Pose-to-Authentic After Hours

This is Stu Epperson from the Truth Talk Podcast, connecting current events, pop culture, and theology. And we're so grateful for you that you've chosen the Truth Podcast Network.

It's about to start in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, and please share it around with all your friends. Thanks for listening, and thanks for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. 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. This is Andy posing for Sam slash Robby again. So we're continuing our discussion in After Hours about posing and moving from posing to authenticity and more of what it takes to really start living out of a true self instead of a false self. But since this isn't really my topic, I'm going to shut up and let Jim take off with it. And I guess I should pose as Robby, but there's no chance I could give you an authentic laugh. There's amateurs in the room, and none of us are professional radio people. We should have got that piped in like that time, right?

But we're talking about posing. I think I missed it on the earlier show, so you guys are getting a bonus. And I don't know that I... Are you a North Carolina native? I am. Hey, what's our motto? My motto? I don't know. State motto. I don't know. I'm posing because... And this is my pose.

I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, and I used to have a lot of trivia, but now anybody with an iPhone or a smartphone knows a little more than I do. It is esse quam vedere, and it means to be rather than to seem, and that's where we want to get to because the pose is quite well-defined by reversing that. It's to seem rather than to be. So that's my short version because we want to get into the meat of stuff. And since you said you're going to pick on everybody's biggest pose, I gave you mine, so I'm done. Okay. All right. Well, that's your biggest one. I'm going to another one. No, it's not.

A pluribus unum, more Latin for one of many. So I think I've got the next clip. So whenever we were talking about this, it was like, you know, I wanted to throw out some Barney Fife. I mean, he's an excellent poser, you know. But one of the things that I always liked in the Remember the Titans was the pose that the players had whenever they met Coach Boone for the first time when he's getting ready to take him to football camp. And this is what you hear, the exchange. You just hear the player kind of directing what's going to be, and the coach kind of calling him on that. So there's just all kinds of posing going on in this. I think there's two or three different ones.

But again, it's people trying to live out of the false self of over importance of who you think you are or just not really living the true you. And so here we go with the clip. I'm Gary Bertier, the only All-American you've got on this team. You want any of us to play for you, you reserve half the open positions for Hammond players, half the offense, half the special teams. We don't need any of your people on defense.

We're already set. Uh-huh. Don't need none of my people. What'd you say their name was? Jerry? Gary. No, you must have said Jerry like Lewis, which would make you Dean Martin, right? Ladies and gentlemen, we've got an announcement to make. We've got Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin going to camp with us here this year. Jerry tells the jokes, Dean sings the songs, and gets the girl.

Let's give him a round of applause. Where's your folks, Gary? Parents, are they here? Well, that's my mother. That's your mama? Mm-hmm. Very nice, that way.

Take a good look at her. Because once you get on that bus, you ain't got no mama no more. You got your brothers on the team, and you got your daddy. Now, you know who your daddy is, don't you? Gary, if you want to play on this football team, you answer me when I ask you, who is your daddy? Who's your daddy, Gary? Who's your daddy? You. Uh-huh. And whose team is this? Is this your team, or is this your daddy's team? Yours. Mm-hmm. Get on the bus.

Put your jacket on first. Dean, fix that tie, son. So I love that, because the multiple levels of posing, I mean, it's obvious about the player. He's sticking out his chest and saying, this is the way it's going to be. And the coach, he even puts on a pose himself, basically saying, okay, you want to see who's the better man, who's the bigger man, who's the daddy? So there's a pose there. And then, you know, I didn't really notice it, but this is a pose that I chose at times, is you would think that Dean would have stood up for himself a little bit, right?

But he just kind of fades in and just goes onto the bus. He says nothing. That's kind of where I've played that pose as well, of where I'm just hiding. I'm not taking on anybody. I'm just kind of no confrontation kind of guy.

I'm just going to get the approval or whatever. So great clip to me. You guys, any thoughts? Yeah, I like the hiding part when we talk about that, because that's ruined many of my life, many of my days, whether it was my wife, my family, or anybody else. But just going into that hiding, when I've got things to say, I really can contribute, but I love to hide when it's confrontation involved and I think it's going to hurt somebody. Or they're not going to take it well and it's going to lead to more confrontation. It's like, nah, I'll just back out and just let it all just settle.

