not going to happen. I understand. Yeah. This topic, I think Andy is actually the one that talks the most about the orphan spirit. You know, God's really worked in his life on it, but it's something that we all battle when we understand really what it is. It's this understanding that I've got to make it on my own. I got to do it for myself. You know, no one's there for me kind of thing that, especially a father, you know, in the picture. And so, you know, it's something that's very hard to break free from, especially if you've had success on your own.

You know, if you've been able to make it in business and you haven't really had a whole lot of help along the way, then you begin to believe, okay, this is the right way to go. And so I love the clip. We've used it a few times from Seabiscuit. Yeah.

And it's so sets up. I mean, here you've got a really successful trainer and a really successful owner, right? But success is not necessarily, you know, how the world sees it.

No. And when you go back into the story, all three of them in their own way are living as an orphan. And God brings them together in my world anyway, the writer, you know, well life brought them together because it's based on a true story and they became a family unit. And the enemy doesn't like that to stay there. And he tries to get in and divide and force back into the orphan spirit. And so here you have the jockey who is finally forced to share something of his story. And right away, the trainer wants to reject it. And fortunately the owner steps in and speaks some truth into his life.

So we'll go ahead and play it and then come back and talk about it. And if you haven't seen the movie, what happens there is you've got the owner who kind of fathers the Tom, the trainer, you know, a little bit in this, but he's using some of his own words from previous in the movie when the owner's asking him about, you know, should we put this horse down? Cause it has a broken leg. Steve biscuit herself, right? Might've been sea biscuit.

Yeah, I think it was. And he said, no, you don't throw a life away just cause it's banged up a little bit. And so it's reminding. And so it really reminded me of the time that God kind of steps in and reminds me of things so that I can have a good perspective. Sometimes he uses my own words, which is really embarrassing and humbling, you know, just to remind me when, since, you know, this is the whole transparent, you know, we're going deep here.

So when was that Sam? You know, I don't honestly have one right on top of my tongue. I will think of one, hopefully by the end of the show. Oh, so I put you on the spot. You did. Oh, what an opportunity.

That was his entire goal. You left out one word. What's that? Effective. Okay.

When God uses our words against us. Yeah. For me, there's nothing that gets my attention more than when that happens. So, and that is one of the beauties of After Hours to me is, and it was Darren's idea originally that we do this was to actually, you know, when you really get into somebody's story, so often you hear something, wow, that's just like, you know, that happened to me or something and that clicks off something that happened to you. And so it's important that we go deep. It's important that we talk about things, you know, where God was the hero of the story, not me.

Right. And so when I thought about this topic, I was looking for something as where do I feel invisible? And so I actually put that in YouTube, where do I feel invisible? And what came up was this clip from the Chosen series, actually the woman at the well. And if you haven't seen it, why not? I mean, I'm just, oh my goodness, this is some spectacular stuff.

I mean, absolutely spectacular. But what's happened is the writers of the Chosen have taken some liberties to go, okay, we know that she says in the Gospel of John that, you know, he told me everything about me. Well, what was that specifically? Let's go deeper. And so this woman goes, I mean, Jesus actually goes deep with a woman telling her very specifically what those things led to her being marginalized in the community. Everybody thought she was white trash, you know, or, you know. No, I'm trying to think of Sumerian trash, Samaritan trash, you know, however that looked.

I don't know. But anyway, you know, what led to those, and so when Jesus actually shares, if you listen carefully, he starts out describing to her the different marriages that she had. And she hears things that she probably had not put together herself on the reason for certain parts of her behavior. And she realizes that not only were you there all along, but you know me better than I know myself, and you really care, and it's an amazing thing.

So take a listen. The first one was named Ramin. You were a woman of purity who was excited to be married. But he wasn't a good man. He hurt you, and it made you question marriage and even the practice of your faith. Stop it.

The second was Farzad. On your wedding night, his skin smelled like oranges. And to this day, every time you pass by the oranges in the market, you feel guilty for leaving him because he was the only truly godly man you've been with. But you felt unworthy. Why are you doing this? Because I have not revealed myself to the public as the Messiah.

