Word of the Year After Hours: What A Year It's Been!

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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 we are continuing the conversation started in the show, which if you didn't listen to that, you have no idea what we're talking about. But we were talking about our words for the year. Robby, could you do a quick recap of what that means when we talk about word for the year?

Sure. So this is something we've enjoyed doing for a number of years and the people at Wild at Heart have done it for years way before us. Essentially, to begin asking God in the month of December of a word, sort of a topic that he would like to work on with us in the upcoming year, in this case 2021. And so similar to the listening prayer that you would do if you came to a boot camp and asked to hear your new name, you know, you're essentially just going to throw that out there. God, what's the word that you would have me to want to work on this year?

And then you just listen. And hopefully, and I know he will. Yeah.

He'll come give you an answer. And then, as you said in the first show, if he gives you the word Greece, you know, it's pretty slick. I mean, Greece is the word. It is, you know. It's a little slippery.

Yeah, it's a little slippery. You got all those kind of things going. But, you know, Rodney, I want to ask you a little bit about your word from last year, you know, and then I think you have a clip from that that goes along with that. Or is that with the new word? I had a clip for both, but I don't think the 2020 got in, just 2021. Okay.

Well, then we're not going to play that. So why don't you tell us about your 2020 word, and then we can go on to the next one. My 2020 word was father, and it was a progression from overcomer. And he showed me that if you're to be an overcomer, you're going to have to have me as father to do that. I can't do it on my own, which, you know, I was a little disappointed in because I thought I could.

But no, I'm not going to be able to do that. So I have to have a father. I have to have a good father. And because I thought when he gave me the word, first thing that went into my mind was, oh, it's going to be about me being a father. It is in a roundabout way, but it's really about me knowing him as father.

So I have to go into a relationship with him to understand what he is as father. And he, my most often prayer for the year was just father me. And what I found saying that just continually throughout the year in any kind of situations, you know, whether you're at work, at home, or you just find yourself in a little situation that would just found so much comfort in the fact it's like, okay, Lord, father me, what am I to do here?

You know, what should I say, help me get through this event or get through that situation. And he would step in and help me out. And the next thing you know, I'm in the throes of something and I'm, after I'm done with it, I'm just like, oh, thank you father for that.

Because it was just something that I could just tell it's not normally where I'm at. And my mind would go into different places and he kept me on track. He's kept me in focus on things and able to share the word several times with people that are, as I'm pretty sure unbelievers and things of that nature, being able to share different things at different times that I'm normally not very comfortable with and was much more comfortable and content in doing those kinds of things. And in the year of COVID and riots and, you know, election and then whatever, which still isn't ending, but all that stuff seems to still be going on, but it was contentment along with that. And it was, that was the, a lot of the fathering was keeping me calm in times of anxiety. Cause normally, you know, I, I get all into this stuff and he, you know, you guys joke about all the time I'm into these podcasts stuff, but that truly is a place where he took me into finding and searching out him and other places instead of just searching out worldly things. And just being able to be a father through that in the year of chaos was, was absolutely wonderful.

Cause I didn't have to worry about all the stupid stuff going on in the world. I could hear that from everybody else talking about it. You know, what do I need to be front and center and getting it firsthand anyway. So he took me in through the word father and he fathered me last year. And then, you know, when we said, Hey, we're going to be coming up on the word.

I knew it was coming up because of December. And I, before you go to the new word, I want to ask you a question. For somebody out there, none of us in this room, obviously, but for somebody out there that likes to try to control everything, which would be everybody in this room, how much pressure is taken off when you just are able to turn and say, father, I need you to father me through this.

All right. Then, then some of the pressure get lifted as far as I don't have to have all the answers. I just have to have the ears to hear. That was one of the amazing things.

I'm glad you bring that up because when you get fathered and you allow yourself to be fathered, you don't have to come up with everything. And that's one of the things that I started noticing throughout the year that gave me that contentment that, okay, COVID was the first thing that really hit right in the beginning of the year. And it was like, Whoa, this thing is out of control. All kinds of stuff coming at us and had no idea it was going to be prolonged because everybody's like, Oh, we're going to, you know, knock down the curve and all this kind of stuff, flatten the curve. And we're going to give hospitals time to react. And then we're going to be through this.

And then here we are today, still at the same place where we were when this whole thing started. So being able to not have to have an answer. I have a talk with my wife, my son, my daughter, you guys.

I don't feel like I have to come up with anything. I just sit back, relax, and what comes, comes, what doesn't, doesn't. If it's right or wrong, I really don't feel all that responsible for having to have the right thing.