And it's just, it's not really being authentic at all. It is another way to pose and it's one that people can't find as easy. You know, we're talking about posing. I'm sitting here laughing. You got a bunch of old married guys in the studio tonight, but you think about where do guys pose the most? In front of the girls, right? You think about where are you going to find the greatest poses?

It's going to be in a high school hallway or on the court or football field. Look at me, I'm all that and a bag of chips. I could do better in the quarterback. I just don't want to play. And I laugh because it takes forever, it seems to learn that women above anybody else sees right through the poses. And now they may be, you know, they may find it cute. Oh, look, you know what they're doing.

But you want to get in trouble? Be authentic. So before we jump into authenticity, I want to just ask some of you guys, you know, I think posing comes naturally for us, sadly, but it does come naturally. We are not limited to one or two because I think I got many hats. I remember as a kid growing up, I kept getting hats for different stuff and I wanted to do everything.

So I just kept stacking those hats on, you know, it was like coonskin cap or a ball cap or whatever, fireman's cap, all the roles that you wanted to play. That's what we do sometimes is we have these different poses that we do. So what I want to ask you is how do you have you identified a pose that you dealt with and you don't feel like you walk into or and or is there something that you still struggle with that you you go to hiding or go to posing without really realizing it because you just live that way for so long. Anybody?

Bueller? I go into the hiding thing a lot. And I realize that sometimes at work or church or wherever it is, even at home, is that rather than tell how I really feel or don't really need to do that or take on more than I should and then get frustrated because I got too much to do. And so rather than confront the thing in proper ways, just kind of let it blow up. And it's not pretty sometimes. So because there's a there's a little demon that lives inside.

And when the doors open, he's not pretty. But that's kind of the that's kind of what I see. And I do a lot with my children is because we are a blended family. So I have a stepson and a daughter. And of course, they have other parents and we always want to play the hero. You know, the other one messed up so I can be the hero when in reality, sometimes you just have to let folks take the knocks that they're going to take. So that's right. Yeah, for me personally, it's probably that.

I have it all together and I can I can solve any problem. You know, it's you get to that point, especially with family and friends where you almost feel like you have to be the rock of the group. You know. OK. Yeah.

So everybody else is going around like chickens with their head cut off. I have no clue what I'm doing, but we're going to pretend I do anyway. And Andy's laughing at me because he's seen me do that at camp. No, I'm sitting there thinking about how I do it. And Danny, while Danny was talking, I thought of and this is actually part of who we're called to be.

We'll get to that later. But I want to be a rescuer. And I think I am. And I was thinking back last millennium when I was in a particular job that required me to go out drinking with the buddies, but I wasn't drinking anymore.

So I'd be the designated driver. And one of our more sloppy drugs was hitting on a girl and he finally wandered off and I was just sitting watching everybody. And then a guy came up to the table and I could tell she was uncomfortable.

So I went charged in on my white horse to rescue her. And that guy got the impression that I'm a very large fellow and I was young then, but he went off and I sat down for a second and she said, Well, you're with that guy, right? I said, Oh yeah, we're together. He said, he was trying to convince me he was a spy.

Well, there's really not too many bigger lies you're going to hear in a bar. Go big or go home. Yeah. So what does he really do? James Bond. Yeah. She said, Well, what does he really do?

I said, You wouldn't believe it, but he is a professional boy scout. And she laughed. I went back to the table, but I've always wanted to be a rescuer. And my wife sees that in me and it's gotten me into some of the biggest problems I've been in in my life. But that becomes a pose when you don't do it biblically. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is, is I haven't thought about it that way. You know, we talk about how we're wounded in our glory of so when it takes us out from being God's glory being shown through us. But I didn't think about it as that, you know, that pose can or what you're wanting to get away from and the pose or whatever, you can be lured into that in a good way, meaning well, kind of, but still hiding. Our poses that are the hardest to identify are the ones that really are part of our nature. Right.

And whether it's our godly nature or human nature. Right. So that's me.

But it's not. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. I like to hide an awful lot, as we just said earlier.

But for me, it's really just in that hide. It's really more of a don't let anybody really know what you're thinking, feeling or really know where you're at. Because if they really knew me.

Yeah. That that can't happen. You know, you're not they're not going to like me. It's not going to be good to know the real me. So really, it's it's anything I can do to throw you off the scent kind of thing.

Anything I can do to just get you to say, oh, OK, I'm close. Like you were talking about earlier, Jim, there's some truth in there. Yeah. You're going to get some truth out of me.

