Spiritual Purple Heart Wounds

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Thank you. How can we keep from losing heart while trying to find the good way when life feels more like a losing battle than something worth dying for? Grab your gear and come on a quest with your band of brothers who will serve as the guides in what we call The Masculine Journey. The Masculine Journey starts here, now. Welcome to Masculine Journey.

We are glad that you're with us this week. If the number of clips that we submit on our team is evidence of a good topic, Danny, you have a great topic. I know, an abundance of clips, and we had a clip cutting. Yeah, we had to cut some clips out.

Yeah. Yeah, because we're not going to be able to get to them all. So, if you want to know what clips we didn't get to, go to Danny at MasculineJourney.org. Or Robby at MasculineJourney.org.

Or any of us at MasculineJourney.org. We'll answer your questions for you. So, Danny, tell us a little bit about your topic for the week. Well, the topic is spiritual wounds that turned into, like, messages of hope. And just thought process behind it was, you know, things that you know you're wounded over, but somehow, some way, God has used it in healing. Maybe not totally, but God seems to put people in my life that have similar wounds and kind of a, you become a guide through some of the stuff, so. Yeah, and when you're talking about spiritual wounds, I mean, it can involve physical wounding, obviously, but it's a spiritual impact.

Yes, the impact to your heart that, that's what we're talking about. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I got it now.

I'm good. So, do you want to go ahead and tell us a little bit about the first clip? The first clip is from the Andy Griffith Show, which did that for my friend Robby, because he'd been missing an Andy Griffith clip. So, it's from the first episode of, it's called The New Housekeeper. And Opie's kind of the wounded one, because his cool housekeeper is getting married and she's leaving, and she did a lot of things with Opie, and so, but Andy keeps selling the bill that Aunt B is coming. And if you're a fan of the Andy Griffith Show, I know not everybody is, but you ought to be. Then you should, then Aunt B becomes, you know, one of the stars of the show, but Opie, she can't do anything Rose could do. And so, Opie's pretty much pushing her out. But the scene is the end of the show, and Opie has a heart change toward Aunt B, and kind of goes after her heart.

So, here we go. I wish you wouldn't leave Aunt B, maybe if you'd give him a little more time. No, Andy, it's much better this way.

Not that I wouldn't give anything to do the things he likes to do, play baseball and fish and all, but he's a very smart little boy. I couldn't fool him. And you know, Andy, he's going through a very, very hard time. I think we better get going. I'll go. Whoa, Aunt B, wait! Opie, what are you doing? You're a pajamas! Don't go, Aunt B, I don't want you to. I want you to stand. You mean it, Opie?

Sure! Well, what changed your mind? Well, if she goes, what'll happen to her? She doesn't know how to do anything. When frogs catch fish or are frogs, she'll be helped with.

Yeah, I guess that's right. A woman don't know how to do important things like that, why she'd just be lost. So that's why she's gotta stay, so I can teach him to her.

You need me. If you don't like Andy Griffith, you need to reach out to We Need to Pray For You at masculinejourney.com. Honestly, it's such a great show. And Andy, what was it about that clip that really prompted you to bring it? Well, Opie's change of heart is so sweet because he honestly from a, I guess Opie's about four, five, six, somewhere along in there, and he just honestly, I mean, face it, I mean, if you can't play ball, hunt frogs and fish, you're pretty much doomed in this life, I feel sure. And that was his perspective of going after her heart.

And, you know, so often people put those agents of sanctification in my own life and that kind of rubbed me the wrong way or just not like it used to be, but ultimately end up with some great friendships out of it. You know, we talk a lot about the healing that happens at boot camp or outside of boot camp or with God as you walk with God, but God doesn't let you just sit there healed, right? I mean, to degrees of healing, right? And there's always more healing to be had, but he's gonna have you do something with it.

You know, he's gonna ask you to work on others with it. Yeah. Right? And I'm sure there's a scripture in there somewhere. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Andy, you don't – Second Corinthians chapter one, right? I think it is. Four, one, it's in there. It's chapter one, verse four, right?

The God of all comfort comforts us so that we can be comforted with the comforted we were comforted with. That's how it goes. Does it sound right, Andy? Or Danny? Andy, Danny? That sounds right.

Andy and Danny agree. Well, go ahead and read it again. I was talking – That's not the one I had pulled up. Oh, then let me have him say it again. Yeah, you have to say it again. No, come back to it. Well, let Andy do it. He's got it pulled up. Well, go ahead, Andy, Danny, whatever.