It's so comforting. Well, I think, you know, as a father, just a person in general, but as a father, you know, it feels as though there's all this pressure to have answers. And I found that, you know, a lot for me is saying, I don't know how to father my child in this situation, fill in the blank, because their life is continually changing just as yours is and everyone else's is. And so whether that's personally, if it's not about your kids, you know, help father me in my finances or, you know, help me in this area, but at least puts it back in his court to where he can follow you in the midst of it. Yes. And you have to be willing to allow him to do that because you can shut him off and turn him off and tune out and go another direction if you want to, real easy.

He'll allow you to, if you want to turn him off, turn away from him. Well, thank you. I wanted to chase that rabbit trail for a minute. I like it. Well, go ahead and go with your word for this coming year. Well, when I started to pray then this year and I was like, oh, I'm going to start early.

I'm going to pray. And we're going to, we're going to have this journey. And then December, well, I got the word really quickly. I didn't have this journey that I thought I was going to have for December.

Cause I've never usually done that. I'm like last year I showed up at the studio and we're like, oh, we're doing the word. Oh, I better go pray. And I got it, you know, got my word. And this year, as soon as I prayed, I got my word, which is family. So in order to be an overcomer, I need my father. And now father's going to teach me about family.

And again, my, my brain went to, oh, me and my, my immediate family. And so I was like, okay, so what do you have for me with family? What are we going to do? What is there anything I need to be praying about? Or what do I need to be thinking about?

Where are we going Lord? And it was like, no Rodney, we're talking about my family, the family in Christ, you know, the church, his church. And so I'm like, oh, this is more about not, it's not just be with only those folks, but it's, you don't know who's in my family. You don't know if the next person you touch or go talk to is in my family or not, but you need to treat them as though they are. And you need to be with them as though they are. And you need to talk to them as though they are and just be comfortable in that, which is something I'm not.

So it's going to be a challenge for me, I think, to be that comfortable, but that's the next step I think he has for me. And so we get to our clip, which is about family. Well, it has the word family in the title. Yeah, I didn't know that we'd ever get a clip from this particular TV show, but you were able to get one. I sent you that one first. It just kind of was like, oh man, how far off the rails can I go with the first one I sent you? And it was kind of funny.

But then this one, I at least found one that was a little more appropriate. And it's from the show All in the Family. And that's just what he put on my mind when I started thinking about what clip am I going to have for family? Because I wanted to go a few different places, but he kept just taking me to All in the Family, All in the Family.

And so I was going through some clips and seeing what was out there. And of course, Archie Bunker is not your typical Christian father, let's say. And basically what God kept giving to me was, here's a vision of what a lot of people and a lot of people will rail on, you know, Archie Bunker and All in the Family for what it was a show of. But he's like, that's what's relevant in today's culture.

You know, the people that are ripping on him are doing the exact same thing. And this is very relevant in the worldly view of family. So that's where I went with that. Okay, so what are we going to hear as we turn it on? What's going on? So you've got Archie and Meathead, his son-in-law.

They're down in the basement, they got a blanket around them, they've been trapped down there. And Archie kind of goes, you know, they sound like they've been drinking, but I don't think they had, you know, but they are talking and they get, you know, kind of intimate with each other. And so Archie starts talking about his dad a little bit, and you can see where his skewed up view is of father. And it was just like, oh man, this is where, you know, a lot of people have very bad views of father because their earthly father was so horrible in many different ways. And even really good fathers have their downfalls, you know?

So this was, I thought, just a good way to bring in worldliness in fatherhood with Archie and Meathead. What's wrong with my old man? Don't be stupid. My old man, let me tell you about him. He was never wrong about nothing. Yes, he was, Arch. My old man used to call people the same things as your old man, but I always knew he was wrong. So was your old man. No, he was.

Yes, he was. Your father was wrong. Your father was wrong! Don't tell me my father was wrong.

Let me tell you something. Your father who made you wrong, your father, the breadwinner of the house there, the man who goes out and busts his butt to keep a roof over your head and clothes on your back, you call your father wrong. Hey, hey, your father, your father, that's the man that comes home bringing you candy. Your father's the first guy to throw a baseball to you and take you for walks in the park, holding you by the hand. My father held me by the hand. Oh, hey, my father had a hand on him now. I'll tell you, he busted that hand once and he busted it on me to teach me to do good. My father, he shoved me in a closet and said, no, it teaches me to do good. Cause he loved me. He loved me.

Don't be looking at me. That's the most uplifting clip we've had in a while. Thank you. Rodney, I appreciate it. Merry Christmas, everybody.

Happy new year. No. So, you know, obviously you've got a guy that's struggling with his feelings of his father. There's some good feelings and there's some really, really bad feelings.

Yeah. And that's where I think most of us are in reality, right? We have a lot of good and a lot of bad, all mixed and jumbled together.