That's that's what that is what I think. But I'm not going to tell you the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say. You know, I'm going to I'm going to hold something back. I'm going to keep it back.

I'm just not going to let all my cards be shown. And I've just fight like crazy. And you guys are the most authentic I've been with, you know, ever. And I still you know, you don't know. We still like him.

And you still don't know squat about me yet. And this is this is kind of funny. I always every time we come around boot camp and start to gear up again and start to talk about some of these topics a little more. I'd say more continuously because it always comes up. We always joke about it.

But now we kind of get kind of serious about what do we think and where are we at in our poses and wounds and some other things. And all I can every time it starts come back up, I just start to look in that mirror again. I'm like, OK, what what layer can I take off this year? You know, go back to the Shrek and the Onion, right? It's like, can I just get rid of another layer, please? Please, Lord, let me get rid of another layer, which is a great segue to I don't know which clip we're on, but it's on getting from the pose to authenticity. And it is OK. I thought we might be ready for this.

I have no clue anything about this movie, except I read what I read in the clip, but I found the clip at a place that it was standalone. This is a politician. And I think the only people that might give politicians a run for their money in posing are actors, which I guess would make Reagan the best poser ever. I'm not sure he was much one. But anyway, this is Matt Damon. He's a young politician.

There's going to be a reference to him pulling his pants down in there. And he was miles ahead in an election. And then they exposed that he had done something stupid when he was younger and he dropped in the polls and end up losing election. And this is his sort of speech after that happened. It wasn't whether or not you got knocked down. It's what you do when you get back up.

I came here to tell you tonight that I will get back up. We didn't have that saying in my neighborhood. It's just one of those phrases that. It had some traction with the focus group, and so we kept using it. But it's not true. In 1998, I did a cover story for GQ.

The title was Youngest Congressman Ever. And since then, every story tried to explain how I got here so fast. And the word that people kept using was authentic. But here's the problem. This isn't even my tie. This tie was selected for me by a group of specialists in Tenefly, New Jersey, who chose it over 56 other ties we tested. In fact, our data suggests that I have to stick to either a tie that is red or a tie that is blue. A yellow tie made it look as if I was taking my situation lightly.

And I may in fact pull my pants down again at any moment. A silver tie meant that I had forgotten my roots. My shoes. You know, shiny shoes we associate with high-priced lawyers and bankers. If you want to get a working man's vote, you need to scuff up your shoes a little bit.

But you can't scuff them up so much that you alienate the lawyers and the bankers because you need them to pay for the specialist back in Tenefly. Now, we've had several clips of having your pose exposed. But we cut out some of the pregnant pause between him being the politician and playing off the crowd to getting to where he says none of this is real.

And when we can get to that point, and that's what I want to show with this clip, then we've got half the battle won. When you want to be authentic, when you want to have integrity, you're never going to get it totally right. But if that's your pursuit, God's going to help you with that. He's not going to help you pose. He's going to expose you.

Yeah, that's right. And it kind of goes back to what Rodney was talking about earlier about whenever you got in this community and you really got around guys that were willing, they found some truth. They discarded some pose, and they finally began to speak out. We talked about how, you know, being real and telling people your story, good, bad, and ugly. You know, it says confess your faults one to another that you may be healed. Well, the best way to drop a pose and the best way to go at the enemy to say you've kept me bound this way all this time is all the stuff that you've hidden in the past that you didn't want people to know, the bad stuff.

The stuff that people would, that would cause you shame or cause you to be disliked by somebody else. When you throw that out there, most of the time that I've seen, I've never seen anybody say, oh my gosh, he is such a whoremonger. He is such a bad person. No, you see people embrace him because they see that's real and it's refreshing and it brings deliverance within the community. That's what you see a lot in the boot camp is that's what helped me to become, I feel like a more authentic man was just to hear the crap that's in your guy's life.

That's right. And he's going, I can't be as bad as Jim. Like what a mess he's made. But there's a lot of truth to that. I think part of the camp, what you realize is that, you know, every man has been wounded. Every man is hiding from something. And if you get that, if you figure that out, you can almost go through and figure out what they're hiding from by their pose.

You know, maybe, maybe they were told that, you know, they should shut up growing up and then they become, you know, a voice on the radio, a voice on the radio. You know, and you can almost go through and pick, you know, the poses that's going on and know what's going on in their lives. You know, I think for me, once again, it's a layer, right?

