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 the Mask on Journey After Hours. We are glad to be talking about the topic we're talking about today. Yes, we're continuing the topic of Open the Eyes, this time on Open the Eyes, How God Opened Your Eyes at Boot Camp.
And so this is our fourth week of our eyes being opened. After hours, it's harder to open your eyes. It is. I mean, we're kind of tired. We've already done one show.
Next bump will be, I can see clearly. Yeah, we can do that. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, we were talking about how our eyes have been opened at or through a boot camp and what God's been doing.
And we're going to continue that topic, partly because that's been powerful to us. And secondly, there's a boot camp coming up. And I know you hear it every week, but I got to remind you, you need to go register now. It is next weekend. Right.
And so you have time to register, but you need to do it today. Right. That's March 12th through the 15th. That must be Tuesday or something by the time you listen to the podcast. That's true, but you could still do it then.
You just got to do it soon.
So we know we got to buy food and things like that. But more importantly, we need to pray over who all is coming. And so we want to make sure we know. I thought you're going to add something there, Robby. I just thought that was well said.
Well, thank you.
Okay.
Well, yeah. Wow. What's his name? Yeah. Sam wants his name.
Yeah. I probably owe an apology to that guy. Anyway. What's his name? No, I know what it is.
but if you don't know what I'm talking about go listen to the last show and yes I do apologize that was very calloused of me uh I didn't mean it that way anyway you have to listen to the first show to figure that out all right so on to how God opened my eyes to more of that I'm sure uh I'm the first one to go on this uh the segment of the show on how God opened my eyes and he's done it many ways at different boot camps every boot camp he opens my eyes to something right and so we could talk about this for days and days and days and we can never even try to articulate what all God's done just even at a boot camp for each of us but this is from Goodwill Hunting it's a clip that we've used pretty frequently we always had to get creative when we cut this clip creative because it's got a lot of language in it so you're gonna hear some little edits out but it's where Robin Williams is his counselor Will has gone through he was in foster care for many years if you haven't seen the movie. Very brutal time through foster care. A lot of that involved abuse of lots of ways. Will is an incredibly smart kid and young man at this point. Could be attending any school he wanted to, but he's choosing to be a janitor at MIT.
And just to be around all those people and not be called out. He wants to be a wallflower, as Robby talked about from the last show. And so he's gotten in trouble with the police. Many, many times and he has a court ordered counselor he has to see and he goes through a series of those until he lands on Sean which is played by Robin Williams and there's just something that works there's something that sticks and they connect at a deep level and so as Will's been starting to let his life unpack we get down to this scene where Robin Williams brings it home about what's going on with him and so we're going to listen to that. He used to just put a a wrench, a stick, and a belt on the table.
Just say choose.
Well, I gotta go with the belt there, Vanna. I used to go with the wrench. Why the wrench? Because of him. That's why.
You're foster father. Yeah. So, you know, what is it like Will has an attachment disorder? Is it all that stuff? Fear of abandonment?
Is that why Yeah, that's why I broke up with Skylar. I didn't know you had it. I did. You want to talk about it? No.
Hey, Will. I don't know a lot. You see this? All this. It's not your fault.
Yeah, I know that. Look at me, son. It's not your fault. I know. It's not your fault.
I know. No, no, you don't. It's not your fault. It's not your fault, all right? It's not your fault.
It's not your fault. D'oh, f- It's not your fault. Hey, don't f- Title or you're with me, all right? Don't finish, I'm not you. It's not your fault.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That's so funny. Very uplifting clip. That's been used on the wound talk, and it's one of the final clip often from that.
For me, it was really powerful when I saw it for the first time and continue to be powerful all the different boot camps for different reasons. And what the enemy is good at is the enemy is good at convincing you at some level, at your deepest level, that the bad things that's happened to you in your life, when you really get down to it, you had something to contribute to that. You're part of the reason it happened. Right. And and I didn't really realize that for a long time.
And I'd been doing boot camps for a while before I got, which I hope is a final breakthrough on that. I mean, there may be more that God's working on. But, you know, as I'd had been molested by a family member when I was a young kid, just preteen time, a little bit before that, I found it relatively easy to forgive that person. Surprisingly, pretty easy to. And I couldn't figure out why I wasn't still getting breakthrough, why it was going on.
