Boot Camp Favorites

This is Hans Scheil from the Finishing Well Podcast. On Finishing Well, we help you make godly choices about Medicare, long-term care, and your money. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds.

Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and choosing the Truth Podcast Network. Every man craves a great adventure, but life doesn't usually feel that way. Jesus speaks of narrow gates and wide roads, but the masculine journey is filled with many twists and turns.

So how do 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 the masculine journey. We are in our post-advanced boot camp show. It's our first show that we've had after it, and we've actually been in studio. The last week's show was live from boot camp, a week removed.

It was recorded live at boot camp, and then it was played the next week, and so that was great. Robby, you want to say something? I was just going to say, for Danny, it's sort of a post-Toasties.

He's been toasted the entire time. Oh yeah, it's been a rough day for you, hasn't it? Don't call me yet. Yeah, we kind of knew that you weren't going to be here next week until late, so we just took it out on you this week. I'm coming for sure. We're calling in, I'm doing something.

I was on a very long call, y'all, I'm just saying. Yeah, we definitely want you here next week. And so this is our second favorite show after boot camp. Our favorite show from boot camp is live from boot camp, because we love to hear the campers talk, and they are. The reason that we're there with God is just, as he's working on us and working on them, it's great to hear what God's doing in their lives. And so we get to share some of what God's done in our lives at this show.

So this is our favorite moment slash clips from boot camp. And so we're going to be going there, and some of us understood that better than others, but we'll talk about that later. Do I need to read the text on the air? I'm just saying. You could, you could. No, you explained it quite well. And you assumed I was talking about you. I was, but you made the right assumption. No, it wasn't an assumption, I'm pretty sure.

It was a correct assumption. So onto our first clip. So our first clip is from Jim's talk.

Yeah, I know. It's from Jim's talk. But Harold had the clip. And so Harold, you want to tell us a little bit about the clip? Oh, yeah, it's a it's a great movie.

Secondhand lines. If you've never seen it, you need to see it. It's great. And I had never seen it until a couple of boot camps back. And it has rapidly become one of my favorite all time movies.

The lead character is Hub McCants. He has a background that's hard to believe. And the scene that you're going to hear takes place in a barbecue joint where some young guys come in and start messing with him.

And he straightens them out in no uncertain terms. And he's asked, who do you think you are? And he explains that he knows who he is and gives some of his history.

My history is not anywhere near his, but there is a part of his speech that I relate to very much. And so play the clip and we'll say a little bit about it. Hey, old man, how's that barbecue? Give me some.

We're busy before we get lost. All right. What did you say?

Here's a perfect example of what I've been talking about. He's been given everything with discipline. And now his idea of courage and manhood is to get together with a bunch of punk friends and ride around irritating folks to good nature to put a stop to it. Hey, who do you think you are?

Huh? Just don't kill him. How can I fought two wars and countless smaller ones on three continents? I led thousands of men into battle with everything with horses and swords to artillery and tanks.

I've seen the headwaters of the Nile and tribes and natives no white man had ever seen before. I've won or lost a dozen fortunes, killed many men and loved only one woman with a passion, a flea like you could never begin to understand. That's who I am. Get out your knife. Yeah. Now, boys, you're fixing to let those teenage hormones get you into the world of trouble. Did I ask you to buddy?

You just come out of the hospital. There's only four of them. Well, look, you fought this one first and then I'll let you fight the other three after, OK?

Yeah. Watch it. Now, you you better pick that knife up because, son, you're going to need all the help you can get. Come on, Frankie.

Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie. Oh, shit. Oh, OK. Hold it wrong, son. Not like this. You always do it like this. Smooth. Yeah, that was the mistake they made was bringing knives to a gunfight.

That click click you heard was the sound of a shotgun being loaded. I've not fought in any wars. I have, however, written a lot of computer programs over the years.

Not trained anybody to lead them into battle. But I've taught a lot of people how to write a good program and debug it. There's a lot of things that I've not done that he did. There's one thing that he did that that I also have done. I have loved one woman with a passion that the flea in his movie could never understand.

And me either. But I think it's a wonderful thing when you can look back on your life and realize that with all the failures that you can find, there is a success that you can find. And the fact that my sweetheart and I are going to be married 59 years. Makes me very happy. Yeah, that's awesome, Harold.

