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.
We are talking about what I think is an interesting topic. Andy, what do you think? Yeah, it's good. Good, good.
Appreciate it. It's sort of a bummer. It is a bummer. It is a bummer. It's a little bit of a bummer.
It's not too bad. You ought to play the clip again. I think you should. You could have told me that before, you know, we came out of the air. But let me try to fight it without my glasses on, which is always a challenge. Well, I just got to thinking, you know, it really helps out this show if you just ended up listening to this one.
Yeah, we could do that. But, you know, if you guys are missing it, if you don't watch it online, we just had the yod cam with Danny. He had the biggest yod ever, I think, I've ever seen. The yod cam.
It was a yod cam. Well, y'all are so excited. We're talking about Richard Gere over here, usually. Richard wakes you right up, dude. I don't know what's going on with that. Anyway, back to the topic.
They have no idea what we're talking about. Yeah, the subject is something called bummer lambs, and it's a lady named Sheila Walsh that used to be the host of the 700 Club. And she's talking about this topic of bummer lambs. So let's listen to it.
It's very short, and we'll come back and talk about it. Renown again. A ewe will give birth to a lamb and immediately reject that lamb. In fact, she'll kick it away if the shepherd tries to reintroduce the lamb to her. And so the shepherd has to intervene.
They call them bummer lambs. And if he doesn't intervene, that little one will die, not of hunger, but of a broken spirit. So he takes the lamb at his home and he'll keep it warm by the fire and feed it with a bottle. And at some point during every day, he'll pick that little lamb up and hold it close to his chest and talk to it. And once the lamb is strong and able to go back to the flock, he'll place it back with flock. But I got to see this, which I just loved in the morning when the shepherd comes out and stands at the edge of the field.
And he calls out, cheap, cheap, cheap. The very first ones to run to him are the bummer lambs because they know his voice. And I will be a bummer lamb for the rest of my life. And it's not as if Jesus loves his bummer lambs more than the rest.
It's just at our very worst, at our most broken, at our most hopeless. The shepherd came and picked us up and held us close. And we heard his voice, and we will never, ever leave his side. Thank you, Andy.
That was a good suggestion to play that again. It was a lot easier than talking about it. Of course, we're going to talk about it anyway.
No, go ahead. I was kind of afraid Andy was going to say the whole thing, waiting for you to get the favor. I get that from Andy. The one advantage that Sheila has that I hadn't really thought about, but she sounds like she's from Australia. And so down there when the restrooms are, you know, Sheila's, she knows right where you're at. Actually, I think she's not that far. I think she's just the UK, but I don't know.
She might have visited there. And the term Sheila is no longer politically correct. I'm sorry about when I was in Australia.
Is it really? They still use it, but it's no longer politically correct. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be politically incorrect.
Why not? Back to the odd game. The odd game. Okay. Well, before the show's over, I'm sure you'll have at least one knowing how we're going. But no, we've been talking about this topic of bummer lambs and what was our bummer lamb moment or moments. And so we're kind of sharing some of that. Or what did this particular clip mean to us? And so, Jim, you actually have the first clip of this show. So if you'd like to either talk about the clip or whatever you'd like to talk about. No, I'd rather talk about me. And we're going to do that with interruptions, I'm sure. I'm sure.
When I heard the topic, first of all, I had never heard of it either. And I listened to that and I said, well, you know, I'm not really a bummer lamb. When I was born, I was the third child, but the first son, and I was named after my father. So I was definitely his favorite, at least until my brother was born. But I was in a very accepted upbringing.
I had a great mother, great father. Two mean sisters, but you're supposed to have mean sisters. Were they step sisters?
No, they were real sisters. And they were mean because they didn't want their annoying little brother following them around on my tricycle while they were going places. Jim, you never fit on a tricycle, dude.
I'm just saying. I did briefly. That was before I was four. Because you were a pretty tall guy. What were you thinking laughing when you were thinking that? It was – and the reason I went to this clip is I knew of God and believed in God from my earliest memories.
So there was never really a question about God. I built different boxes to put him in through the years. Initially, he was my plan B because I was sharp enough and had a good background.
I mean, we weren't rich, but we had everything we needed and then some. And so my upbringing was, you know, Jim could do it. And when Jim can do it, there's no real need for God. So I sort of identified with his character, even though I don't identify with Richard Garrett.
Apparently, that's a good thing from the way you guys were talking. But this character – and he had a rough upbringing. But he's gone to flight school in the Navy, and he has fallen in love with the girl there. But he is ready to leave her because he's ready to go on and be a pilot. And then his best friend in camp ends up killing himself, and we're coming in after that. And he had already told the sergeant he had nowhere else to go. But he's going to bring up the fact that he is ready to DOR, which is Drop On Request.