I mean, I'd forgiven people. God you called me to forgive until they kept pressing on this and God had to tell me in many different ways many different times and through many different loving people counselors friends and lots of people that Sam what happened to you is not your fault And as long as you hold on to it you can say like Will does, yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Because logically, I know. But knowledge never equals healing.
There's not the same thing. I can have knowledge of my woundedness. And I walked around with knowledge of it for a long time. I didn't remember it for several years but God brought it to me at my first boot camp and I walked around for another series of time understanding that I had this wound understanding how it hurt me but not having healing from it because I didn't let the words sink in it's not your fault and when I could finally accept that I really could truly get freedom right it was the last hold that the enemy had on me yeah and so that's always been a powerful clip to me and a special clip to me because even though it has a lot of rough language and a lot of things in it when we use it at boot camp, it really gets to the point of where the enemy holds us hostage often in our woundedness. Even if there's some truth that you contributed to it, he makes you think that it's all on you.
I think that's one of his best lies. And the reason it is, I'll speak in my case. there are many wounds that I have that were not my fault. And there are some self-inflicted wounds, right? And we all have that.
I mean, we call that sin in essence. And so Satan conflates those two ideas.
Well, you know, you know all those times you sinned. You know all the things that you chose to do that nobody did to you or, you know, blah, blah, blah, all those different things, right? And so Satan is constantly – that's why he's called the accuser, right? Because he's accusing you of things that perhaps you did, but he's also accusing you of things that you didn't do but feel a lot like the ones you might have done. And it doesn't matter, ultimately.
God is forgiving you of all of those things, but we live in a society that doesn't count it good that one should forgive himself of our shortcomings. You know, we live in a John Wayne world still. I mean, a lot of youngsters listening to us might not even know who John Wayne is, but we still live in that world, especially here in the Western world and in the United States specifically. And Satan uses that. And there's nothing wrong with saying, hey, I blew it sometimes.
I did inflict some wounds on myself and others. but that doesn't mean that all the wounds you've gotten were your fault or that you're not forgiven yeah he tries to convince you somehow you had a play in it that you were part of that role you know and often that's not the case um harold i'd like to ask you what boot camp opened your eyes to Well, I came from a background of a religious group that really places emphasis on the Word. If you can't find it in the Word, then it's not real, and you can't have anything to do with it. When I came to the boot camp and I'm hearing about listening prayer, I'm hearing about a word. God, give me a word for this year.
And all of a sudden, I'm confronted with, well, can I hear from God? And how can I know it is from God if I hear something? Because it's going to be between my ears. It's not going to be verbal. And so I came away realizing that, yeah, if I really try to talk to God, I need to listen as well.
And that's a difficult thing for many of us. We tend to have a one-way conversation with God.
So listening prayer and finding a word for the year are very important things to me that came strictly from exposure to boot camp and through the Masculine Journey team being a part of that. Thank you, Harold. Often our prayers are a monologue and not a dialogue. Exactly. What he's saying, I mean, I think about some of the times that God opened my eyes at boot camp and, you know, Harold was involved in these listening prayer exercises where we would sit down with a group of guys and say, okay, you know, we're all just going to listen, see who God wants to speak to, you know.
and the most remarkable one was always for me at the boys camp that time and I'm sitting there with a bunch of 12, 13 year old boys and 12 or 13 year old boys get to giggling and they couldn't stop and I'm sitting there, God, what do you want me to do? Nothing, let them laugh and they giggled and they laughed and they giggled and they laughed for 20 minutes like this went on I was just like, man, this is humiliating like god you know i'm hoping these people will hear something and then all of a sudden it started you know one of them said i think i'm hearing whatever the boy's name was another one confirms it and then all of a sudden they start hearing things that they want to speak into these boys lives and as outstanding as all that was and it was outstanding just to watch god work we get up and leave and I go towards the kitchen and the one boy comes up you know Mr. Robby did I really hear from God? You know what do you think?