So let me find the right – Well, come on. Who comforted us in all our tribulation – he's talking about God – that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted by God. Yeah, I think that's pretty much what you said. Yep. Yeah.

I mean he – A lot of comforting going on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I used the Robby Standard version.

Robby Standard version, yeah. So, Danny, there's more than one scripture that talks about this? There's absolutely more – the scripture I put out to you guys.

Yeah. And hopefully you all saw it. I didn't read it.

I didn't think so. Is – Joshua 4 says that this may be a sign among you that when your children ask their fathers in time come saying, What mean you by these stones? Then you shall answer them that the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord when it passed over Jordan. The waters of Jordan were cut off, and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel forever. Just a reminder – the stones were a reminder of the – you know, I can't imagine being pushed up against a body of water and enemies pressing on you and that kind of thing. It was a reminder of what God has done. And that's kind of the way I see, like, physical scars is a reminder that there was – yeah, there was pain, but there was also healing.

Well, they were self-inflicted, which I have many self-inflicted scars, but – Well, I should have read that. That was good. So, while we're on scripture – Actually, I did read it, Danny.

It was good. So, while we're on scripture, I'll throw out one more. Oh, three. You're cutting out a little bit there. Am I? Is that – I don't think we can hear you. Can you not hear me? No?

No, it's cutting out. Let's go ahead and give you the other mic, and we'll kind of go from there. This will be quick, but it really goes along the same lines. We've used it many times – confess your faults one to another that you may be healed. Now, in that, you would think, well, how's that tied to a wound? But a lot of times your faults are tied to your overcompensation for a wound.

And when you confess those and you confess the way that God healed you, it brings healing to other people, so. Okay, so while you have the microphone, do you have a story that comes to mind of when God – No, that's after hours. You're a little bit early here, man. We're on to another clip or something, aren't we? We're good to go to break here in a second. Good. Well, I'll bail you out there.

All right, thanks. You know, there's been plenty of times God's kind of done that. This last week I did my first real counseling session with somebody as a counselor. I've done counseling over the years with people from boot camps and people I've met at church and those kinds of things and worked with men from time to time on stuff.

But this is my first cold, never met the person before. And as I was listening to their story, God was constantly reminding me of, yep, you've experienced that, yep, you've experienced that. Yes, you've had that happen too, right? And so it wasn't an accident that he and I are together meeting. I don't know where God's going to take it yet. But he was reminding of, you know, you've got some parallel journey that you've went on.

You've been down that road just a little bit ahead of him, you know? And so there's a lot of comfort in knowing, okay, I can at least speak to what God's done, right? One time I worked at the Association of Christian Counselors national, you know, event or whatever.

And I was asked to do, you know, a hundred and some odd interviews over the weekend of all these different counselors. And God just gave me that scripture, you know, 2 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 4, as you would say, you know. And I would just open the interview with, you know, the God of all comfort comforts us with the comfort we comfort others with.

What does that mean to speak to your ministry? And you wouldn't believe story after story after story after story. Like if they were working a suicide hotline, guess what? You know, they had experienced suicide. If they were working in an abortion clinic, they'd had abortions.

If they were working in marriage counseling, they'd been through divorces. And time and time again, it was mind-blowing. But my favorite story was we had this psychiatrist. He looked like Sigmund Freud.

You know, he had the little goatee and the three-piece vest and the glasses and the whole bit. And so when he told me he was a full-blown psychiatrist, I was like, I don't know if this is going to work, but God told me to use it. So I said, okay, the comfort of all, you know, same line. And he said, well, now I've never told anybody this before, but when I got married, I went insane.

And I'm like, really? And he said, yeah, I was in the hospital a couple weeks after I got married. And I saw this little red dot on the wall, and I thought it was Satan. And my new bride climbed up on the bed next to me, and she looked at me just heartbroken. And she said, I don't know how this has happened to you, but I can't live without you.

So if you can tell me how to get where you are so that I can be there. And as I heard her heart breaking, I began to ask God for a way out, and he showed me that way out. And now that's what I do with my patients, right? And, you know, when you see that in living, like, oh, my goodness, I mean, this is so clearly, you know, what God does. And, you know, in all our lives, and I have stories for After Hours, too. But, you know, it's one of those things, you know, that it's just amazing how God uses it. Yeah, Danny, you know, going back to your scripture, you know, obviously, the whole comforting thing is tying in, but I really like the remembering. God will take us back and remind us of those things that he's done, right? Yeah, it's kind of, I think, the purpose of memory in itself is that you can remember what God has done.