And the point of what they're pursuing here is trying to run off everybody they can and get them to quit rather than dump them out of the flight school. So he is coming back to challenge his sergeant, and we will pick it up there. Halt! Sir, this officer candidate requests permission to see you in private, sir.
Well, the whole class knows about candidate Whalley, and we're sorry. Oh, I bet you are. I want to see you in private, sir. Not now.
I'm busy. Now! Forward! Sir, I request permission to see you in private, sir!
Left, right or left, right or left, right or left, left. Sir, this officer candidate requests permission to see you in private. Sir! Not now. I'm busy. And so are you. Now you're cleaned up. I came back to quit. D-O-R!
Halt! I don't need you. I don't need a navy.
I don't need anybody. Okay, male. I see what you want.
You said you wanted to meet me in private. You got it. The blip hanger. Now! Move it! You move it. We ain't going there to talk, boy.
Move! All right, male. Let's see what you got. I see you've had some training, man, eh? Come on, fully. Looky, looky here. You can quit now, male, if you want to.
It's up to you. In this, I didn't exactly fight with God, but I've always sort of identified with my namesake, Jacob, in wrestling with the angel. This fight was too long to even be a clip all by itself, but they both gave and got, but Mayo was the one that ended up on the floor.
That's when Sergeant says, you can quit now if you want to. He still had a choice. Over the years, I did get beat up some, not by God, although he allowed it, and I learned that I wasn't all that like I thought I was when I was younger. I figured I was going to be a Ph.D. by the time I was 25, but I was a dad of three by that time, and the life for most of us did not turn out the way we saw it, and so I didn't really become a bummer lamb until I had gotten knocked down by life, and then I realized that there was nothing that I really could accomplish on my own without God being part of it, and he brought us near the point of divorce based on my stupidity, and that's when God got hold of both my wife and I, and we got into church in a meaningful way instead of being the Sunday attenders that many are, and he's getting us closer and closer to him and closer to one another the further we go along.
Still challenges. We're 70 years old, and my wife's with us tonight because I have to take care of her right now after an operation, but the whole journey has been about becoming that bummer lamb where we recognize God's voice and we run to him first instead of having him as the back-up plan like I did in my youth. Darrell Bock Thank you, Jim, appreciate that. Andy, you have the next topic, or the next – not topic. Andy The topic.
I get to choose a topic. Darrell Bock Yeah, next week if you're going to be here. Andy Horwitz Oh, okay. Darrell Bock Can I ask you a question before I get there? I mean, it's kind of – I imagine there's other listeners that are like me that just weren't in the military. There aren't?
Nah. I don't really understand all that was going on there, and I would like to. So D-O-R means drop on request. What does that mean exactly? Andy Horwitz That basically means you're dropping out of the program to become a – well, they're all actually going to air school, and he's gotten a degree so that he can be there and be an officer once he gets through this. But it's basically boot camp for officers. Darrell Bock So if they drop out, are they dropping out of the Army, or they're just dropping out of the school?
Andy Horwitz Well, this is Navy. They're dropping out of the school. And earlier on, they were allowed to – if they dropped out, then they became a swabby. They were in the Navy, and they were stuck. And this program is sort of like an OCS.
If they get through it, they become an officer in the Navy, and if they drop, they are civilians. Darrell Bock Okay. So he was going to drop completely out of the Navy? Andy Horwitz Yeah. But as he had said earlier in the new movie, he had nowhere else to go, and that really was true in that life. And it's a movie worth watching if you haven't seen it. Darrell Bock If you really like Richard Gere. Andy Horwitz In the last 40 years, you don't have to like him.
It's a good movie, even. Darrell Bock Yeah. There's lots of movies I watch where I don't like the actors. Andy Horwitz Yeah.
I would even say most of the movies. Darrell Bock I would say there's quite a few of them. Andy Horwitz You like First Night, don't you? Darrell Bock No. I like clips from First Night. Andy Horwitz You don't like Richard Gere in First Night? Darrell Bock No, not so much, not that character. But I do like scenes from that movie quite a bit.
Sean Connery is pretty good. Anyway, you get the next clip. It's up to you. Are you crashing from the sugar? You just can't? Darrell Bock Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Brownie crash.
Andy Horwitz Yeah. Darrell Bock So this clip is from Rocky II. I actually was doing some traveling this weekend, and it came on, and I just watched a portion of it. And it's kind of like, fortuitous. It ended up being what I picked the clip from. So Rocky II, Adrian is pregnant, and she's not wanting him to go back and fight Creed in the second movie. And Mickey is here trying to inspire him to get going, and you'll hear something like a bummer that Rocky gets called, and he goes through all that of really questioning a lot of things. And we find out Adrian's pregnant, and she's in the hospital.