You know, a couple of things about that clip. First of all, I didn't realize, did you know that Hub got a new name at boot camp? It was Dub, according to Jim. Like 15 times he called him Dub McCann during his talk. And then he would switch back to Hub and then back to Dub. And so I was just trying to wonder, Jim, what was Dub about? I just dubbed him as Hub. You can call me Hub.

Or you can call me Dub. Yeah, that's right. But no, what I really love, that's a great movie. It is an incredibly good movie about the masculine journey. And what I like about this, and as you were playing it earlier tonight as we were listening to it before the show, I thought about the fact that, you know, we talked about this masculine journey and God continues to enter in to our life. And so, you know, Hub's at a point where he's feeling useless. I mean, literally right before these boys walk in, he's talking about being useless, being old, being forgotten. And all of a sudden God says, oh no, I'm going to remind you who you are. And doesn't let him stay there. And I think that's really cool that, you know, God loves us that much. He doesn't let us stay in our places of funk that we get into. You know, that he makes us move out of there. And it's a whole experience of bringing Walter into their life.

Yeah. One of the things that he's sitting there saying that he feels useless, because when you hear that full liturgy of what he's done in his past, and now he's an old man and he doesn't have a job and so forth. Well, when I was involuntarily retired, even though I had reached retirement age, that feeling of uselessness can really impact you, especially when you identify yourself by what you do. But God had other things in mind for me to do.

And fortunately, being here with you guys is one of them. And so you have to look past the down feeling of losing your job and look for what is next. Things have to change over time. Yeah. And Hub, his mission didn't change, just his focus changed. He's still fighting for the hearts of others, right? That's what he was always doing. He's fighting for people's freedom. Well, that's what he does with these young boys. That's what he does with Walter throughout the movie.

It's what God comes after his heart for. It's just a really cool story. And it's quite a good movie. It's one of my favorite movies as well. Oh, I love it. And spoiler alert, but at the end, Walter is going to the scene of their death, and his last words are, they really lived. And that really goes for all of us.

We can live a full life or we can hide in the shadows. Anybody else want to comment on this particular clip? I was going to say, there's more similarity.

You have those guys just sitting there on their porch shooting at the shotguns that every salesman drives up. You reloaded the dishwasher. Yeah. That was your first round of retirement and a new life. It's like, oh, I can help my honey out.

I'm going to do all these wonderful things for her. Yeah, that's a longer story than we have time for. That's a long story for another day. We actually do have time, Rodney, for your clip, because it's not a very long clip. So if you want to talk about that, and we've got probably four minutes before we go to break.

Yeah. Sam got up on stage, and even when he had this clip, he's like, man, we can only play this for so long because it's very hard to take. So this is a very short clip of the passion, and this is when Jesus is getting whipped before he's actually going to go onto the cross. So let's just play it, and we'll talk after.

Yeah, and the language you hear is in Latin, so you're not going to be able to understand it. So Rodney, that was a pretty short clip. Yeah.

Well, everybody's in different places. One of the things, when you were even saying that, and one of the things, I've never even watched that movie until the last year. It's the first time I've ever even watched the movie, so I had no context for what was in it up until recently. And for me, and then when you played it again at boot camp, it's just one of those things, again, it's like, I think I suffer. I didn't suffer anything, and it's just during your whole talk, I just kept replaying back in my mind, where am I at in suffering or not suffering compared to what he did for me. And again, like I said at camp, to me, what he took in physical pain was but a mere, I don't know, just something. It was very small compared to being separated from the Father when the wrath of God was poured out on him, in my estimation.

It doesn't talk about that, but I can only imagine that, how close and how tight he is with his Father, and then that separation. It just had to be horrifying for him to be in that mode, to be in that, and what we're doing to him, and just not believing, and just saying, no, I can do it on my own, and all the other things that I've done in my life, and know that I'm the one that sent him there. I put him through all of that, and he had to come to rescue me. But then it's also the glorious side of all that, too, where I sit there on the other side and go, man, hallelujah, just praise Jesus for what he did and came for our rescue.

And that was a favorite clip because it's just something that really helps solidify my faith, hope, and trust in Christ. But then I think just as far as moments, like Danny was wanting to go to, we're in an advanced boot camp where we've only had boot camps for people to come back that have been there before, and then we get two new guys. It was a big surprise to actually meet two guys that came in and were able to share with us, and then got to spend some time with some guys I didn't get to spend time with before. And even in the studio today, we got a couple guys that came to be with us today. And the relationship side of everything is just a huge benefit.