You are the first. It would be good if you believed me. You picked the wrong person. I came to Samaria just to meet you. Do you think it's an accident that I'm here in the middle of the day?

I am rejected by others. I know, but not by the Messiah. And you know these things because you are the Christ. I'm going to tell everyone.

I was counting on it. Spirit and truth. Spirit and truth. It won't be all about mountains or temples.

Soon. Just the heart. You promised.

I promise. Just the heart. I mean, that clip, I mean, it's hard for me not to cry when I listen to it, because there's so much that, like, he is very, very intimate with your story, and he knows things about it that you yourself have never sat back and thought through. And yet, you know, he came all the way to Samaria for use, very specifically in the middle of the day. It was no accident, right? And others may have rejected you, but he didn't.

And as we receive what he has to offer us, then we don't feel so prickly when we try to join in a community, right? But when we still have all these things that we don't know, you know, what's going on there. So in my own story, to be extremely transparent, the other day, for whatever reason, Tammy and I were just out on the lake for a long time talking, and I realized she had never really heard much of the story of what I would call my first marriage, right? Because I got married in the Church of Scientology. It wasn't an official marriage, because they weren't licensed to marry people, but I was married from everybody's standpoint in the Church of Scientology to this woman, and it was a really strange marriage in that the way that it ended was, you know, we had an argument over who was going to buy the dog food in a grocery store, and she wouldn't go in with me, and she got so mad she got out of the car on this on Wilmington Island outside of Savannah, and she just starts walking down the road.

She doesn't have her clothes. She doesn't have nothing, and she will not stop walking, and that's how she left me, and I left her eventually walking because she was clear that she was not getting the car, and that was the last time I saw her. And the sad, heart-wrenching part, and the part that Tammy was trying to understand was she had cheated on with me with at least two, and one of my brother's best friends, and Tammy was like, how could you put up with that? Why would you do, you know, how, you know, and those kind of things rip your heart out, and they rip your heart out.

And fascinatingly, as I was working on my own podcast, I was thinking about this very idea of my own sin, and all of a sudden it hit me like, man, one of the worst things I ever did, and here you go, this is after hours, one of the worst things I ever did, that I often wonder, how in the world could Jesus still love me? He knows I did this, that, you know, when I was in Albuquerque, after my parents left kind of abruptly, and I was there on my own, I had an apartment. I was about 19, and a friend of mine had this girlfriend that was going to become his fiancée, and she was being, had kinds of trouble at home and whatever, and so he said, well, why don't you let her live with you, Robby? You know, and I didn't, at the time, it just seemed completely innocent, really did.

Why don't we have her live with you? Well, that wasn't a good idea. You know, looking back on it, you know, this was not a good idea, okay? And, you know, she had issues.

There's no doubt she had issues, but I must have had them too, because one night I came home drunk, honestly, and I mean, I actually slept with this girl, you know, with this guy's future wife. Man, me, right? Just like what I was so mad at my, and as I started to think about that, wow, you know, there is a certain pattern of this in my life, and like, wow, I didn't realize that, you know, that's me too.

That's me too. And yet, in spite of how unthinkable that is to me, you know, Jesus still is in there slowly unpacking this stuff. So, you know, it's kind of like that story of John Lynch, you know, yeah, that's a lot of sin. But the question is, is that sin separating you from God, right? Are you on your own?

Because if your sin's separating you from God, you're definitely an orphan, okay? Or are you, you know, let's work on it together, kid, and able to share that? And again, the idea here is, you know, what's in your story that really needs to be, you know, worked on? You know, I had a thought just recently about our relationship with God and how He takes us even when we do things like you just described. And I got to thinking about it, that, you know, God acting toward me the way He does would be like me looking outside, and here's this slimy snail crawling up the driveway, leaving the slime trail behind, and I want to be its friend. I want to be its buddy.