And I'm not going to tell the whole clip. Basically you'll see – Darrell Bock Well, they've known she's been pregnant for a while, because she – Andy Horwitz Right. Darrell Bock Yeah.
Andy Horwitz Yeah. But she's working and trying to provide, so Rocky doesn't have to fight and ends up getting in bad shape. And so I'll talk about the second half of the clip after we play it. Come on, where are your guts? All right, then don't you waste my time no more.
Come back here again, because I'm too old to waste my time trying to train a no-good loser like you. You bum! Hey, Rock, they want you across the street. What's the matter?
Your wife's sick. Baby. Is that it? Come on.
I can't believe it. He's ours? Yeah.
He's really ours? Thank you. Oh, come on. You've done all the work. Adrian, I can't believe you've done this.
Believe me, we did. Oh, no. He ain't got a name. What do you want to call him? Paulie's a great name. Yeah, Paulie's a pretty good name.
What about after the father? Rocky Jr.? Come on. You really want to do that? Yeah.
Well, Adrian's the best I've ever seen. You've really done good. You look so tired. Why don't you go get some sleep? Oh, no, no. I feel great. I feel great. Listen, I've been thinking.
If you don't want me mixing with Creed no more, we'll make out some other kind of way, you know? There's one thing I want you to do for me. What? Oh, he got cut off. What happened? When? Well, he got cut off.
That's what I did say. So yeah, she wants him to win. She wants him to win. And he goes on and gets into a little bit of inspirational music, which I was telling the guys earlier when I saw Rocky II the first time, I was into the raw eggs and going out and exercising.
It lasted about a day. But it's a very inspiring movie. But in the case of this Bummer Lamb idea, she goes on. He sits there and prays for her. She had gotten a bad way at work where she was trying to work and lifting stuff and all. But obviously, she woke up out of the coma or whatever she was in, and Baby comes along. But she becomes that – or she really was before, but she was that shepherd to the Bummer Lamb. I mean, Rocky, you know, Mick gave him a hard time. If you see the rest of the movie, he's not – he couldn't get a job.
Everybody thinks he's dumb, all that. And she truly was. She saw the potential in him, and she stayed close to him, and he heard her voice.
She was his shepherd through all of that. So I thought it was a good parallel. First I was like, well, Mickey was kind of being positive, but Mickey was one where it's like the rest of the world. If you're doing something great, you're great. But if you're not, then you're the bum.
And it's like it's not consistent, whereas a shepherd is consistent, right? In my life, you know, I've struggled with relationships. I mean, it was a relationship, a broken relationship, a girl broke up with me that got me to come to God, and then I got – felt like I had my life straightened out.
And then I was married for quite a few years and messed that up, and we split up. And when we did, you know, I was really seeking after – and I've told this story many times – but I was really seeking something different, because I tried the religious thing, and I tried to do it the right way. And I'd learned a lot of stuff, and God was real to me, but he wasn't always present for me, because a lot of times I didn't really know how to invite that in. I walked in a lot of shame.
I walked as a bummer lamb. But he truly came in as a shepherd at that time. And like she says on the clip, is I can truly say, this is the time in my life I've had different encounters with God. This is the time that I truly got close enough to the shepherd consistently, didn't run away from him, and had to stay close to him, to where all of those conversations, all that stuff that – all that talking he did during this last 10 years, I guess, I feel like now I come running to him when he calls. And it's just – it's different – there's different degrees, I think, that you can go with God. And I think as a bummer lamb does, as she was alluding to, draws you closer as a consistent – I don't know, as part of a consistent connection and relationship the rest of your life. Yeah, and I think it's a little different for everybody. For me, it was almost topical that I would let God get close with me, that I would step in next to him, that – well, I'd let him in this part of my life, but I would hold back that part of my life.
And that kind of thing. And it just – in the last probably four or five years, less than that, honestly, two or three years, that I've really tried to make sure he's included in every part of my life. And I don't chart off and try to do things on my own nearly as often without just – Oh, yeah.
God doesn't know anything about this. I mean, I know he's got the spiritual part, but he didn't know how to do – he's never been a IT guy before, right? I don't need – and it wasn't that overt when you would – but it was still – So there were things you liked to control, I've got this, I grew up in this, I know this, and you trusted in yourself, and you begin to – as that part of becoming a bummer lamb, you begin to question all those things that – places that you think you have. Well, and I think as men, you know, us being wired to come through, right, that we want to be able to come through, that we don't realize that we're leaning into God is still part of that coming through.