Can we separate the two? And again, the statement that keeps coming to me is the father that made me, you know, if the father that made you, if you really look at the real father that made you, you know, your father, the heavenly father, you're going to be fine. But when you take, as soon as you take your eye off that, there's all kinds of other things that can creep into your life and help ruin it for you. Yeah. As I listen to that, you know, I do think about the family of Christ. It is full of broken people, you know, and that's unfortunately what we do here is a lot of the people's stories from bootcamp is just very heart-wrenching of stuff that they've gone through.

Yeah. And I think about, you know, we all think that the way we grew up was normal, right? I mean that, you know, I, yeah, I tried to kill myself three times, but you know, that's just average stuff, stuff, normal stuff families go through, you know, or my mother, you know, she attempted suicide, ended up in the hospital for a year and a half.

And, you know, they're just the normal stuff that people go through, but it's not, you know, we, he put him in a closet for seven hours, but to Archie, normal, that's all he knew. And, and so to all the attacks and the things that have happened in everybody's life, when you get to know them, there's a story there. Thank you, Rodney. Uh, Danny, you want to share a little bit about, uh, your word from this year? Well, I kind of backed into this thing. So, um, the word was released and I just kind of derived it from the adventure I've been on this year, which has been quite an adventure.

Um, and, you know, cause when we started talking in the previous show, you know, got the email or the, uh, text and I'm like, I have no idea what they're talking about and I didn't really want to share. I didn't know what you're talking about, but I didn't. So, you know, just with that word being released to move to King and, and, and, and to, you know, where we are now is amazing with a new church. Our pastor just announced his announced his resonations.

I don't think it was because of us, but you know, you always wonder A plus B. Well, yeah, you know, okay. I'm not dealing with that. I'm resigning. But to, to see that and to, um, not the pastor resigning, but to listen to you guys and to listen to your passion about what you're doing. It is amazing because I'm like, you know what, that needs to be a part of what I do. And then that's kind of the heart behind, you know, going to a bootcamp, you know, hanging out with you guys. I have the luxury or the whatever you want to call it and to do that, but to see that, you know, Robby, you're passionate about this, you know, Sam, you're passionate, you know, and it's something you want and it is making changes. And I think that's kind of what discipleship is about. It makes it attractive. Yeah. We're wounded, broken, messed up. You know, I told the guys one time we were teaching, I said, if you find a perfect church, don't go in. Cause you're about to mess it up.

The reality of it. And so to be involved into, to have these tools to, to walk forward is amazing. And so I'm going to start praying for a word for next year. I think maybe I know what it is, but I'm not sure, but it's not catch to go with catching. It's not greasy. Just wondering, you know, they usually tie together. So maybe like a big release could make a great meal. I don't know. We've got them all covered. Okay. Yeah. Well, I guess I'll, I'll go. So I'm going to play my clip first and it's on the word believe, which, which is what I believe to be my word for the year. Um, so I'm gonna go ahead and play it. And it's a clip from a song from the Doobie brothers called what a fool believes Michael McDonald has a great voice, but you can't understand anything he says. So I'll come back and read the lyrics to you afterwards, but yeah, this is just a little clip from it. So go ahead and play it. Yeah. I've listened to that song since I was a kid. Literally. It was like one of my first albums ever got, cause my sister gave it to me.

She was tired of it. And so I had the best of the Doobie brothers. Right.

And so that's where I got all my albums initially. And I've known this song forever. I had no clue what it said other than what a fool believes. And so that's a clip that I was thinking on this topic of belief, but what he says is, uh, but what a fool believes he sees. So basically what he sees, he believes to be the truest thing and no one, no wise man has the power to reason away what seems to be. And for me, what that was saying was I look at a situation and I come up with conclusions that may or may not even be true.

Right. And that leads into my beliefs, whether, and mainly it's been about me, a lot of it. And so I had this, this year that I was working on this, uh, word belief. And so I'm out working the other day and I'm like, God, what's my word for next year? You know, I'm ready for a new word.

And I hear him say hope. And I'm like, what? I did that word two years ago. I know I did that. Why am I going back to another word? It's supposed to be progressive God, you know, why am I being recessive and going back to another word? So I went and I downloaded the last couple of years, um, shows and I went back and I listened to the word of the year and actually my word of the year for 2020 was hope in my year, my word of the year for 2019 was believe. And apparently I just stuck with believe for another extra year.

You got to repeat kindergarten. It sounds like, yeah, it definitely God's saying you didn't get it the first time. And so for two years, I've been on the same word and didn't realize I've been on the same word, but really it was important to me this year because he's really come after these things that I see things and I believe in to be true, but they're not, you know, Danny, I was joking with you a plus B equals C, right? Well, yeah, that works in a math equation.