Well there were two or three of them that were next thing I know almost everybody in that group had understood that God just would he'd open up their eyes to the fact that they actually could hear from God because one of the boys heard something about a boy's name that turned out to be his middle name and then it connected some other dots to what had been said that you wouldn't know. That clearly was just delineated that way and we had that happen through listening prayer which takes in my opinion the courage to even have the exercise because every time we want to do listening prayer I don know Yeah. As much as we've seen it work, we're always like, oh, man, is it going to work this time? Because you feel like you're standing out there on a, you know, like in Indiana Jones, walking out on an unseen bridge, like, God, you better come through, Because otherwise this is, you know. But every time, just some of the most precious boot camp memories were listening prayer where we got to see God touch somebody's heart with something that changed their life.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you, Harold. The covenants of silence. Yeah.
Yeah, that's the time to do it when you're out there and you have the quiet time with God.
So it can be a group activity like Robby was just talking about, or it can be just one-on-one with God through a covenant of silence. Yeah, it shouldn't sound like you're out on a limb with some of the questions you ask God, but it sure feels that way. You know, to ask God, God, what do you really think of me? Wow, I mean, I know me, and he knows me better. That's a scary question.
but anyway art over to your your turn art i'll put the camera on you that's good right there yeah got me right right in the middle um well uh my eyes were opened at the very first boot camp i went to i had not been a part of the this group uh for very long but i i came to the boot camp and i was just amazed at how much work all the guys were doing to put The amount of work they were putting into their presentations, the organization, the timing, getting the meals right and setting everything up. And I'd just like to say that, you know, I actually saw God's spirit in each one of these guys. It was working. It was pushing them to the far extent of their talent to be a part of this. It really takes a lot of dedication, a lot of work, and obviously God is behind all of it.
And I guess you could just take me, for example. I used to be, and it seems like a lifetime ago now, I was just a lab rat. I worked in a laboratory, and believe it or not, I actually really enjoyed doing that. But at the time, you know, I never thought that I would be like part of a radio broadcast. You know, it was the furthest thing from my mind.
But one thing, you know, God led me through one thing and then another thing, and his spirit was in me. It brought me here, and now I'm a regular part of this group. Absolutely. Very vital part of the group. Thank you, Art.
Thank you. I run the cameras, you know, what else? Yeah. Well, you wear a different hat every week. You always keep us on our edge.
Thank you, Art. Darren, over to you, buddy. What's got laid on your heart on this topic this week? Specifically, when you threw the question out, the first thing that came to me was not necessarily being at a boot camp as a participant, but being at a boot camp as a leader.
Some of the first boot camps that you and I put on together with Mark and others and Jim. And believe it or not, there's no boot camp that goes by that doesn't have significant amounts of warfare involved or significant amounts of just pressure. you know, that we all feel because we're doing it seemingly for others, right? I mean, we're doing all this work to bless other people, and you want it to hit hard, right? I mean, you want it to land.
And so you try to put forth all this effort, and there's one particular boot camp that Sam and I were primarily leading, And we had some helpers who happened to be our wives, and they were great helpers. But one particular day, they didn't really come through the way that we had asked them to come through to be back in a certain amount of time for the guys because it was really hot. They were being Mary instead of Martha, right? They were having fun. That's the reality of it.
they were having fun and i'm glad they were having fun but we we needed a bunch of cold water and all that kind of thing and we'd run out and the guys had just come in from playing paintball and all that stuff and i was furious and rather than be a nice loving husband that i should have been um i was not and i i was i was pretty rough with all three of them and two of them weren't my wife So and rather than them, you know, pulling me out behind the woodpile and just beating the daylights out of me, they just didn't say a word. And they went away. They did what we asked them to do. And then they went off on their own and they started praying for the idiot who had just, you know, rebuked them. And then later on that day, those three ladies came back to me and were so gracious and began to pray over me, which just totally shattered my heart.
But the realization, the thing that God opened my eyes to at that moment, and it still is one of the most powerful times in my life, is these ladies really love me. They love me unconditionally. They do it even when I'm a jerk. And they're showing me this kind of grace, and I can't handle it. I struggle to handle that grace from a human.
and these very, very gracious, lovely people. And if that true how much more do I struggle to accept God grace which is immensely more needed Maybe not if you ask those three ladies but from my perspective God knows every sin I committed and he knows all of the evil thoughts I've had or the mean things I've said or done, and he loves me even more than that. And it just rocked me to my core that I really struggle with accepting God's grace and what do I do with that. And I don't ever want to be flippant with it, you know. But in that moment, I was terribly uncomfortable accepting that grace from those people.