I just love getting to know some people a lot deeper than I did before. Thank you. We have an entrenchment coming up April 28th. You can register at masculinejourney.org, and we'll have a boot camp in November, but we'll talk to you about it later. What we have at our boot camp is something that makes you stronger and gives you the strength to go on your regular walk with God. It's something that will make you be bigger than you were when you got there. I want to read the dictionary meaning of vulnerability. It's the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed either physically or emotionally. I always had a negative aspect of vulnerability, but at boot camp, it's really different because we come, and there's seven or eight guys here that speak, and they all get vulnerable with the rest of us. And what comes from that is encouragement, just building up and knowing that, hey, I'm not by myself in this battle and warfare and growing up stuff. You guys have all had similar experiences, and it's great to know that. Register today at masculinejourney.org.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit, because the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, and that is the voice of truth. Now, Andy, that was your bump. It was.

Any particular reason? We were at boot camp. Okay.

In the story. I knew you had a reason. I was just asking. That was not played at boot camp. I'm just saying. It was a moment. We wanted to.

The moment they wanted to play it. There's one of us here that has heard that before in live, so I'll let you. Well, Jim has, too. So, yeah.

Harold, you have. Yeah. When I was at basic training, I hated that. I'm not a morning person, and they blew that thing way too early in the day for me, a sound I hated. And, Jim, I'm sure you were not a big fan of it either. I was actually a bugler.

Oh, were you? And played it often, but I can't get them up. I can't get them up.

I can't get them up in the morning. They sleep. They sleep, they sleep, they sleep. That's right.

Yeah, they sleep. So, Robby, you actually have the next clip. I didn't tell you that. I thought it'd surprise you. Surprise? Ta-da.

It's you. So, we did something, you know, just still I marvel at this particular advanced that we'd never done before, and, you know, God kind of put us on this journey to explore the stages of the masculine journey, which is kind of our namesake, you know. And so, we each, you know, had our own stage that we got to explore, and mine was the lover stage, which comes in line with the warrior stage. And, you know, it's a neat thing that we had talked about the mulligans through the show here and the idea of, you know, even at 67, I'm still learning how to be a lover. I'm still learning how to be a warrior. I'm still learning how to be the beloved son. I'm still learning all those things, and it's creating my identity even more so, you know, than perhaps when I was 18, 19, and 20. And the idea of, like, wow, when we were at that stage in school, was there a teacher that came after your heart and your soul, right, to see that a true lover, right, when you went out on that date with, you know, the woman of your dreams, you were trying to learn everything you could possibly learn about her as you sat there. You know, what's her favorite color?

What does she like to eat? All those things, but you were a learner because you were a lover. And so here, Robin Williams, in his genius, you know, talks about the battle that is love, which, you know, so much of that love story is set in the midst of a great battle. And so here he takes these boys, which really were just trying to analyze the world through the analytical side of their brains, and here he's going to open them up to a whole new picture, and again, unfortunately, you can't see the look in their faces, as at the beginning of the clip, you know, they're totally disinterested. It's a boring class like every other class that they attend, and now all of a sudden he has touched their hearts, and they see that there's an invitation here to love. And this is from Dead Poets Society. It's Robin Williams explaining to his class about poetry. This is a battle, a war, and the casualties could be your hearts and souls. Thank you, Mr. Dalton. Armies of academics going forward, measuring poetry. No, we will not have that here.

No more of Mr. Jayven's pictures. Now, my class, you will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language. No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

Now, see that look in Mr. Pitt's eye, like 19th century literature, has nothing to do with going to business school or medical school, right? Maybe. Mr. Hopkins, you may agree with him, thinking, yes, we should simply study our Mr. Pritchard and learn our rhyme and meter and go quietly about the business of achieving other ambitions. I have a little secret for you. Huddle up.

Huddle up! We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion and medicine, law, business, engineering. These are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.

But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, O me, O life, of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains, of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish, but good amid these, O me, O life, answer that you are here, that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be? So what an invitation that is, but I got to tell you that something that happened for me personally, I don't know, maybe 10, 15 years ago, I began to savor words and language, especially the Word of God, right? And so when you think about when you're looking at a passage that you chew on that passage and you break it up just like almost like you break up your communion bread in your mouth and you're tasting it.

