Adventure to Live

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.

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Welcome to Masculine Journey. We are glad that you're with us this week. We're glad that you're joining us on this adventure, you know, that we're going to be talking about the topic of adventure.

Adventure? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So not real sharp today, so you get what you get.

Not like I'm really sharp any given week, but this would have a little more dull. So yeah, you just can't cheat it up, setting the expectations low. Can only improve from there. Now, Robby, this is from a boot camp talk that you normally do called The Heart of Man. I call it core desires, but it's the core desires from the heart of man. And so I'm doing that talk this boot camp. And so last week we touched on the first topic, which was a battle to fight.

Yeah. And so we talked about why God creates us with this desire to write injustices and those types of things. You know, that it's not just the way we were brought up, it's the way we were designed. And there's a big difference.

It could have been both, right? If you're brought up in a good household where that was important to your family. Exactly.

You know, and so we talked about that and this week is adventure to live. It's the same kind of concept. Like if you give a little boy a bar of soap, he'll figure out how to make it into a gun. But by the same token, if you tell a little boy to go out there and ride his bike, it won't be long and he'll have created a jump and, you know, some type of a ramp so that he can get as much lift as possible. Yeah.

You know, they turn everything into an adventure and there's a reason that God wants us to give those hearts back. I never did figure out why the bike engineers were so mean that they always gave the boy the bar on the bike. We should have had the little dip part. You know, I'm just saying it would have made some of those jumps, some of those jumps a lot easier, you know, a lot less painful.

Let's just put it that way. Wayne got so upset he hung up on you. He did. He did. I wasn't sure if there was an air raid thing going on.

That was like a loud beep. Rodney, why don't you go ahead and set us up with the first clip? All right, so what we are going to start off with is kind of what not to do, I guess. We're going to go with adventure gone wrong. In this clip, you got a guy whose heart is in the right place. He really wants to go on an adventure, take his family on this great adventure. They're going to go from Chicago out to California. They're going to go to Wally World, the greatest place in the world.

So yes, this is National Lampoon's vacation and this first scene is two scenes put together so you have a little pause in the middle. Clark's wanting to take his family and show them, hey, this is the great trip we're going to take and you can hear him talk about so you can get everything in on the way to Wally World because they don't want to miss anything. So he's trying to cram everything into this one trip.

And you can just hear his heart is really live. The kids, I just want to play a video game. So that's what's coming on here is it's basically Pac-Man.

He's got himself his little family truckster going across America. And then Russ, he's trying to eat it as he's playing Pac-Man. And then Audrey comes in and tries to shoot it with the space invader little guy and they're goofing around. And then all of a sudden you'll hear what really happening towards the middle of the trip after they've been on an adventure for quite some days and have all kinds of family chaos. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit when it first starts with the old game Oregon Trail.

It kind of sounds like, you know, the graphics for a minute. So we'll go ahead and listen to it. Who wants to see the trip, Jake? Okay, shut off the video games. Come on, Russ. Shut off. I know you'll enjoy this.

I've worked out the whole trip on the computer. So we get the maximum amount of fun time at Wally World without missing any of the good stuff along the way. Go. There's us.

And there's Wally World. Now let's just take a look at day one, shall we? Honey, come on in.

We're gonna do day one. Okay, now there's the family truckster as we leave Chicago. Rusty, please do not eat the truckster. Russ, do you mind?

I'm trying to work this out here on the old computer. Please, Russ. Thank you, Audrey. That's just great. Got that. You're calm. All right, that's enough, Russ. Okay, now I think we're moving toward the graduate. Thank you.

Good shot, Audrey. I don't want to be in the car anymore. I want to go home.

I don't want to go to Wally World. Clark, under the circumstances, I wouldn't mind if we just went home. In retrospect, it seems like a pretty bad idea driving out.

It's been one disaster after another. Yeah, it's been a real drag, Dad. Maybe we can try it some other time.

Wally World's overrated anyway. What do you think? We're 10 hours from Fun Park and you want to bail out? Well, I'll tell you something. This is no longer a vacation. It's a quest.

It's a quest for fun. I'm gonna have fun and you're gonna have fun. We're all gonna have some fun. We'll need plastic surgery to remove our smiles. You'll be whistling Zippity-Doo-Dah. I gotta be crazy. I'm gonna pilgrimage to see a moose. Praise Marty Moose. Dad, do you want an aspirin or something?

Don't touch. Oh, man. Everybody who's seen Family Vacation just loves hearing all those scenes because they, everybody's memories come back. Harold's just dying over there. He loves Clark and all of his movies. And I tell you, when you can just remember all those scenes of just vacation gone wrong and cousin Eddie and everything else that goes on, he's just trying to force down their throats. The poor man wants something to go really well but he just forgot about relationship through the whole thing. It's like all the kids want to do and the wife wants to do is just spend time together and have fun.

