Word of The Year 2021 After Hours

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.

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Share it. But most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. So in case you're wondering, was the Masking Journey's New Year resolution this year to not have Sam as the host? No, that isn't what's happening.

We don't do New Year's resolutions here on the Masking Journey. We're so glad you're with us. Come on, Robby. Andy's particularly glad because he'd be in that chair. Yeah, that's true.

Robby wasn't here too. So Sam, to his credit, is with his son who had surgery. And we're just wishing them prayers, right, for Eli as he recovers from shoulder surgery. But we don't do New Year's resolutions more. The idea of like, you know, we know that one of the core desires of a man's heart is an adventure to live.

And so it's an adventure to go on a word adventure with God that he gives us as sort of a theme as a way to interpret our year and kind of where he's taking us in our journey. And so Andy, you know, it's been for us, you know, it's just been glorious to watch other guys, right, pick it up and be able to do it. Yeah, I think I've done it for four years.

I'm like everybody else. When first heard it was like, I don't know about that. But it becomes a part of what you do. And I never thought about it that much is, it is probably a better thing to do to take on than a New Year's resolution, which is pressure, which is, oh, I'm gonna fail, you know, and it's all about you on that most of the time, unless it's like get closer to God, but to say, let God and I mentioned this earlier on the other first show is that way we look at it sometimes it's like God gives us a word. I think it's more of like God presents a word and says, let's do this together. Let's go into this together.

And that's the experience. So there's this line in the 13th Psalm, which I really love because, you know, David's saying, God, how long will you forget us forever? You know, how long will you hide your face from us?

Which is what Danny was talking about. You know, how long is that going to be? And then he says this word that's unbelievable. He says, how long will I seek counsel in my own soul having sorrows in my heart daily? In other words, if you're out there trying to make a New Year's resolution without God, guess what you're doing? You're seeking counsel in your own soul.

And what's the prediction for that, according to David? Sorrows in your heart daily. Okay. Just saying. As Clibber Lang used to say, pain.

And so there is the upside for us old senile guys. I can remember one word. If I made three resolutions, I guarantee you about week two, I couldn't remember two of them. So we have this other idea of asking God throughout the month of December, early January as the case may be, no pressure. Really isn't like, God, where are we going this year? And then listing, and then in some of our cases we get confirmation.

We're going to talk about that a little bit more in this after-hour show, how that process actually works. But when we left our hero gym, the second world's oldest man, because Harold's not here to pick on yet, he's just sitting over here, you know, because… Being sagely. Yeah, he's being sagely back there. But anyway, when we left our hero gym, he'd had the hardest word ever, right? Of the five I've done, integrity has been the one that has popped up the most in a negative way, I'll put it that way. I was starting to explain when we finished the show that I'm from a long line of Jameses, and anybody that knows the Hebrew root of that Yaakov is the deceiver, supplanter, it's not a real complimentary. I like it better than being Mary, because I don't want to be a boy called Mary, but Mary is bitter.

A boy named Sue. But yeah, but I am the third, and my father and grandfather were both men of integrity, and I was brought up being told, you know, you do not want to bring any shame upon the name Graham. And that was a resounding thing I heard when I was young, and I managed to hang more onto the James than the Graham, and I was very good at maybe not lying so much as telling you something that was factually accurate to give you the wrong impression of what I was trying to accomplish, and that has, that's still something I'll start sliding back into, and Lord reminded me of my word every single time that, or at least every time I noticed that happened this year, and it did not seem to get less frequent, so I sort of felt like I did not accomplish that the way I wanted to, and we were talking about getting new words each year.

I have every single year I've done this. As soon as I thought about it, God planted one in my brain, only once, and that was one that Robby had just had that was last year, which was faithful. I will say, well, I can't take that one. That's his, but well, he's got a lot of work, work, a lot to work with with you, right? Well, you sit around and read the dictionary, so you know, it's like, I know a few words, but this is an important one, but the faithful one was the only one I questioned, and that was briefly, and Robby straightened me out on that pretty quick, and I appreciated that because that was a solid word for me last year. This year, I haven't gotten another word yet. I know we're only one day into the new year, but I'm not sure whether God's got another word for me or whether I get to do integrity or some variation on that theme again this year, but whatever he has, I know it will be productive in my life.

