MJ Mulligan After Hours

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This is the Truth Network. Coming to you from an entrenched barricade deep in the heart of central North Carolina, Masculine Journey After Hours, a time to go deeper and be more transparent on the topic covered on this week's broadcast. So sit back and join us on this adventure. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here now.

Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours, and it is great to be back this week and seeing most of my friends here. Most of you are friends. I didn't say that correctly. You guys are all friends.

Oh, okay. You were staring at me when you said that. What about Dave?

Dave is my friend. That's pretty myopic of you, Andy, to be calling me out like that. Yeah, get a dictionary, David. That's right, get a dictionary. I've heard that said before. That's not you anymore, dude.

You're 40. David, you're his guest friend. Yeah, yeah. So we are talking about going back into wounded places, David, so it's a perfect place for us to be here. Yeah, absolutely.

There's quite a few wounds going around. Dave or David, which would you prefer? David. Okay, Dave, we'll just go ahead and go right to you, Andy. You want to tell us about the show?

After I get done laughing. Yeah, so this show, and I'm not going through the stages. This is the Masculine Journey stages.

Yeah, about how we talked about that on the first show of kind of explaining those stages, and we've done a series of programs on that a couple weeks back. But what's going on, guys? I'm still laughing.

He's still mad at me. So we're talking about the Mulligan, though. Mulligan, golf term, you get to hit the ball again. If you shank one, come off the tee, you get to lay another one down and hit it again. And in these stages, we can be taken out. We cannot get what we were supposed to get in these stages as men. And the Mulligan, the idea of that is God taking us back to that golf hole and saying, being our instructor and standing there and telling us.

I mean, it was kind of a similar type of clip on the first show from Bagger Vance, but really guiding us through the process of how to be initiated in that stage or being in a golf term, being our golf pro to guide us and help us through those places that were undeveloped or wounded. Yeah, and if you're not familiar with the stages, they have one called boyhood. And in that boyhood stage, God meant for you to understand that you're the apple of your father's eye, primarily your father and your mother. But yes, in this case, speaking of God, the father figure, right? So you're the apple of your father's eye. It also that you're the beloved son during the whole thing. And so if you don't get that, and you're reading that, you're like, wow, okay, I guess I just missed out.

Now, this is God taking you back in and saying, okay, I'm going to help you unpack some of this and go back into that wounded place and get you to a place of healing and restoration and initiation and all the things you're talking about, Andy. And whether it's a young boy or a boyhood stage. Or a younger boy. Yeah, exactly. Older boy. Older boy.

Yeah, which would be the other stages. But anyway, on to Jim. Jim, you have a clip. I do have a clip. This is from a independent movie.

I'm pretty sure independent. Yeah, it's Interview with God. And I picked this one because a major theme in my life, and it's one that I keep having to come back to. I've always wanted to know everything. That's why I read dictionaries and encyclopedias as a kid, and they love to pick on me for that.

I'll do it first, so you can't. Oh, there's others. But I had a major change when knowledge became less important. And that was good because now we all have complete knowledge with a cell phone, smartphone.

But wisdom became more important. And talking to God is something that has changed a lot in my life. And what I saw in this clip was a lot of my conversations with God, because he doesn't answer the questions I want him to answer.

He often responds with a question that takes me somewhere else entirely. And we'll listen to the clip, and then I'll talk about why that's a mulligan for me. Okay.

How old are you? Time is different for me than it is for you. I exist outside of time. After all, I created time. Right.

Where do you come from? Oh, I think this interview would be more productive if we don't waste time on questions to which you already know the answer. Okay, moving on. Oh, I'm not being different. I just think you of all people should know why my answers might be confused. If the nature of God were obvious, look at the world around you.

You will see that it is not. So we struggle here on earth to know you, but I assume you know all the questions and all the answers. Of course. Does that make you feel uncomfortable? But then you know the answer to that question, too.

Yes. But a divine perspective is not required. You try to see this from my point of view. This is not an easy process.

No, I get it. Knowing all the questions and all the answers must make human conversation kind of difficult. Well, no one likes to know it all. Right. You said you of all people a few moments ago said you of all people should know why my answers might be a little confused.

What do you mean by that? Why me of all people? Well, you have a degree in religious studies and a degree in journalism from Loyola University, where you graduated the top of the class. You started working at the Herald in their online division right out of college, where you write about matters of faith and theology.