Pull back a layer at a time because the enemy has spent years and years building these brick walls. And as we get together in the boot camp and I encourage you guys to come out, register at masculinejourney.org. Go out there, get registered and, you know, go ahead and sign up. Here's some stories. And you'll hear some stories. You'll discover that all the guys here, we all have a past.

We all have our own poses we've done with over the years. And you'll get to hear Jim's. And there are plenty. Actually, one of the most common comments from guys that come to the boot camp that I've heard is, you know, you guys were real. We weren't up there telling them what they needed to do and here's the 12-step program that's going to save your life. We're just letting them walk with Jesus after telling them how screwed up we were.

Well, I think it's not only that. Once you start getting rid of those layers, you know, it's like wearing coats in the middle of summer. You know, you start peeling them off one at a time.

You start feeling better. That's right, Jim. But you start feeling better about who you are and when you realize that God created you for a purpose. And only He can tell you who you are, you know. And you don't have to fit in because God created you. It's just like a tool in a tool drawer, you know. Not all the tools are the same.

Each was created for a separate purpose. And once you realize that, you can be your authentic you. And Danny, you look like you have something to say. Well, I was thinking about one of the greatest gifts God ever gave me was being able to sit down with some guys in, ironically, a 12-step program. But in sharing, and you're thinking, I always call it terminal uniqueness. Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, but when you share with another human being and they share back and you go, oh, my God, I can't believe they did that, you know, because most of the time we look at each other and we take a snapshot of where they are, what they're driving, you know, got it all together, always had it all together. They were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but I'm the screwed up one.

And so what did you end up doing? And I just thought about how it says we overcome by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony. So when I know your story and you know my story, all of a sudden there's a little more authenticity shown there because you go, wow, didn't realize he made it through that. Yep. Yeah, you overcome the enemy, but you really overcome your false self, I think, of who you're hiding. Yeah, one and the same. Yeah, that's right. Because sometimes we have found the enemy and it beats us.

Yeah, for sure. I never would have been able to share my story if I hadn't been around others sharing their story. So come into boot camp and actually hearing how people share their story, how authentic they are. And then you talk to them at mealtime, you talk to them at other different times and you start to learn more and more about how they really are now, what they were, the transitions they've had to make.

Not just a transition, transitions, because there's many of them, all those different layers that each layer comes off is another transition. Right. So just getting all that going and learning about that and getting at the Band of Brothers is huge. Absolutely. It is just absolutely wonderful.

Yep. I don't particularly like onions, but that is an excellent analogy. And one of the things, I did grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth and I had all the advantages and I'll start to whine about something and then the person I'm talking to will tell me their story and say, man, I had it made.

But that can be an even harder place to come from. And Jesus went after the religious leaders. Whenever people that were sinners and knew they were sinners, he embraced them and he wanted to embrace everybody, but those that thought they knew it all, like some of us posers do, really were the ones he went after. And I'm glad he came after me and for you young folks, I will encourage you that growing old isn't all that bad because the layers of the onion fall off over time. You don't even have to have them ripped off. There's just not that much to pose about anymore. Yeah, and I'm going to give a clip to show the excessive way that you can actually become authentic. You know why I pulled you over? Depends on how long you were following me.

Why don't we just take it from the top? Here goes. I sped. I followed too closely. I ran a stop sign. I almost hit a Chevy.

I sped some more. I failed to yield at a crosswalk. I changed lanes at the intersection.

I changed lanes without signaling while running a red light and speeding. Is that all? No.

I have unpaid parking tickets. Be gentle. All right. Just some guidance.

That's probably a little bit over the top of how you actually want to go. I mean everybody needs to be authentic and talk about who they are and the reality of who they are. But that doesn't mean you have to share everything with everybody. There's a time and a place. It could land you in jail. It's a hilarious movie, Liar Liar. And you got a lawyer, again, one of our top ten posters for sure.

But he cannot tell a lie for 24 hours. And what that does in one's life is life changing. Absolutely. Thank you for clearing that up, Jim.

I didn't do set that clip up properly. But anyway, we're excited about this topic. We want to share it with you at the next boot camp. That boot camp is April 29th through May 2nd. It's at a different location.

You'll find that on the website masculinejourney.org. But we're really excited about the different venue of going back to a place that we've had boot camps for quite a few years. And we're really looking forward to you being there. Please join us. Thank you. This is the Truth Network.