Sanity in the Insanity

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We are glad that you're with us today, and this is such a cool topic we're going to talk about here in a second. But Robby, we're only about a month away from something really, really cool, right? That's right. It would be like 30 boot camp Eves. Yeah, pretty close. You know, we're right in that general ballpark.

And how much fun is that? Like, wow. Yeah, I think we're about five weeks away, you know, from this Saturday to just under that to the Thursday that we kick stuff off on the 18th of November.

The week before Thanksgiving. What an opportunity. Yeah. Yeah, we talked about doing a show, which is not tonight's show, on the reasons you need to come to boot camp that week before Thanksgiving.

We might get that in. I don't know. God keeps giving us other topics. And so we'll switch it over to our friend Jim. And Jim, this week is your topic.

Yes. And we have such a staid, you know, serious show here regularly. I wanted to mix things up and go crazy. So this is how to maintain sanity in an insane world. Yeah, I think a lot of people would agree that it's kind of a crazy time. You know, it's been a crazy at least last few years, if nothing more. And I think by the end of this show, you'll realize that we've had a few crazy millennia. But how to deal with it is what we're looking at tonight. Hopefully we can get Harold to talk about, you know, before any of us were born and what happened back then, you know, where we're talking on the show, you know.

And he's got us all beat significantly. Before the car, all those kind of things, you know, that we want to ask about. Andy, you got a microphone? Do you want to say something? Oh, I'm good. Okay.

He's waiting for you to play. I did think about that, though. I mean, I guess we do get a different aspect of what it was like back, you know, 500 years ago and how crazy it was then. Moses came down from the mountain, all those things.

We'll find out about those as we go on. We love you, Harold. We love making fun of you. So Jim, we have a clip, but it's not your clip. It's Andy's clip. That's why we have the microphone. So you want to tell us a little bit about the clip, Andy?

Yeah. So being the wonderful father that I was, this movie was, my daughter probably watched it 100 times and I probably watched it with her, probably 50. And I don't remember anything about it.

I must've fell asleep. But anyway, it's a tale of Despereaux and it's about this mouse in this kingdom. And I'm going to explain the part I know from the clip. And you guys help me out here if I miss anything, but basically there's in this story, the queen is eating soup and she gets scared by a rat and falls in the soup and drowns. She's a mouse.

That's a key thing. See, there you go. See, I was sleeping during that time. No, she's not a mouse.

She's a human. See, I'm not a good daddy. I watched you with two kids. So Robby's the only good dad of the group. Oh, thank you.

Thank you, Robby. I never heard of her before today. So the queen was a human and drowned in the soup.

So she drowned in the soup. And this, basically there's this declaration that comes out that basically that soup and rats are forbidden in that town. But what I like is really the statement. It kind of plays in to the mandates and the prohibitions and all the different stuff that we're seeing in society. And it can be very draining on one psyche. There's a lot of debate about people's different positions on it. But I think coming from people that are free, it's very difficult when you put things on constraining.

But after you hear the story a little bit, then you hear the narration and she kind of explains it and it's stated rather well. When something hurts this much, there must be a reason. There must be someone to blame. From this moment on, soup, the making of soup, the selling of soup, or the eating of soup is hereby outlawed in the kingdom of dawn. Rats are to be considered illegal as well and are hereby deemed unlawful creatures in the kingdom of dawn. From this moment on, anyone hovering, sheltering, or possessing a rat in any way shall face the full wrath of the law. So think about this. What happens when you make something illegal that is just a natural part of the world?

You may as well make flies illegal or sweat or Monday morning. But that's what the king did out of a terrible sadness. Sunlight left and the world went gray. Colors faded into each other and dark clouds filled the sky. And for a long time, it wouldn't rain.

The clouds just stayed and stayed and stayed. Well, that was kind of like a Seinfeld episode there. No soup for you, right?

Exactly. As I was listening to that clip, I was reminded of now, but also a few years, just a year or so ago now when we had all the COVID protocol and everybody was on lockdown and just how depressing. And everything did feel great. Everything did kind of feel overwhelming at times, at least for me. And my life was not interrupted that much. I still went to work every day outside the home and I wasn't really locked down, but there were so many people around me that were, that it was just a very tough time.