And he's trying to cram all kinds of things into vacation. Reminds me of me so many times how I was like, we gotta get from point A to point B. You gotta do it now. You want to stop? No, we're not gonna do that. We gotta go. We gotta go. We gotta go. You know, we gotta run. My daughter, man, we had to stop for her all the time when she was little. It's like, what do we gotta stop for? We gotta get there.

That's what I was wanting to do is just take off and go. I had my agenda. It's kind of like Clark, you know, instead of what the kids and the wife want to do, I just set it all on my agenda. So we're gonna start calling you Sparky.

Sparky. One of the things I love about Clark in those movies is when he starts planning these things the way his eyes. He opens up his eyes and they look like the headlights on a Mack truck.

That's the funny part to me. I only remember really one trip with the family that we went. It was a trip from Indiana down in the Texas, Oklahoma, and back. And so we had one of the pickup trucks with the camper, you know, in the back. And so my sister and I rode in the back mainly because mom and dad smoked so bad that we couldn't stand right up front in the truck.

And it was really kind of cramped. We ended up, we would sleep like all day because we had nothing to do. We'd play cards or read a book or play a game or something and we'd sleep all day. And so we'd get to the KOA campground at night and they'd want to sleep. And we were wide awake.

I must have slept like 20 hours a day during that whole vacation. That's a lot for a little kid. But if I had to pee, there was one right there. So that was good.

That was good. Yeah. I tell you, man, stopping for me was always the one thing that the family was like, you know, I needed to keep going.

They always wanted to stop. Yeah. So adventure to live. I wish Andy was here. And yeah, Andy, I did say that, believe it or not.

I'm not going to make fun of you yet. It'll probably come at some point. But Andy has a way of explaining the different types of adventures. You know, there's critical, crucial. Do you guys remember?

Any of you guys remember that? Or is that just an Andy thing? It's over my head. Over your head?

Okay. Well, God takes you on all these different types of adventures in in your life. And some of them are critical things you have to do, you know, that it's urgent, right?

You have to really get the ball across the line kind of thing. Some are more fun in nature, right? And so when Andy's back, we'll talk about that, I guess. But I do want to talk about the importance of adventure. And so what's adventure meant to you guys? As we talk about this topic, where is God used adventure in your life to really draw you closer to him or to spark something in you? Wayne, what about you?

I have to push a button or is way not other? Man, I've got I've got so many different stories. I don't know which way to go. But um, you know, a lot of what he does with the adventure is showing, I guess showing me that that I actually do have what it takes, right? That through the trials through the confusion through just just through not knowing right, but not knowing the outcome, I guess was the greatest part of the adventure, not knowing the outcome and stepping, stepping up and walking in that and realizing that it's not always easy.

It's not always fun. But there, he's always there with you. And whenever you get on the other side of it, you look back and you're with the hard times, it's still a time where you can look back and laugh and smile and look for the places where you were taught something or you learn something. He talked about Andy, you know, one of the adventures he talks about that that required adventure before.

And if you don't, if you don't come through it correctly this time, you're probably going to go through that adventure again later on down the road, because there's something important that we need to learn during that. Yeah, there definitely is, you know, I think it was just thinking as you're talking, Wayne, about, you know, look in Scripture, God takes pretty much everybody on an adventure. Right? Everybody you look at Abraham, you have to leave the country that you're in and go to a new country, right?

I'm going to take you to this new place. Right? Everybody goes on this adventure with God. And David ran around for a long time before he got to be king, living a lot of adventures with God, some of them very critical and crucial and all those things.

Right? So it's a key part of Scripture as we look back at it. So it's got to be a key part of our lives. And there's always a story to be told, and a story to remember to pass along too.

Jim? One of the things that hit me when we talked about that is that every day really should be an adventure, because with Wayne talking, he took me on an adventure Sunday with my family, his family, a couple of friends. We walked all around his 30 acres up in the mountains, and he basically gave me the ultimate compliment saying I had what it takes to walk through the woods. Well, I still remember some of my scout trips or tricks from half a century ago, but it was a lot of fun. But it was just going through the woods with friends and family. And you're probably taller than some of the trees, which kind of helped.

Well, I got smacked by a few too. Adventure is key. You know, you look back, and I think that there's some level of it. You know, when you're on an adventure and it's truly not a Clark Griswold adventure, which that movie ends up being a great adventure all the way along, is it's not scripted. You don't know what that next outcome is going to be.