I want to take care of it. And that's how, you know, I think, you know, that's how I am in relationship to God. At my very best, I'm a slimy, crawly snail, but He loves me, and He accepts me, wanting me to be better. Yeah, Sam's ready, I think. Yeah, there were a couple things from that clip. You know, Robby, you asked the point, does our sin separate us from God? Well, Jesus entered in right where she was, right?

He routinely did that. Now, He had a conversation He had to have with her and set her heart free, but I think that, you know, that adage, you look at what the fruit of what Jesus did was He was always entering in where people were, right? They didn't have to come to Him. Well, some came to Him, but most of the time He went to them. You triggered one of the most powerful things I've heard in the last 20 years that most people need to get to. I think everybody hears, you know, your sin separates you from God.

That's past tense. If you have Jesus in your life, it doesn't separate you from God. God separated you through Jesus from your sin. So we are free.

We just don't feel like we deserve it. Sort of like the slug. Or my wife, it was wormology, you know, that we end up wanting to tear ourselves down, not remembering that the Creator of the universe loves us so much that He wants us built up. Yeah, it reminds me of a meme I sent you guys that had a horse that was tied to a plastic lawn chair, right? At any point, the horse could just drag that lawn chair away, but that's us with our sin. We see ourselves as tied to it, right? Where God has separated, He set us free, but we don't often live like it.

We don't often live from it in our life. And I do have a memory, as you were talking about, when God used my own words. At some of the worst times in my marriage, when I really, really wanted to give up, God would remind me of things that I had prayed about. I would hear my own words praying to Him, you know, and it was His reminder of, look, this is what you said you wanted. Well, I'm dying of curiosity. Do you remember the words?

Or at least the idea of the words? Just how much I wanted my marriage to work, you know, how much I wanted to love her the way I needed to love her and to move past some of my own issues, you know, and God would just remind me of those prayers. And I'm like, okay, I get it, God, you want me to stick in here, you know, you're not going to let me bail, you know, and, and He did that for a long time. Off and on, probably five years, you know, and then eventually I did feel released to move on and, and all that.

And that's not necessarily a great thing. It was just a different season for me, but there was a long time there that I would pray about, you know, God, should I, should this be it? Should we, you know, separate?

Should we move on from here? And He would, He wouldn't say yes or no. He'd remind me of my prayers. And knowing your family and your story pretty well, as I lived those, some of those years with you, as I think about that right now, wow, the fruit of the amazing fruit of that season, where you were sticking in there. I mean, I realized that you were getting your heart plucked out and everybody that was close to you knew that, but at the same time, God was doing some amazing things in a lot of people's lives as a result of you guys' marriage and as a result of your family of Eli and, you know, and all that was going on.

Yeah, He does. I mean, God's obviously very faithful and takes the little things that we offer and produces fruit out of them, you know, but He did use those years for a lot of good things. And there were some really good things that happened in my life and my ex-wife's life and our family's lives during that time that it wasn't all negative, but, you know, the enemy will spin it and you're at a point where you're just frustrated and ready to give in and feel like you keep running into the same wall. And like I said, it was funny, I would pray hoping for a yes, honestly, because I was just tired and He wouldn't say yes or no. He would just, I would echo the prayers. It was just amazing how you do it. And I'm like, all right, God, I got it. You know, I'll get there, you know.

So Danny's been trying to take off his glasses over there. Do I need to do that? You know, I was thinking about in all my drinking days, part of addiction is just trying to make yourself feel different than you really are. And I realized just sitting here listening that, that it was the loneliness and the abandonment that I felt. And I was trying to ease that pain, you know, having a marriage go down, having a daughter being taken away for four and a half years, a grandpa that I dearly loved, lived a quarter mile away from, died all in that and just that abandonment. And I can remember after getting sober thinking, okay, everything's going to turn around.

But it didn't in a sense because I was still lonely, but I had no medication to medicate it. And I can remember living with my grandmother after my second marriage went down and praying, God, if you've sent me miss right. And I missed her, make me okay with where I'm at.