It's not an absence of God, it's in union with God, as we're looking at doing it. Where I really was – came – life-changing to me was whenever I got my new name, and it was Strength, because I always struggled with Strength, and for a while, I just walked out, I was like, yeah, I'm strong, I mean, God says I'm strong. And it's just been recently I realized that, you know, my – his strength is made perfect in my weakness, that strength is a delegated strength. And if I'm disconnected from him, that strength is not necessarily available, in fact, that was my past life.
I had that strength, but I wasn't walking that close with him to actually pull from that strength. Darrell Bock Well, you should have listened to Jim's topic a few weeks ago when we were talking about things that don't seem to make sense, and Jim, I forgot – Jim Evans A paradox. Darrell Bock There, thank you. Jim Evans I was here. Darrell Bock Oh, I forgot you were here. Sorry, Andy. You wasn't all here.
So what you're saying is, whether I show up or not, you're not going to remember anyway, so. Jim Evans Well, there's lots of things I don't remember, so I wouldn't be offended by it too much. Rodney, you got some things you'd like to add on this topic? Rodney Well, I just remember going through this whole setup and talking through things and just trying to figure out what is everything about here. Bummer lambs, I'm like, what is – I'd listen to the clip over and over and over and over, and I'm like, I didn't get a whole lot out of it.
I was like, I don't know what it is, and then I'm listening to you guys tonight. I tried to do it a few different times, and I'm like, I really just have struggled to understand what is this and what does it mean and where am I supposed to be, and it's like, well, if it's bad times, bad things, and this is what happens to you and you have to live through this, I'm like, wow, there's a lot. You start thinking like, there's a lot of things in my life that I've had to go through, whether it was I think all the way back into high school, go back that far, and then there's all the things in college and then getting married and all the things with the wife and just living through all these things, and it's like, wow, how do you pick one? It's really, really hard, but one of the hardest things is actually just coming through and in the end getting a divorce. That's one of the hardest things for me to continually live with. I think that since it's happened, it's like, okay, what's going on in your life? Is it better?
Is it worse? And just living through this and trying to, well, what should I have done instead? What should I have done better? And there's just so many different things as far as the honesty, how I should talk with things, and how I should have loved better, and all those kinds of things. There's just so much that just kind of comes pouring out, and I just kind of fell into thinking about those moments and times as to, well, where could I be better and how could I be better?
And it's nothing that really just is, oh, it's simple, it's easy, you just go do this. It's always about more reflection, understanding it more, diving in, talking about it with you guys, with other friends, and just trying to understand what it is that God would have for me in those type of moments. And that's just where I kind of spent my time was just thinking through different scenarios and situations, not knowing if I'm really hitting the Bummerland thing right, but that's where I was just trying to think through and work through in my own life.
Where are all these things at? And unfortunately, there's way too many that come up, and it's like, oh, my gosh, there's so many different things in your life that you should have done differently, should have done better, that you just didn't. You're like, okay, well, I'll learn from that and move on. And that's the fortunate part about being in Christ now is, okay, yep, I have screwed up, I still do, but it's like, okay, all those things don't matter for eternity. All those things, they're just there, but with and in Christ, everything's good. It's all washed.
It's all clean. He's got it taken care of. I don't have to go fix it all, and it really, really is nice not to have to go fix it all and just go live in and among Him. Yeah, I think what you said there at the end was pretty key from the standpoint of, as we walk with Him and we get these times where He comes in and rescues us in one way or another, He rescues our heart from some woundedness, or He helps guide us in a direction where we need some guidance, I hate to use that word twice, but I didn't have another one for it. And we have these opportunities, we start to learn to say, okay, I really have somebody there that's in my corner all the time that I can lean into, and where it really helped me is when my kids got older, and they were beyond living in my household. And I had to say, God, I've never been a father of a child that, you know, fill in the blank, you know, because they're going through things I've never had to do, and I don't know how to father them, so I need you to father me, right? And so as I saw things that happened there and the things that He's rescued me from and some brokenness and those types of things, and it's really allowed me to say, hey, I need to make him first in what I invite in. You know, when you get some medical things that you don't know what you're going to do with instead of Googling everything, I want you to go to God and say, God, I know you got this, and I've had some of that here recently, where I just got to say, God, the only person I can trust in this whole scenario is you, not knowing how that's going to come out, but I know that you have me in this, whatever that situation is. And so I'd encourage you to think about the times that you've been a bummer, Lamb, where God's come in and He's rescued you in one way or another, and if that's not been your story, take some time and invite Him into your story, and say, God, I really know you have been there, and I just need to have the eyes to see where you've been involved in my life. And let Him love on you this week, and then take that time and love back on Him and love on others in His name. We'll talk with you next week. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the boot camp November 20th through 23rd. This is the Truth Network.