It doesn't work in life and relationships, especially it doesn't work with our own woundedness and the things that we've done that have damaged our own hearts over time, you know, but the enemy will let you really like for you to believe that a plus B always equals C and God's really need a second year to unpack that for me. Yeah. Some of us are slow learners.

We get it. I am, you know, apparently, and I know my word for 2021 is not believe it's it's hope. And we'll talk about that in a second, but, you know, really this last year has been pretty important for me on this topic. It's really helped me break through some of my own personal beliefs. I know in September, you know, I said I was going to stick a sticker up on my mirror and in my car and I did it was, it was there. And it says, what do I choose to believe today?

And I left it there for probably about a month, maybe a little longer because it made me do something with it every time I saw it. Right. And what I found was that I'm quicker to catch those agreements. I'm quicker to catch the enemy's lies and not let them funnel into beliefs. Right.

Cause I want to hang my hope on the beliefs that God's already shared with me. That's more true than the things I've thought about myself or the world's told me or those types of things. I want to pull out a little more from what you're saying. The a plus B equals C I am sort of the math.

One of the math guys here, we've got a few, but in relationships that never works. When you are thinking about things, there are so many factors that impact that, that, uh, I mean, you just look at the political situation, doesn't, you can look at it from whichever side you're on and see how can those people on the other side believe that they can't possibly if they're thinking. And that's because our perception is not the reality. And the only one that has a reality is God.

Yeah. And so thank you, Jim. That's been a big thing that's helped me this year is really, I needed a second year of focusing on belief, you know, and God did tell me hope.

I know he did, but I think he just deferred it and said, eh, maybe we'll regroup again and go back to this belief. And so my word for the year, this next year is hope. And it does build on belief because if you don't have the right beliefs, it's kind of hard to have hope, right? When you're founded in things that are lies and you believe those to be true, what's a really to hope for at that point.

So God had to kind of break through those beliefs in order for me to be in a position to get greater hope. And I'm going to play a clip on hope it's from the hunger games. And what this is, is you have the enemy in this, you know, the president is the enemy in this situation.

And he's controlling all of his areas. I can't remember what they called them, you know, the different regions that they called them, but he's talking about this topic of hope, why they have the hunger games, because it gives hope, right? But not too much hope.

I'm going to listen to it and we'll talk about it. Hope, hope, hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous.

Spark is fine. As long as it's contained. So, so contain it. Now, I like that clip for a lot of different reasons. I do like the fact that it says that, you know, the only thing that can beat fear is hope, which, you know, love obviously beats fear as well. But it's one of those things that it's a natural polar opposite to that. You can't live in fear and still have hope.

It's hard to be in both of those camps at once. And so for me, I want to be on the opposite side of that this year. I want God to really help me see hope in a way that's very big and very contagious and very, not just a little hope that he's not worried about, but a bigger hope that the enemy is worried about. And so that's really kind of my hope for this year is that I understand that word at a much deeper level and, and find a lot more of it in my life. Yeah.

And have it make basically a home in your heart. Yeah. And actually Danny's doing a sermon on this very word. Sunday, right? Sunday.

Yeah. Well, tell us, tell us a little bit about it. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.

Well, it comes in. I've still got to get you to give me the pronunciation of the Hebrew again. Don't get okay.

I'm gonna see Jim evidently. But as I was recovering from hernia surgery, God gave me something about hope. You called it a procedure, but it was really a procedure. But the hope in the Hebrew now, I'm not the Hebrew scholar, these guys are, but it refers to a thread.

Is that correct? So you're very fiber and God is hope. So using scriptures as he knit us together in our mother's womb, you're, you're very fiber was made by the hand of God. And so your core beliefs, what you believe inside makes you react to the things, just exactly what you were talking about, you know, and we act on false hopes. I think about my addictive life and I think about the reason whether it was a false sense of who I was or who I was not, because I believe in our very core that men are not scared of who we aren't. We're scared of who we truly are.

That's what makes getting the words for a year. And that's why we avoid things. Because if I discover who I really am, maybe I will be sent to Greece or Africa.

I don't know. Or maybe not, or maybe God wouldn't choose me to do this. And so they might start with just another state, another town, another town, you went from, from one Southern town to another Southern town. Maybe they'll move you up north.

Anyway, I don't think I think you'd fit right in. But this year, there's still time in the year, right? There's still time in the year for you to be praying.

And this isn't something you got to have by January 1. Andy may not have his till like the 15th or the 20th, you know, it's hard to say, but you do want to pray about it and just say, God, what's my word for this year? And then continue with him on that journey and help him unpack it throughout the year, as he really brings to your life, a deeper and deeper meaning, and more importantly, a deeper and deeper intimacy with him. Go to masculinejourney.org, send us an email, reach out to us on social media. We'd love to hear from you. Hope you have a wonderful new year and we'll talk to you next week. This is the Truth Network.