Honestly, as I'm sitting there listening to you, Jim, well, what I've noticed almost every year noticed almost every year on everybody is he flips it on you, right? You thought it was about your integrity? Well, I did, yes. Still do. Maybe you'll listen to my story a bit, and maybe it'll help you.

I don't know. I hope it does because it sure helped me, and so, you know, I knew we were going to do this show, and my word that I was given for 2021 was engage, which was just a spectacular word. It's a word I personally had struggled with my entire life. Like, I just never felt like I was engaging like I should, and we used the clip from, you know, Top Gun where, you know, Maverick is engaging. He's not engaging, or he is engaging, or he's not engaging, and that was kind of like how I felt like I wasn't engaging.

I wasn't engaging, so I came into the year with this great excitement that after, you know, that I, right, would engage, but it's a very neat thing, and you'll like this, Jim. In Hebrew, when you look at the word affliction, right, and it's used a lot in the 119th Psalm. That's why I've looked at it a lot recently, but it talks about being afflicted. Well, the word afflicted in Hebrew is a nafesh, which is like your spirit. Your little candle is burning. Okay, that's you. Your little voice is talking to yourself. That's your nafesh, right? And then it's an ion, which means where have you got your eyes? On your own soul. Again, going back to what's the prediction for that one, according to Kleber-Lang, pain.

If Robby's tried to get, you know, this idea of engagement in his own strength, you know, that's something. So, you know, I went into, and so what I did on Sunday morning is I took out all my journals, and let me just tell you that long before, the reason why I journal, I don't know they've ever told this story in the air, is years ago when I was a Chrysler dealer, I won a trip to Sweden, and I'm on an airplane. I'm flying overnight to Denmark, actually. It was a cruise to Sweden, all these different places. So I'm on this plane, first class, by the way, because we are Chrysler dealers, they flew you nicely, and these very nice reclining seats, and as I'm laying there praying on this plane, excited about this journey, and I've been in Christ maybe two years, and God says, I want you to write down all our adventures together, every day, what you and I do. And that word came to me very clearly, and I still have the stationary from the airplane where I wrote down that very sentence, like, you want me to write down all my adventures with you every day. And I took that as, you know, like, fun. Well, I have all those adventures, right, of that airplane, and because I had that adventure, right, when I got cancer in 1996 and I went through that journey, I have all that stuff journaled.

When I was crushed by the Jeep, every single day in the hospital, all the stuff that went through all those different journals, it's absolutely a phenomenal journey. So I took out my journals for 2021, and as I began to look, man, this was a creepy year. I mean, if you can remember January 2021, you know, the Capitol was being invaded, quote, unquote. I won't go into a lot of that. All sorts of shenanigans with Trump and all sorts of stuff that was being fed that just were pure lies one way or the other.

Somebody was lying big time, and nobody ever came out and said, okay, this was who was lying. Oh, no. And I had nightmares and all these things, and all this. So as I was going through these journals, Jim, looking for Engage, right? Where was God coming after me?

How did this work? Because I, you know, one of my practices in my daily prayer is to pray, God, help me to engage. In fact, I have all my words for all my years right there, and I ask again for all those words. And so I'm very excited about 2022.

And so, you know, I knew that every day as I started, as I was journaling, right, I'm praying these prayers. Help me engage. Help me engage. Show me what that means.

Explain it to me. And one of the things that got me about this word as I was unpacking it, unfortunately, God, or fortunately for me, I guess God has not asked me to write everything down. And I may have your word for you this year. It's biography with God.

Nobody's going to believe it. You've had so many adventures. But one of the things that really is getting under my skin, I'll even use the word angry, which I'm slow to do, is seeing the lack of integrity from so many places in the world.

And I almost have to focus on me because if I look at the rest, it's going to bring me down. But God has complete integrity. And I was talking with a brother earlier today about a gentleman that passed on about a year ago that if I said his name, two-thirds of the people in Kernersville would know who he was immediately. And he came to Jesus late in his life, but he was the picture of integrity and of what was my first word, service. He served the community. He was always doing things for other people and usually in a way that he got no credit. And I looked at him and was thinking he wasn't an authority figure for me late in my life in respect to an organization I'm part of.

And I just love the man as soon as I met him. I assumed he belonged to Christ because of his integrity, because of his motivation in life. I suspect he did. He just hadn't, you know, said the prayer that we love to say his Baptists and other denominations. But when he did, he sat down with a pastor close to his death and they had a long conversation.