Now, we use it to, a lot of times, remember the negative stuff. And, you know, it's amazing to me that if you were in a room full of a hundred people, and one of them had made you mad, you'd remember his name, address, phone number, the whole nine yards. The rest of them, you'd go, yeah, I think I met him once.

Yeah, I might have met him. You know, I'm really excited about coming back after the break, because we're going to have Harold's second clip ever. Harold's second clip ever, yes, I said that, and he had that even, looked it up online, and the whole deal.

So, we're going to come back, learn about that story, and learn about why that clip really spoke to him. But go to masculinejourney.org, look for the upcoming boot camp coming up in March. Hi, this is Sam with Masculine Journey.

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So, Andy, that was your bump. So tell us a little bit about it. So, yeah, we were just finding something tied to wounds, and that actually is a perspective coming from God. That's Matthew West with mended, and he's talking about God mending us. And we're talking really about individuals and our stories helping somebody else. But, you know, when I hear it, as you listen to it, it says I see certain things.

And I took it as, when I first heard it, is I see the possibilities of somebody else coming out from their woundedness as I share my story with them and help them through it. And, you know, obviously God's involved in all of that. He expects us to, you know, use those very stories that he gives us. I mean, it's like if he brings us through something and we don't share it with somebody else, you know, to me that's like the ultimate sin of not being able to really share our story and help somebody else out. That is, he gives us that story for a purpose.

Absolutely. I know the Lord's Scripture brings people to salvation, right, but I also know that the stories that people share, right, the impact that was made in their life, the personal thing that people have walked through. Yeah, I mean that Scripture from Revelation 12 about we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. I mean, we overcome our circumstances, but I have to believe that it also helps somebody else overcome their woundedness and their hurting. So, yeah, way to throw in more Scripture. Thank you, Andy. And I'm going to throw in an extra bump.

I find it real amusing that I had the Hollies, he ain't heavy, he's my brother, and it didn't get used. But you said exactly what I was going to say in that if we have those wounds and we just keep them to ourselves, they'll fester and we'll die. But if we are letting God heal us and then we're sharing that with others and bearing other people's burdens, it's a right use of our injuries. You sound a little wounded over the whole bump thing there.

I got over it and everyone's forgiven. Harold, I was not really poking fun. I know I poke fun a lot, but I'm really excited about this clip that you're going to tell us about and play.

Well, this is one that I found. Hold on one second. We'll go ahead and grab you this other mic. We may have to have you scoot up a little bit. Stand up.

I am standing up. Yeah, I found this clip. I was looking to see about clips related to wounds and scars, etc. I have not seen this movie, but looking at the clip and listening to it, I realized just how much it did relate to me and my experience. I carried a wound for most of my life up until I was already pretty advanced in my adulthood. My father had a problem with alcohol and because of that, it affected me greatly. I had a lot of shame associated with that. I come to find out later that he had an incident in his life that I didn't know about until, again, I was an adult with children of my own. My father had been married before he married my mother and his first wife was pregnant with their first child and she died with typhoid fever. I could see my father go sometimes weeks or even months without drinking, but when May would roll around, you could count on him falling off the wagon. My father was not a social drinker. He stopped by the ABC store.

He drank it as fast as he could just to get his head out of the world. There's a line in this clip that really resonated with me. All this time I've been out looking for work. Yeah. Something about that ain't entirely accurate. The truth of the matter is I've been in a, I've been in a hospital.

What? What it has to do with me being in a war. Well, I went, I went nuts for a little while and the doctors call it post-traumatic stress. You remember how I used to, I used to do things before they didn't make no sense? That's because there was a lot of pain in my head. And I'm going to tell you something else too. I landed three jobs after the war. And I lost every one of them because of them dreams.

It wasn't because I couldn't do the work, son. They find an adult. A lot of men who go off to war, they just don't come back the same. A lot of them. Not me. I'm definitely getting better. Yeah. I used to think PTSD was a war related thing. And while it is, it's not the only thing. And the other thing that came through to me is that, yeah, I had a wound. So did my dad. And his wound was greater than mine. And fortunately I did forgive him. We had a good relationship the last several years of his life. Even though when I was a young teenager, I bordered on hating my father.

For what he was putting the rest of the family through. But being a good friend for many years, how many men have come in to cross your path? Their fathers were alcoholics and obviously, you know, you've been in that position. Well, I can try to help anybody who's in that situation because I have been there.