And you and Mark, actually, because you're the husbands of those two women that I kind of rebuked. And so it was just an immensely wonderful gift that they gave me, and they showed me the glory of God to forgive. And the thing that opened my eyes was, I'm not sure I can handle that. and so I still think back about that often when I'm struggling and not feeling very good about myself and trying to reconnect with God on that level knowing full well he's there but just you know remembering okay it's a struggle but he's there even if I'm not feeling it even if I'm not wanting to accept it, he's still offering it. Yeah, it's amazing how forgiveness opens up doors you never thought that it would.
Yeah. Not only within you, but just in others. Yeah. You know, when they genuinely feel your grace, the grace laid upon you from them, it's a game changer for everybody. Andy, you have another clip you'd like to play.
Yeah, another two for one. Yeah, yeah. Could be a long story. That's it. That's it.
So boot camp, what my eyes were open to was the power of story or film in getting this message. It's about the heart. We talk many times about how movies can be used like modern day parables. And when you go to these boot camp talks, it's not a continuous, we're talking at you for an hour. Thank God.
To make the points and to open up your heart, clips are used. And I didn't know that. I remember watching some of these powerful movies, dramas, adventures, that would make my heart come alive, and then I had to go back to work on Monday. And I was like, there was a disconnect. They were there.
The movies were there and impacted me and impacted my emotions and opened up my heart. But again, I had to go back and there was no way to really put them together. And whenever the talks would be given and these clips would...
Okay, yeah, go ahead and play it.
Sorry about that. That's all right. We'll talk about it. It's a trailer to Braveheart. That's right.
Yeah. I came back home to raise crops and, God willing, a family.
So you want me to marry you then?
Well, that's a bit sudden, but all right. Is that what you've got on a proposal? I love you. Always have. I want to marry you.
In a land of timeless beauty, William Wallace was a man of peace. I want to stay here with you. And I with you. You say you want to stay out of the troubles? If I can live in peace, I will.
But when they threatened his world... Edward Longshanks is the most ruthless king ever to sit in the throne of England. Scotland. My land. And the woman he loved.
I want a home and children. It's all for nothing if you don't have freedom. He was driven to war. Go back to England and tell them there that Scotland's daughters and her sons are yours no more. Her rebellion has begun.
And who? William Wallace. He rallies new volunteers in every Scottish town. We've come to fight and to die for you. Stand up, man, I'm not the poor.
Pick a flock of your finest assassins and set a meeting. My lord, Wallace is renowned for his ability to smell a membership. We'll dispatch our future queen with the notion that she comes in peace. Longshanks desires peace. He declares it to me, I swear it.
You tell your king that William Wallace will not be ruled. Nor will any scoffle I live. He waits for you at York. If you are a man enough to come and face him. Why do you help me?
Because of the way you are looking at me now. Where are you going? I'm going to pick a fight.
Well, we didn't get dressed up for nothing. We can't beat an army. We can't! Then we will. Would you be willing for one chance, just one chance, to tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!
Andy, if you want to go ahead and just take us home on the rest of your... I cut you off earlier. Yeah, no worries. Yeah, we use Braveheart a lot, and Braveheart speaks to depths of our soul, or my soul. And it really, it just energized me to really open my heart up to the power of story.
But again, Braveheart, we used that. We would play just the soundtrack in between sessions, and it would bring your heart alive. It would prepare it. It was like smelling salts for what's going to go on at boot camp. And it's just a powerful thing.
It's another way that God uses, the Holy Spirit uses to get access to your heart and allows you to come alive as a man. Yeah, it's one of the reasons we love to use clips from secular things as well as Christian is God's story is in the midst of it. You know, it may be around a lot of other stuff. It's not his story. But those things that speak to your heart and bring you alive are coming from his story.
So lean back into him and ask him about it. Go to mascoandjourney.org to register for boot camp.
Sorry.