You don't know. You can have an idea, but often it's a surprise. And so that unknown part, that piece of you that says, I really don't know how this is going to turn out, is a key part of that adventure as well. And so when we come back, we're going to talk more about it. We've got some great clips.

We've got a couple of different bump-ins that we're going to listen to, one of them when we come back from the break. In the meantime, you've only got about 11 days until boot camp. Really, you got to register now. We've got a lot of people signing up. We'd love to have you there. We'd hate for you to miss out. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the boot camp coming up November 18 through the 21st.

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.

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Box 550, Kernersville, North Carolina, 27285. Welcome back to Masculine Journey and we're talking about adventure. Now Rodney, that was your bump in, so why don't you tell us a little bit about it? Well, I figured the clip that I played would go first since it's the laughing track for vacation. So I thought this one had another song too that every time you hear them, the first thing you think about is this movie.

I mean, it's just so tied in with the movie. You just start laughing. You can't start to get a big smile on your face because you're thinking about Clark Griswold driving across the country with his family and it's like we're also having boot camp right prior to Thanksgiving. So you got the holiday season, it's the holiday road starting off with a good masculine boot Masculine Journey Boot Camp.

You can't beat that. Yeah, you definitely need to go register. We've had the registrations coming in every day for the last few days and getting more and more. It's typical guys. You guys kind of wait till the last minute. Well, I want to wait and see, you know, not all guys, majority of guys, but yeah, not all guys. Some register right away, but some of them are, you know, very, it takes a long time to get them to decide to come and so we're definitely grateful that the ones that are coming and definitely would ask you to consider coming.

Yeah, as well as the wives that want to push their men in that direction, you know, perfectly good. Yeah, give them an early Christmas present. Give yourself an early Christmas present.

Get them out of the house for a couple of days. Let them come back with some really cool stories and some good God moments. That'd be good. So we got another clip coming. This is from a Disney movie from back in the early sixties with Dean Jones, who was their big star, but it was actually Peter used to know I've got a Academy Award for his portrayal of Blackbeard and this Blackbeard's ghost. And it's a pretty classic setup for a movie that the hero is dragged into an adventure that he doesn't necessarily want to go on. And I bet your life is characterized in some ways with that because God really does want to drag you into an adventure that you don't necessarily want to go on. Well, in this case, Dean Jones, who is a track coach, meets Blackbeard the pirate, who is very much, as you can imagine, this washbuckling, you know, adventure seeking pirate.

And now he's stuck with this spindly bean rake is what he calls it. And so you get a sense of him dragging Dean Jones on to this adventure. But there's another key element that God does while he takes us on these adventures, right, is he is showing us, you know, that we have what it takes. And when you get a sense of the two men, you know, there's no doubt in your mind that that Blackbeard is very convinced he has what it takes. I mean, throughout the every scene of the movie.

But Dean Jones has got that lesson to learn and this adventure, you know, helps him do that. Pirates, malarkey. Blackbeard himself was a phony. Probably some chicken-livered little pipsqueak that built up a reputation scaring old women and children.

Chicken-livered pipsqueak, is it? A remark, spoke slight in like that, could raise a man's blood now, could it not? I don't think you're real.

I don't think that sword is real. And I'm going to walk right through it and go to bed. Try it, mate. I'm a kind of a ghost, you know, in limbo, caught twixt this world and the next, beholden to that spell which brings me to your eyes only. You mean no one can see you except me?

That's about the shape of it, son. And that's why I'll be sailing alongside of you, see? Wheresoever thou goest, there also will I go. So let's drink to that.

Are you sure you don't want to freshen your spleen? Now let's get one thing straight. I want nothing to do with you. I'm going to go to bed and you can go back into the woodwork or wherever it is you came from. Well, I let turn. One thing old Blackbeard don't take kindly to, it's them sort of insinuendos.

Come to think of it, I don't care for the cut of your jib neither. If I were to lay this course, I'd choose myself a companion, a hearty companion, with a little blood on his sleeve and a predilection for rum, for song, and for the occasional wench. What have I got?

I've got a shindly little bean ray. Yes, I have, with the shakes and the whimpers. What do you mean the shakes and the whimpers? Shakes and the whimpers.

Doesn't even want to join me in a drink. We're stuck with one another, you and I. The cruise may well be a long one. You know, it's so much from my perspective, my own experience, right? Going on my first boot camp, I was pretty much drug on there and, you know, I was probably the spindly little bean ray, I'm just saying.

And I had the shakes and the whimpers. But it was really an amazing thing as I watched this idea of the core desire of my heart and seeing how, as a child, I really did long for the high seas and all that, those things. And so interestingly, as I learned in the boot camp, that this is essential for a guy's heart is to go on these adventures. I'd always wanted to sail, you know, a boat from Florida over to the Bahamas.