And I know that you can come out on the other side of it being a better man than you were going in. But we need to be aware of the fact that hurting people do hurt people. And we need to look for what's hurting them.

And it may help us to have a better attitude toward them. Agreed. Thank you, Harold. I like that clip.

When I was listening to it this time, there was something that really kind of jumped out. That, you know, you don't have to have been in a war, such as your dad, to have warfare. Right? We all have warfare on us and sometimes that does make us feel like we're in a place that we can't cope with the world.

That we can't deal with things and that there's not a lot of options. You know, I was telling my son, my oldest son, this last weekend that, you know, when I went through some stuff when he was really little. And there was a point where I really was convinced that the world would be better off without me. Right? You know, and fortunately I didn't act on those things because I was fearful of what would happen with my daughters.

You know, and if they would go back to their natural mother or whatever. And to the point where I got to a doctor and got some medication that helped me get through a season. You know, to get through that warfare where you just feel really beaten down and beat up and all that. I think that, you know, it's comforting in a way, and sad in a bigger way, that we all go through our own journeys of those. They may not end at the same destination of where you think you're hopeless or all that, but it's definitely a common message. One of hopelessness. One of, you know, you don't have an option here.

Right? And the strength about that is that we all have those stories that, you know, you have your flavor Rodney or Danny has his or whatever that is. But it will match up with someone else's story. You know, that we can speak to it as you talked about Harold. One of the really good, excuse me, one of the really good things for me was realizing what a good man my father was. Except for his problem with the alcohol. Because he was constantly doing things for other people. Repairing automobiles. He worked with a gas company. He would install stuff. I remember crawling up under houses, doing plumbing work with him. My father was a good man. It took me being a smarter adult to realize it.

Yeah, he was a good man with a broken heart. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Danny, I want to see if there's more you want to touch on the topic before we go into the after hours. We'll work on getting your mic over there.

Yeah, we'll share this mic. Well, I mean, y'all have touched on it very well. That, you know, there is those places and most of the time more than one. But that, you know, like me and my alcoholism and addiction and the, you know, so many times God puts people, like-minded people in your path. And it's so interesting to see sometimes and it'll take you down some interesting adventures.

We talk about an adventure to live. Well, God's got one on every corner, I think. Yeah, God is able to step in and start working on your healing at any time. All you have to do is say, God, I need you. Right? And let him start coming in and working on your heart. And I can promise you it won't probably be the way you think it's going to go. But he's going to respond and he's going to come in at the angle that you need to get the healing in your heart.

Right? It's not going to be a way that you expect. I'm not going to say prayer, pull the little machine thing and all of a sudden, ta-da, healed. You know, I get the little healed sticker and stick it on me.

No, it's going to be a journey to go through and do some of that stuff. A great time to do that is at a boot camp. You know, and it's not just our boot camp. There's other boot camps going on. If you need to get to one before we have one, March 31st through April 3rd, we'll get you set up with another one.

Right? Somewhere around here that you can get and spend some time with God. The important part is the times with God. Whether it's at the place that we do it or whether you go to someplace else, or even if you can get some time and go out in the woods or go out near the river or lake or whatever, you find peace and comfort to go get some time with him and let him really start to speak into that. The other thing to ask him is, God, you know, the stuff I've been through, help me see the times that you've stuck people in my life that I've been able to give them a word of advice or a word of your love, whether I knew it or not. What's the saying?

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Yeah. Yeah, that's from Zorro. Yeah.

That's from the original Mask of Zorro, I think it was. So, anyone else got anything before we go into the after hours? Robby, you got anything you'd like to add? Well, I know in my own particular case, it seems like I keep ending up because when I was 16, I attempted suicide and, you know, over a broken heart. And I didn't even – I buried it so deep why that was. It took the boot camp, my first boot camp, to even discover the wound or the reason that I tried it to begin with, which had to do with betrayal on a girl, a lot of things. But the thing I found later in life as I had a chance actually to work with people there, God started to open up my heart to, wow, had that happened, I would never have had Mariah.

Tess would have never had Lila. It was – if I'd murdered myself, I was literally murdering all these people that now are so near and dear and phenomenal in my life. You know, one of the things that just clearly means the world to me. So we got after hours coming, a lot more stories. We do, and that's where we're going to share a lot of our stories. And actually, we're sharing God's story and his work in our life, right? That's what it's really about. And so if you want to go to the boot camp, you want information on the boot camp, you know, reach out to us, any of our names at masculinejourney.org. Also, you can go to Facebook and reach out to us. We'll talk to you next week.