And I know he's with Jesus and I'm thrilled because I look forward to seeing him again. But when I see somebody with integrity, that's somebody I want to be. So I continued through my journals and was looking for where I engaged. And fascinatingly, you know, I got COVID in February and it put me in a health crisis with my blood pressure and several struggles.

And it didn't get me to engage in some stuff that would really help me physically. And I could see that, but I kept looking for really what's going on here. And as I began to watch, you know, for those of you who've seen the movie Evan Almighty, you keep seeing at the beginning of the movie, Genesis 614 shows up all over the place because, you know, he's wanting him to build an ark. And he's trying to get, well, if you go back to a movie before that, most of us back in the 70s can remember a movie called, you know, Oh God. And it was with John Denver and George Burns played God in this particular movie. And it was a similar kind of thing that what was happening, as I discovered through these journals, was not that I was the one engaging God, but he was engaging me.

Right? It was, he turned it, it was like I could see all these different places where I'm over here, Robby. I'm over here. I'm over here. Here I am.

Okay. And so in this clip with John Denver, he'd shown up to John Denver, if you've seen the movie, in an AMC Pacer, which is near and dear to my heart being that my dad was an AMC dealer. And I know what a Pacer looks like. Anyway, he'd shown up with John Denver in the Pacer on the radio. So the only place that John Denver has heard God at this point in his life is through the radio. Is through the radio. So he's now in the shower and he hears God. And if you listen real carefully here, as soon as he realized it's God, he goes, Oh God. Jerry, Jerry.

That's right. Is that you in person? You're not on the radio? Have you got a radio out here? No.

Bingo. You're here? In my bathroom? Come take a look. I can't. I'm naked. You think I don't know what you've got? That was another little goof of mine. Shame. I don't know why I thought we needed shame. Come on out.

Don't catch cold. Not, uh, not what you expected, huh? I picked a look you could understand. For someone else, I would look different. I could do any face, voice, whatever. I could, I could even be a woman. Feeling a little strange, huh?

Very strange. Like you're going to faint. You know what's good for that? Shaving. Shaving? Sometimes when you don't feel normal, doing a normal thing makes you feel normal.

Yeah, start shaving. It's such a shame that John Denver never had that relationship with God in real life, um, where he could talk to him like that. Cause he had the perfect, like the way he says this, the way I know I must respond. Shaving?

You know, it's just classic. Like he takes, he takes me places I never would have guessed. And a lot of people say, Robby, how do you hear from God?

How do you hear from him? Well, that, that little clip right there is a perfect example. I hear a thought there's no way I would think.

Shaving? I mean, and when you hear that thought that, you know, there's no way you thought that thought, then you start ringing the bell. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

That's God, right? And, and, and here comes this message and here comes another message and here comes another message, which is leading to intimacy. They all, you know, whatever word you got, I can just assure you we're at the end of the year, you're coming back to, and I know I come back to the same place. And I know you do too, Andy and, and Rodney that, and Danny now, and all of us that, man, I don't want to give up this word cause it's been such a delightful journey just to like, man, I, this has been unbelievable. I don't want to graduate.

I want to stay in the sixth grade. So I did do it one more time. You know, just saying, don't start giving hints for next year yet.

Yeah. So we, we do have that upcoming that there's no doubt about it, but when you look at it, Rodney, really, isn't there just at the heart of it, it's, it's now a chance to actually feel like we're really connecting the wall. That's what I like about it is when you first basically infected the rest of us with this joy that you had with God, it was like, okay, I'll give this a shot.

I don't know what we're going to be getting into just kind of like Danny said on the regular show. And, but what I really enjoy is listening to others talk about their word and when that word comes up and what happens in their life and what they say about it, like Jim dealing with integrity this last year was, was so much fun. Cause it was like, he, as soon as he got, he's like, Oh no, I'm going to have to be, and he knows where his integrity is at.

And he knows he has a very high standard for integrity and he knows he doesn't meet it, but he's like, Oh my gosh, this is, this is going to be an adventure. And it like, like he explained it was, and it was it's just fun to listen to that and Maverick over here engaging and disengaging and all that. It's just, it's just fun to know other people's words and what they're doing in their life and their walk with God and helps you with yours. That's it's, it's a communal thing.