It was a very gray time. And I remember looking forward to, oh, 2021, the turn of the clock's going to be a lot better at midnight on the end of the year. And it just continued with other stuff. Yeah. I really liked Andy that they're looking like, don't we always try to find a solution? There has to be something we need to outlaw in order to make this better, or we need to create some type of system to fix it rather than seeing what God has in mind. We're going to find some way to fix this. We've talked about that as men, we want to fix it and we always go to that. And we, you know, so much of my life has been so much of that orphan spirit that you feel like that you do actually have the responsibility to fix it. And humanity does that, governments do that. It's a, it's part of our fallen nature, I believe, is to go and try to fix things.

God continually tells us, bring me into this, bring me into this. And I'm being looked at, but actually this is a pretty good time to go to your clip, I think. Yeah. When we were talking about craziness, I think people are drawn to craziness, you know, kind of like a moth is to a flame, you know, and we'll give examples of that probably later. But when I was thinking about the craziest time I could remember as I was growing up in the media anyway, where things just seemed so out of the norm and the crazier seemed to be the better at the time was during all the, and if I was going to name the show, Jim, I told you I was going to name it. It's, it's Maury, Sally, Geraldo, Ricky, Jerry's fault, right? You know, it's, it's all the talk show hosts that did the surprise stuff, the, the shock things. And I went to get a clip from Jerry Springer and we're going to play as much of it as I could take from this clip because I started to edit it and I'm like, no, I'm just done.

Right. And so we'll listen to it. This is from the Jerry Springer show at some point. Serena is not falling for romantic proposal from her man. Please welcome Serena to the show. Hi Serena. Hi. What is this?

Marry me. It says, yeah. Yeah.

You guys see this beautiful proposal right here? Yeah. It was supposed to be a happy day. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's not going to be.

Why not? You see, I just found out that my man's cheated on me. Yeah. That's all I could take. Cause it escalated really bad really quick, you know, and I had actually watched a documentary on Netflix about this in the original one that, that, that was out there. I can't remember who it was, but Sally, Jesse Raphael was one of the second or third one that came out, you know, and it was a mistake. It was something they did. And it kind of happened on a talk show and the ratings went really high.

And so they said, Oh, let's do more of that. Right. And so all of these shows spun off to the point when Sally, Jesse Raphael had a guest on, and it was like a meet your admirer, your secret admirer.

And it happened to be a male and he thought he was going to meet a female and he met his male coworker that was in love with him. And later on the, the, the, the one that we got shocked, couldn't take it and ended up killing his coworker. Right. And then that's when all those shows kind of just drifted away.

Right. But it was just spiraling crazier and crazier and crazier until then. And, you know, I was thinking back, but that wasn't even the beginning of crazy.

We'll find out after the break that it was way before that, you know, at least in, in most of our lifetimes, but that was definitely a crazy time. And for me, I was equating it to, that was the media crazy right now. I think we live in a social media crazy, right? Cause there's so much misinformation. There's so much things out there that people just jump on whatever bandwagon they feel like they should attach to. And they attach so easily to things that aren't even part of their lives. It's a, and that's part of the social media.

I don't think things have changed as far as how people are. In fact, in the seventies, when I was a police officer, the, it drove me nuts and I nearly got hit once when I was helping out with an accident. Cause people are looking at the accident, not where they're going, not at the folks that are trying to get them through there safely. And that we've got one person that's trying to get us through all this. And I don't like the word safe to begin with because it's an illusion, but our only safe place is in God's will. And that seems awfully dangerous. So, but that's the best place for us to be.

Different kind of danger. Yeah. Right.

You know, and I think you're right. You know, Robby, you'd made the point before the show that, you know, why do people go to certain events? You were talking a little bit about that, you know, why don't they go to hockey games for the great extent because of the fight. So they go to NASCAR or stock car races.

So they want to see the crashes. Right. And, you know, back in your day, when they, when they used to do the chariot races, Harold, right. I mean, Ben Hur, you remember that stuff. Yeah.

You know, they put the little spiky things on the wheels. Yeah. It was like stepping it up a notch at that point. We couldn't do it in the backyard any longer. We had to build a coliseum.

That was a new, a new coliseum at that point. Yeah. But it's, it's definitely a time, you know, in my lifetime, which is more than half the room's lifetime. You know, I'm in the upper half of the equation in here close anyway.

Middle right in there. But this seems to be crazier, just everywhere. Andy, I think you said it, just every place seems to be kind of crazy right now. Right. It's, it's not like just this one little area that we're dealing with.