So you memorize my online body. And I also know about your marriage. Excuse me. I know about your marriage.

Oh, you have me going for a second. I did. And you're waiting for me to ask. Ask what? For proof. Proof that you are who you say you are. Well, tell me, when you pray, do you ask for proof that God is listening? No, of course not. And this is your lucky day.

I'm here answering your question. In this, the back and forth, and it was a little faster than it is in the movie, but I was trying to cram a lot in there, reminds me of how often, I mean, all my life I've had God in different boxes. You know, initially he was love. Well, he's more than that.

And he would break out of every box. And this interviewer doesn't really believe this is God, but he comes to know that he is over the course of the movie. And I've had enough conversations with God that were as confusing as this that I had to get to the point of realizing, well, I don't have all the answers I want and never will. I have to rely on him. And that's really where faith comes from. But every once in a while, I'll jump back on that, well, I can figure this out without him. And that rarely leads to wonderful places, except that they are times that there's a lot of learning.

And that's, I'm sure, will continue the rest of my life. And I'm glad he gives me second, third, 59th chances. And God does, at least for me, he uses a lot of questions, to your point. And it's interesting, because sometimes you just want an answer. Just a yes or no. Just answer the question.

Just yes or no. And you don't get that, but ultimately what you get is so much better. You know, it just takes more time. And I know you're on the same page with this as well with me, that he often answers with humor.

Yeah. And I'll be laughing at serious things, and people look at me like I'm crazy. And they're right, I am.

But I'm crazy about God. Thank you, Jim. David, you have a clip.

Yes, I hijacked Robert's clip, because there was one there. What movie is it from? Indiana Jones, The Last Crusade. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, yeah, it is.

It's the time that they're going, trying to look for the Holy Grail. It was right after his dad got shot by the Nazis. And ultimately, what this is going to go back on is him going back to his boyhood stage, looking to be, you know, the apple of his father's eye and have his dad to be proud of him.

So we can listen to it and then come back and talk about it. Yeah, in the process, he's solving a lot of clues. Yeah, he is. Right. So he's looking at his father's journal and kind of solving clues. Yep, yep. Doing the adventure with his dad.

Yep. The footsteps of the word. The world of God.

No, Henry, try not to talk. The name of God. The name of God. Jehovah. But in the light now forbid, Jehovah begins with an I. Oh, yeah. And you must hurry.

Come quickly. It's a leap of faith. So for me, you know, going back revisiting the stages, with God that he keeps going back to is the adventure and some of, you know, of feeling like I'm the apple of my father's eye. If you follow my story at all, you know, I've talked about it a lot that I didn't really grow up getting that in the boyhood stage. So that's been a revisit and revisit and revisit and revisit and revisit. And now I'm at the point now where after, you know, healing through God and healing between me and my father personally, that, you know, I'm starting to see it for for what it is.

So that way, I'm not making the same mistake with my kids, you know, making sure that my daughters understand that they are the apples of my eye and that I'm proud of them no matter what they do, regardless of the situation. And then also going on adventures, you know, I visit back to the Cowboy Ranger stage all the time, you know, doing things outdoors, as Andy was saying, you know, going hunting with my friends, I kind of got back into that over the last year or so really, really deeply, maybe a little too deeply sometimes. But, you know, so that is where my mulligans are going right now. Yeah. So what was your favorite part of that clip of the movie? Oh, the part where they found the Holy Grail, of course.

You know, because he was trying to get that so that way he could heal his dad. Yeah, I liked at the end where he has to step off on a bridge you can't see. It's a step of faith. It's really pretty cool. You know, I have to go back and watch that movie again. Yeah, you know, it's a good movie.

It's got some pretty cool, cool things in it. Thank you, David. You appreciate that.

No problem. You have chosen well. You have.

You have. So Robby picked a clip that had Latin in it. I wonder if he's switching languages all of a sudden. He's going to go from Hebrew to Latin. You know, I'll let him talk about that next week. I didn't really want to take his glory of trying to explain Hebrew and stuff like that.

Maybe French. We could. All right. Well, I have a clip and then, you know, of course, I'm asking you guys questions because I'm on this side of the microphone and so I can do that. But my clip is one we use at boot camp, you know, quite a bit. And we've used it on the show. It's from the kid.

Wasn't one of my favorite clips for a long time. But, you know, it's about a dad who's dealing with his own issues being, you know, pretty aggressive with his son, you know, at the beginning of this. But what you have in the story of the kid, if you've never seen the movie, the movie is the story of the masculine journey. It really is. And so if you want to just go watch that, it'll help bring it into context.