If not make it so obvious it's her that I can't walk away. And though this, I met miss Michelle Marsh. She wasn't Michelle Marston, but I didn't get a cousin.

Yeah, that would have been weird. But, uh, but you know, it was God, it was God's answer. And, and, you know, Michelle and I were talking and coming back from dads over the weekend and, you know, he compares his relationship to us, to a marriage so much. And I, I, I was able to tell my wife after, you know, boot camps and stuff like that is that, you know what, that I have come to realize that either you really, really, really do love me or you're dumb as a brick because you stayed with me this long, you know, cause, and, and, you know, the love that, that God has poured into our lives is really incredible.

And, and when I play back to tape, I've lived an awesome life. Yeah, it's had his bumps and bruises, but God has been good to me. Yeah. Yeah. That's, um, some profound stuff, you know, as, as, as you think that he was there for all the intimate details, all those twists and turns that even Satan tried to get you to, to sell you on this, he was still, you know, like the father and Jim's clip, you know, moving the toothpaste, you know, so that we can find it. Yeah. Um, I just, you know, I've, I've thought about that clip ever since it was just a really great clip, Jim.

I know that God gave me that one and I wanted to speak to your female listeners. These guys weren't being cruel to Danny when he was pouring his heart out, making fun of him. That's what guys do.

And that shows we love it. Something Sam said triggered one I'll put out there. My wife's a very private person, so hopefully she won't hear this, but we lived as angry roommates for a number of years in our marriage. And both of us pursued someone else and God orchestrated things so that when I was ready to cut and run, Carolyn wasn't. And when she was ready to cut and run, I didn't even know it.

So I didn't, I probably would have let her go. So I didn't know for that reason, but in our pursuit of others, God had circumstances set up so that we both failed. When I was ready to take off with a Proverb seven woman, um, and we were very close to intimacy. I, God put in my brain and something I'd told myself, and this is why it triggered it, that the only thing I had left in my marriage was physical fidelity. I'd lost my heart, but we had the physical fidelity. And when that last thing was about to fall, I got up and left.

I think physical fidelity has my 401k. Yeah, they are, they are big at doing that sort of thing, but God does. And in retrospect, I saw God's hand in it all, but at the time it felt like hell.

It was an interesting thing that from my perspective is that both Sam's clip and, um, Jim's clip had blindness in it. And, you know, I've, I was actually studying darkness earlier today. As you know, I studied things and looking at the letters and the interesting letter that begins the word darkness is a het. And that's actually meaning our marriage to Christ. I mean, that's the eighth miracle letter.

Like what? Darkness is out of love. Just saying, because so we don't hurt ourselves. And like, oh my goodness, there's this idea of all this stuff that we don't see because he's really in his own way, protecting us. Right.

It's, it's an amazing thing as a, as you think about how blind, go ahead, Jim, you quite, you're dying over there. He doesn't like, I said head or what? No, no, no.

I'm fine with hat or hate, whichever you prefer. Now you just triggered something else. Uh, talking about that, uh, about darkness darkness, because this is my science nerd bit. Darkness does not exist. Darkness is the absence of light and evil doesn't exist.

It's the absence of God. And that to me always was very powerful. Interesting. Not real. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everything is not as it appears.

You know what I'm saying? So again, the idea is like, wow, do you experience this feeling, this feeling like I'm on my own and there's nobody here to like, and the idea is we're, we're trying to, you know, illustrate like, man, you have a whole bunch of people that are just like you. You're not alone in feeling alone. I mean, that's crazy is the way to say it, but it's true.

You're not alone in the way that you feel alone, but God does not want it to stay that way. And in order to do, to fix that, you can go to the free entrenchment camp. That's coming up September 30th through October 1st.

It's free. It's at masculinejourney.org or the bootcamp. It's coming up November 17th. That's the week before Thanksgiving. Always that bootcamp. Oh my God. Oh my goodness. It's going to be awesome. Join us masculinejourney.org. This is the Truth Network.