It's just everywhere. Yeah. I mean, you know, health, politics, you know, just so many different areas, climate change, weather, whatever it is, there's a, there's a spin on it from the media and there's a counterpoint to that. Finding the truth and all that, it makes it difficult.

It makes it in the same time. Yeah. Come back after the break. We're going to talk more about it. We'll see you, but go in the meantime, go to maskandjourney.org. What if one weekend wasn't up to you that you could go and God would orchestrate it all? Masculine Journey Boot Camp, basic training designed to give men permission to be how God made them, passionate warriors for the kingdom. Based on John Eldridge's Wild at Heart, experience four days purpose for God to come after and perhaps reawaken dreams and desires he uniquely placed in your Masculine Heart. Fall Boot Camp coming up November 18th through the 21st. Go to maskandjourney.org and register today. Hi, this is Sam with Masculine Journey.

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Box 550, Kernersville, North Carolina, 27285. I picked that bump and it's from the 80s and I really didn't like the song very much, but it spoke to one of the points I want to make is that things have always been screwed up since Adam and Eve fell. It's been an insane world and that listed a bunch of things that were going on over a long period of history.

He basically was trying to do history and I think the song can go on for quite a few minutes, if not hours, based on what has been done with it. But that was a time period and it mentioned AIDS, which was a big scare and still is to many. That was right after the Vietnam War and some of those things were mentioned, but there's always something to get you frantic about your life. And probably the biggest thing I lived through in my life was in the 60s and I was a kid and I wasn't paying much attention, but I remember being trained to dive under a desk in case we had a nuclear attack and I know when I, and that was, I remembered in the third grade and then I knew that's not going to help. I read a little bit of history and you wiped out everything and the small bombs they had at Nagasaki and Hiroshima were nothing compared to what they had in the 60s. Actually, I think the lead in the desk probably would have protected you.

It was a little bit more than your standard x-ray that they drape lead on you for these days and those days too. But the clip that I cut was the biggest fear of people in the 60s and it was a spoof on a very serious topic of nuclear proliferation. I normally can talk, but I'm giving it up in my old age.

Fortunately, Harold has not lost that ability. I appreciate it. But this is from Dr. Strangelove and it's, I don't remember the exact quote on the rest of it, but it's one of the longest titles of a movie ever.

It's Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Fearing. Yeah, there you go. Say it in the microphone.

Yeah, give me my microphone. How I Learned to Love the Bomb and Stop Worrying. And those are the right words. I'm not sure about the order, but it doesn't matter.

And this is something we went through. Now, what you're hearing is a discussion in the war room and primary people or the Russian diplomat and the president are talking and let her rip. The earth will be as dead as the moon. Our studies show that even the worst fallout is down to a safe level after two weeks. You've obviously never heard of cobalt thorium g. Well, what about it? Cobalt thorium g has a radioactive half-life of 93 years. If you take say 50 h bombs in the 100 megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium g, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud, a lethal cloud of radio activity which will encircle the earth for 93 years. What a load of commie bull.

I mean after all. Afraid I don't understand something, Alexei. Is the premier threatening to explode this if our planes carry out their attack? No, sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to trigger itself automatically. But surely you can disarm it somehow?

No, it is designed to explode if any attempt is ever made to un-trigger it automatically. It's an obvious commie trick, Mr. President. We're wasting valuables. Look at the big war. They're getting ready to clobber us. Well, this is absolute madness, ambassador.

Why should you build such a thing? There are those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. And at the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we've been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines and we were afraid of a doomsday gap. This is preposterous.

I've never approved of anything like that. Our source was the New York Times. Yeah, that gets back to media, but I forgot to mention George C. Scott.

That wasn't a great setup. He's the one of the couple of crazy generals that gets us in that place to begin with and it's a movie you can probably download. It's only 60 years old, 50 years old, but there's always been something in our lives and this was a big one in my youth is the fear of a nuclear war and it was a real danger.

And now for the person that was an adult then. One of the funniest parts I remember about that movie, and yes I did see it live when it came out, was the one where they've got this doomsday machine so-called where they buried these atomic bombs at the bottom of the oceans circling the earth and the American general when he finds out about it says, I won't use his word, but he says I wish we had one of those, like one that could destroy the earth is not enough. We need another. Needs to be us that pulls the trigger and that's part of the silliness that we do have.