It's going back into your story at broken stages where something went wrong and rediscovering that and entering into that with God and getting healing and restoration from that. And that's what that whole movie is. And in this movie, you have Bruce Willis's character, which is Russell Duritz. And then you have the little kid, Rusty Duritz, which are the same person at different ages.

And so through the magic of movies, they're able to be in the same place at the same time. And Russell's trying to help Rusty figure out what happened in his life. In the process, Russell figures out what happened in life. And so when we get to this, this is the crucial point of when they find out what really happened that sent their whole life in a different route. And so you have an interaction with the father in which Rusty finds out that his mother's dying.

And so we're going to listen to that and come back and talk about it. Stop. You got to grow up. You understand? Grow up. Grow up.

Mom's dying. I know. Soon? Yeah.

For your next birthday. Did I do it? No. No, you didn't do it. It's not your fault. Dad was just saying those things because he's scared. Because he knows that he has to raise you alone.

He doesn't know how to do it. I thought you never crossed. Since my eighth birthday. Guess I'm starting up again. Go on.

Because I just figured out where I got that twitch from. Somebody called the Lambiolans. Yeah. Gotta need them now, huh? Come on. Gotta get out of here.

Let's go. This movie, when I first watched it, I was not, you know, in this whole message, you know, this part of Christianity. I didn't really understand it or know it to the depth.

And it was like, eh, it was okay movie. And then just the brilliance of it, you know, from the beginning where Russell does not like Rusty at all. He's embarrassed by him. He belittles him, you know, to the point here at the end where they're walking very close together. And it reminds me that, you know, those broken spots in us often come with shame that we like to push away.

Cause we don't want to have to deal with it. That's the thing that's different about, you know, when you're thinking about Russell, Russell had the mental capacity to understand his dad didn't really mean things, but understanding something mentally and being healed from it emotionally are two different things. Right? And so a lot of times, Andy, when we enter into counseling, when it doesn't include God, you can get discovery. You can get understanding. Right. You can get knowledge, but in the garden, there was a tree of knowledge and true of life.

Right. And whenever we pick knowledge, it doesn't always give us life. It often doesn't give us life. And so what we're after is that life that God gives us through the emotional healing that comes.

And so what Russell needed in this movie through Rusty was to see him get some breakthrough so that Russell could experience a breakthrough. Cause he was stuck at that point as that eight year old boy, you know, what happens to us. And we talked about it, you know, and other shows, but when we're wounded, we get a piece of us get stuck at that stage.

You know, when you get so angry about something, when a car is not working right, and you think you did everything you're supposed to do, which is what I'm dealing with right now. And you know, God's helping me see even the midst of this show that he's taken me back to some stuff when I was a teenager, you know, and I wanted my dad to be able to help me and couldn't help me. He just physically wasn't able to, and the anger I felt from being ripped off of my dad, not being there to help me at the time I would have told you I was mad at my dad, but honestly, I think at the time I was mad at God and didn't have the words for it and didn't understand God.

Right. Cause I'm not mad at God about that. God didn't want that stuff to happen to my dad either. It's the choices my dad made to smoke a lot and eat fried food.

Kind of pretty much contributed to his stroke, but yeah. It's his choices and the consequences of the choices. But you know, when I look back and God's taken me back on that adventure real time right now, because I'm dealing with a car situation I'm very frustrated with and he's helping me see as we've been talking of, okay, Sam, I need you to dig in back here because there's still an agreement.

There's still something back here that's got you tied up and I'm acting very much like a upset teenager today. You know, wouldn't you agree, Dave? David.

But yes, I would definitely agree to that. Okay. Well, thank you, David.

David. I appreciate that. Hurt people hurt people. We do.

You're exactly right, Jim. Yeah. Yeah. And short people hurt people just at a lower place.

Like in the knee. Yeah. So, all right.

So what's God working on you, been working on you with in this arena? I mean, we're getting ready to a bootcamp and some of you are doing talks and we're responding to talks. All of you are going to be there, I think for the most part, right Art? You're going to be there.

Maybe. Okay. Yeah, I'll be there.

As far as we know. Yeah, you'll be there. Yeah.

So I just want to get you on the radio. So where's God worked on you, working on you in this arena? Where have you gotten healing? Where are you getting breakthrough? I've been working on the boyhood talk, the younger boy.