It is very much a communal thing. And, and it is our hope actually that you will take on the practice. And now, you know, you're connected to us through email, right? You can put to, to Danny at Mask on Journey, whoever you like, you can get to us. We would love to know what is your word?

What's your experience with your word? You know, it, it, it really is a fantastic adventure that, that God would love to go on with you. I just know he would. And so, And there's no vaccine for it. You're going to get infected and you're going to love it.

So Danny is rookie of the year. You know, for all of us, you know, it was really, really cool. It just was to watch your heart through this year with the losses that, that, that you were suffering. But at the same time, you know, it was a community that just seemed like really surrounded you in so many different ways, but I just feel like there's more that you've got that I would love to hear. Well, what's, what's interesting about that is, is, you know, you talked about it being flipped and for years, and y'all hear me say this a hundred times, you know, I tried to put together a brotherhood and we had somewhat of a, a brotherhood and just, my heart has always been about discipleship and men and, and I think, and, and part of my heritage has been you guys is, you know, toward the end of this year with everything that has happened, I began to realize that I truly get to walk out what I've loved to talk about, what I, and, and to hear the thing about the word of the year and all the different stuff we talk about is we're doing life together and engaged as brothers and, and surround each other when it's tough and laugh and lots of laughter. And, but those kinds of things and what a heritage that is that, you know, I am truly a blessed man. You know, we had a house full of our children and their spouses and the granddaughter who it looked like Amazon exploded twice at my house and, and, but it was cool to see the wonder in her eyes.

And she taught me a little bit about gaming after she made me a noob and she was a hacker and we just had a lot of fun, but, but it is that engaging heritage, if you will, to combine two words, Robby, that, and to, and to begin to really live what I think is an authentic Christian life. Yeah, I heard that in a neat quote today, actually from a rabbi who, who said, you know, in order for, if you want God to be himself around you, you know, you need to be yourself around God. And because, you know, God can't relate to the false self, the mask that we're wearing or the person we're pretending to be and all these kinds of things. And so how, how can he engage if, if we're posing right. And if we're posing with him, you know, that's the ultimate, you know, like, I feel like John Denver, God, I'm naked. You don't think I know you, Robby, that's a pose right there, just saying, you know, he knows it, right?

That can we get with the real Robby, please stand up in this situation. And how many times do you get to that place, Andy? I mean, you're, you're there, you know, time and again, I love your walk with the Lord.

I really do. So about being authentic with God, you know, I've been, you know, everybody knows I did the poser talk or not everybody knows, but I've mentioned it on the radio that I did the poser talk at the bootcamp and it, it, it caused me to go deeper with God in, in that area. And, and just on, on that note, it really helped me. That was one of the, like, to me doing that talk and doing the other talk I did this time was part of me prospering because it was something I struggled with most of the year, or most of my time doing bootcamps and stuff. And I feel like God really gave me my voice more so this bootcamp, but with that being said, in that poser talk, as you delve into the material, you, you realize that just because you don't tell a lie, just because you, you know, basically your motives are mostly pure or, you know, mostly pure, all of us struggle with stuff, but you can still find ways to live in a false self that you're not even aware of.

And what I do love about that is that this year I became more aware that you, you have that tendency to fall back, to live out of that false self. And that does, like you said from the rabbi, it hinders your ability for God to be who he is around you. He's not going to validate your false self. If he did, he would be dishonest to himself.

He's not going to do that. So just a little example of, of what I, you know, what I experienced this year, how that ties into my new word of, of prospering though, it's this desire to go beyond even anything or whatever I thought about what the Christian life looked like, to really, truly be somebody, really it takes me back to the Garden of Eden in the fall and what took place there. It wasn't just that all of a sudden Adam had a desire to look at a woman and have lust for her or to be angry or whatever. It was really what happened at that fall that happened that separated man and God and how he had always tried, Adam had tried to live out of a false self and his true self that the more that I try to live out of that true self, the closer I'm able to connect with God, the more I'm able to connect with God.

Darrell Bock Right, which in its own way kind of circles back to Jim and that, that God sees you as having integrity, right? Or you wouldn't necessarily find yourself there. And again, the idea is that you would join us in whatever way you can do that.

You can go to masculinejourney.org, register for the boot camp. We'd love to see you there. But also you can email us, engage in any way that you would like, because again, it's all about doing this together and it's an eternal thing, man. I mean, this is an opportunity to really share life. So thank you for listening. This is the Truth Network.