And so I dug into renting one to see what that would be. I didn't end up going to the Bahamas, but I left out of Tampa Bay and went out into the ocean on this adventure with my family. We got into a great big storm.

My family will never forget it. All the waves coming over the bow and all that went on. But what it did for everybody involved was gave you this sense of, A, that God is there, you know, there comes a point where you're on an adventure.

Like you say, it's not scripted. And when life and death really starts to show up in the thing, it's all of a sudden, God's becomes more real to you and your need for him becomes more real. And you really do can imagine, you know, Blackbeard having experienced, he had what it takes because he'd been there on a lot more occasions than I have. And as we talk about this topic of adventure, I guess, how do you define it?

Right? Because we've talked about different parts of it. Wayne talked about some of it being scary, you know, and sometimes adventures are scary.

Sometimes they're not, you know. So when we're talking about this overall topic of adventure to live, you know, how does that really, how would you define that? Well, I used to consider riding my motorcycle an adventure back when I used to get to do that. But probably the one adventure that comes to my mind other than when we went over to Europe, when our son was in the military, is a mission trip down to Guyana in South America. That was truly an adventure. I mean, it gave me an insight into how the rest of the world lives.

And it'd just break your heart to see what some of those people are going through, to see little children going across the street with a bucket into a nasty ditch to get water. And one of the things that happened to me is I fell in love with this little eight or nine or ten-year-old black girl. We were doing a VBS down there, and she just stole my heart. So I left a part of me down in Guyana.

Yeah, and we went down to Guatemala on a medical missions trip. You do, you leave part of your heart there. You know, you see, you know, what people have to put up with, and I consider I have hard days, and none of those days are really that hard in comparison to what they put up with in some of the countries that we visit and help with. And it just, it's amazing, you know, how God takes you on that, and there's something in you that changes permanently, right? When you see the world from outside your living room, you know, from a different place or outside your town or outside your state, you really get to see life a little differently.

I'm going to do something very uncharacteristic for me and give you a very short answer. I think what an adventure is is something that takes you out of your comfort zone. I mean, when you're talking about mission trip, my trips to Peru are wonderful adventures, every one of them, and every one different. Taking an adventure with my bride, just being stuck in a 40-foot RV for seven months with her, off and on, was adventure enough, but that was something that brought us together in a way that was incredible, and that was a 4,000-mile trip back and forth from North Carolina to Alaska, and that changed my life. I think adventures will do that, even the little ones.

We took a family vacation out to Bermuda, and my daughter was in her early 20s, and my son was a teenager, and it really changed our lives as a family, because unlike what you hear horror stories of, kids want to play video games, and I think we all hung out as a family for the most part and did things on the cruise and in Bermuda, and it was on a Father's Day weekend, so I told them they'd never top all of us having lunch together on the island of Bermuda on a Father's Day, so what a great adventure. Yeah, adventures definitely speak stuff to your heart that nothing else can. I can watch a TV show and they can show me some great scenes of the Rockies, but it's not the same as standing there and looking at them yourself or feeling the wind come off of them or being at the top of one of those big mountains.

There's just nothing that replaces that, and you can't go to those places and not, at some point, just know without a doubt in your heart, if there was any doubt to begin with, that God is real, because when you see what he's created, you just draw that much closer to him. Yeah, you have expectations that you set. Each person on the trip sets an expectation. Those things sometimes and sometimes don't get met, but it's all the other stuff that happens that you're not expecting that's like, oh wow, that was great, it was fun. My wife and I went on a big adventure. We went to Colorado to go snowmobiling, drove out there, and you pull up and you park away from where the cabin is. The cabin you have to have to snowmobile into, so you ride up into it, and then it's just beautiful scenery everywhere, and we got to see some moose actually up very close. It was just on the other side of a ditch, and things like that, you got just open powder range where you can see for 20, 30 miles easily, and you got the fog that was there part of the day, and then it's lifting and settling back in, and out there where there's nobody else is, just great adventure. And then on the way back, we're just driving along, and she's like, hey, there's a little ski hill over here, why don't we go over there and try skiing? We just went over there, had a great day, never planned on it, nothing, and just went and did something for the fun of it that day. And it was just, that's what I always enjoyed about adventure.

Absolutely. In the show after this, in the after hours, we're going to continue the topic on adventure. In the meantime, while you're waiting in that to load on your podcast, won't you go register for the boot camp coming up November 18th through the 21st. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for that. You'll get to see all these people in person that you get to hear on the radio show each week. Not that you really want to see them in person, I'm not promising that's a big thing, but you get to do that, you get to interact with us, we'd have a great time with you. Go register now. This is the Truth Network.