The youngest. Yeah. Yeah. I might've changed my notes now. Yeah. Just because of this show. Yeah.

But the... Andy Fyatt. What's interesting is God gave me the word beloved at the beginning of the year from a word for year. And then, you know, we started in on this thing. So being able to go back to the boyhood stage and just let God, and the interesting thing, David brought up the scripture, keep me as the apple of your eye. Well, if you read that in the Christian standard version, it says, protect me as the pupil of your eye. And the pupil is what lets light in. So the difference between discovery and being able to see it clearly is light. Mm-hmm. And I mean, you can discover something in the darkness.

I've done that time or two, discovered the Corgi in the dark the other night because she run. Anyway, that's a whole nother show, but they... Sounds like a country song. I was thinking a wound. Yeah.

It was close to being a wound. Did you get your truck and get the Corgi? Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, the going back into the things that my perception of my father and my perception of being the apple of his eye, even him and my heavenly father, it's been almost like just a tidal wave at times. And it's really, I'm beginning to gain some traction in this masculine journey in life, this mulligan, because of it, because there was so much there that I didn't understand because there wasn't proper light shine on it. Mm-hmm. So that scripture really, really means something to me.

And this whole, when we went through this in the show and, you know, you challenged us, let's go through this, man, it just kind of just lit my fire, so to speak, or cranked my tractor, as some of us would say in the country. Yeah. Yeah. That's a way to say it. Andy, what about you?

You got the microphone. So just one of the wounds, I mean, I'm talking about at boot camp, advanced boot camp, the cowboy ranger stage. And, you know, there's the adventure part that I mentioned earlier, but then there was the hard work, which I really didn't, I mean, I worked hard, I think, and I think I learned that in some aspects of the way I grew up on a, you know, kind of a small family farm, but then, you know, my dad was always a hard worker. But where I really, one of the places I really got hung up on was when my mom remarried and I had a stepdad who was very hard, he could do about anything, but mainly he was really into cars, mechanics, and he expected me to work on my cars and I'd never had anybody work with me and I was learning and stuff.

And, you know, he really, to your point about not being able to do these things, well, he let me know how inferior I was. So I heard you don't have what it takes there. And so I avoided really doing that. My interest didn't gravitate to that. I think we all have certain interests.

And I think that's one of the other things that John talks about. Whenever we, in these different stages and these things that, these attributes that come out of these different stages, we tend to go and the things that we do well, we gravitate to those and avoid those things that we don't do well. And so I heard that, you know, that I didn't have what it takes. Now, that doesn't mean that since I got in this message that I'm becoming a mechanic at all. I was still pretty much in the same place I am. I try to be where I'm not intimidated, to go and use my hands and try to fix something instead of just outsourcing it all the time. I got way too much to do to try to do everything or whatever, but there is a certain point to where I don't feel like I'm avoiding things like I used to because a lot of times we do. We just gravitate to the things that we do well, forget the rest. God wants us to come in and risk and depend on us. And so, you know, risk and depend on him.

Put us in situations where he has to come through for us. So did you fix your dryer not that long? I did. I fixed my dryer and washer. I'm hard on, you know, that stuff. But yeah, I did that.

And I'm trying to go back to a dryer or fire. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But I fixed the generator, you know, just doing stuff like that, you get a certain sense of accomplishment that, you know, instead of just having somebody else do it. Yeah. Harold, is there anything else you'd like to add for this show? Anything that you didn't get to say before winter break? I'm doing it right before we go to the end of the show, but you know. Well, I think there are stages that we remain in.

I think that's been mentioned already. And growing up in the movies and in the books I read, I always identified with the hero, the knight, the lover, and always thought that the beautiful girl should be mine. She turned out to be.

I still got her. And I really enjoy playing the role of the knight and the lover. It's a part of my life that I don't want to get out of.

So we got just probably about 30 seconds left. Anything you want to throw out there that you would tell people to go do this week as far as, you know, how do they enter into this topic with God? I was thinking in terms of woundedness and forgiving others. And I realized that I have a minor father wound, but I did the same thing to him when I was a teenager and whooped him at something he was good at. Well, thank you, Jim.

Just lean into God, whether it's a wound, whether it's something else to say, God, I need you to guide me in this. And we'll be back next week to talk with you more. Actually, next week, we're live from bootcamp. So we'll talk with you next week through bootcamp. This is the Truth Network.