It is. We've got a little bit of time left in this show, so Robby you're going to take us a little bit different direction, right, with your clip. Right, with your clip. Yeah, we got a couple crazies from the movie Die Hard or Lethal Weapon.

They didn't die hard, they were lethal weapons, but anyway it was Danny Glover and Mel Gibson characters and apparently Mel Gibson is one of those very reckless policemen that has got a death wish and Danny Glover is just trying to retire without dying and Mel Gibson puts him in a bad situation and so Danny Glover screams at him takes him to the side and then you know you hear this horrible confrontation between the two and as you listen to this I do have to say he's that Danny Glover's character is going to tell Mel Gibson to put this pistol in his mouth and you'll begin to hear this clicking and you need to know that the clicking is actually the Mel Gibson's character is pulling the trigger and what happens when you hear this click is that he pulls the trigger and the Danny Glover character sticks his finger where the hammer would hit the thing to kill Mel Gibson and so when you hear this ow that's Danny Glover's finger you know hitting this is your ass so as you listen to this think about what is really the behavior here hey what you just do well I control the jumps you wanted him down he's down hey come here come where pair with me okay you want to kill yourself oh shut up yes or no you want to die yes or no I got the job done what do you want after the question oh what do you want to hear man do you want to hear that sometimes I think about eating a bullet well I do I do I even got a special one for the occasion with a hollow point look make sure it blows the back of my head out do the job right every single day I wake up and I think of a reason not to do it every single day you know why I don't do it this is going to make you laugh you know why I don't do it the job doing the job now that's the reason you want to die I don't I'm not afraid of it I ain't afraid of it take my gun don't nibble on the barrel pull the trigger go ahead pal be my guest go ahead if you're serious you shouldn't tempt me man put it in your mouth bullet might go through your ear and not kill you yeah under the your ear and not kill you yeah under the chin oh you're not trying to draw a psycho pension you really are crazy I'm hungry I'm going to go and get something to eat oh god so the the thing that grabbed me about that clip is you notice that the end is when he finally says oh god and in the 119th Psalm King David in the in the Zion section says I remember thy name in the night oh lord and I kept thy word but the the idea is like oh my goodness to be so aware to call on Jesus before you go through the guy pulling the trigger right before the craziness happens and and actually as I was telling these guys I've been praying praying praying that I would be able to do that actually in my dreams and so God gave me a couple chances like my unfortunately my brother was in this situation in this horrible farming accident a dream I had last week and I woke up with my you know brother did unfortunately and I failed to call out to Jesus and the next night my wife and I and some friends were driving on this mountain road it got icy all the sudden before I knew it the car's going off the clip my friend jumps out the back but my wife and I and his wife are going falling falling falling falling plenty of time to call for Jesus I should have called for Jesus before we were on the icy road right but no no I and I wake up and I'm like oh I failed I and and so man I'm praying I'm saying this Psalm and I'm praying I'm praying God please help me to call on you in my dreams because I just want to get to the point where it's so inherent in my thinking that I don't want to get to the point where it just gets crazy and so actually I had a little breakthrough Sunday night um I was dreaming and the strange woman came on to me and all of a sudden it came out and I was like and I knew in my dream I was like Jesus help me and he and he showed up and immediately everything was cool and I felt like okay man I just this is a serious opportunity that we have because when you when I more I've analyzed that clip but I got to think about it ever since I came up with it that I don't know that those guys are crazy they just want the pain to be over with right they they're living in a crazy world and they want the pain to be over with and they want to take a shortcut to do anything to stop the pain the one guy's one is his partner to die so he doesn't have to get killed and the other guys want to die so that he doesn't have to face the pain because they don't want to take the long road of healing that it takes and so fortunately we have after our show where we're going to talk about some of the healing yeah we're going to talk about some of the healing we're going to share some more of our stories and you know how we're trying to to stay sane in a crazy world and so in the meantime a great way to stay sane in a crazy world is come to a boot camp and we have one coming up fortunately if you haven't heard about it it's coming up November 18th through 21st and it's going to be in Moxville at a great Carolina Bible camp an amazing facility out there it's a lot of fun it's it's like camping but indoors and so we have a lot of fun with it out there please come join us go to masculinejourney.org to register for the upcoming boot camp November 18th through the 21st and go download the After Hours podcast we're going to continue talking about it we'll talk to you next week. 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