And you know, when I was a kid, I could care less what a noun was or a verb or predicate or any of that stuff, right? But all of a sudden you come across, this is God trying to express to you something about himself and all of a sudden the fact that that's a masculine noun or a feminine noun is telling you something very specific about God's heart on the issue that you're facing and to say that I savor that stuff, you know, or my own wife's words, right? Or my friend's words that here they're trying to express something to me, you know, how important is that if I'm going to love them well, right? And so what Robin Williams is expressing there to me is that here's this opportunity for all of us to go back into this lover stage of life even though you may be in this age like me and experience that on a level of really creating verses that you never thought you were capable of because you didn't realize that you live in eternity.

Yeah, that's great. You know, that clip is such a good clip because it makes you just wonder what verse am I going to contribute, you know, what am I going to leave for society? You know, and hopefully I'll leave something, right, that makes an impact for generations after me, right, or the time that you have here is what did you do with it?

And so it makes you wonder not out of pressure but out of honor that you have the opportunity to make an impact and make a difference. And if you're not familiar, if you haven't heard any of our masculine journey talks, we did shows on every one of these stages and the lover, you know, when you hear that word, society now tells you it's about a man and woman, right? It's about that type of love, right, between two people. But the lover stage is so much more. You know, it's a love of beauty and poetry and the things God's created and just those types of things, and it's so much bigger than just, you know, learning something, you know, when I'm on a date. Right. Oh, absolutely.

And, you know, that's part of the really cool thing about discovering this stage for our lives, right, is you can go back into music or you can go back to painting or you can go back to, you know, visiting to national parks or wherever it is that you're digging into that beauty that is God's. It just opens up that whole warrior poet that, you know, that's at the end of the movie Braveheart, you know, they fought like warrior poets, and that's with passion because they know what they're fighting for. Yeah, there was a quote we used years ago, and Robert, you may remember it, you may not, but there was something about the Scots would not let men become warriors until they were warrior poets. Right, until they wrote a poem. Yeah.

They had to be poets before they were allowed to take, you know, get their kilts and all that stuff. Yeah. And they knew something was much greater than just being able to fight, right? You know, there's something deeper. You know, it's fighting with the passion that you get from being in the lover's stage.

Right. Anyone else want to talk about that? I mean, I spent years probably disconnected from my heart and more of an analytical, I mean, I was an engineer, so it came naturally, but I always was, if I was to try, my approach to a woman was if I instead of learn from her and about her, I'd go read about how to figure her out or whatever. You know, it's just, it's a part of where that's where you go to as a man, you can count on knowledge, but you can't. It's the whole, that's the whole distinction in the lover stage of analytical versus poetic. And there is so much, I mean, I can't say that I write poetry like this guy over here, but I do, like Robby was saying, I got so much more from beauty that I hadn't tapped into in years and that opened my heart up to things that I never would have before then. Jim, do you want to say something?

I did. My poetry is music and I don't write it as much as I do express it, but what I wanted to say is that love is such a messed up word in English and I was thinking about making love to a woman. Well, that, you know, sex is part of that, but it's not the important part and that's what we've turned that into and that can be beautiful, but far more beautiful is kind of what you're talking about, although I was laughing because you said you want to understand your wolf.

If I could ever understand my wife, I can probably figure out God, but the pursuit of understanding and recognizing the immense difference between us and appreciating that difference is what love is really about. Yeah. Yeah, we want to find what nail do we have to hit, but then you have to watch the video. It's not about the nail. Yeah. Yeah, and so it makes more sense.

Anyone else have any comments about that clip? I did want to go back to something on yours, Rodney, that you had. I think the perspective you had looking at what Jesus did is great. We've got to be careful that the enemy doesn't take that and say, but your suffering doesn't count and I know you weren't saying that, right, but that's where the enemy can kind of take that and say, well, look what Jesus did and you're complaining about your bills or you're complaining about this and no, one of the things is our suffering is real.

And it's needed according to the book of Colossians, right? Your suffering is added to the work of Christ. It's a beautiful thing that we get to do that and, of course, the disciples always rejoiced when they were able to suffer for his name. Yeah, and it tells us in Scripture we are going to suffer, right? But one of the cool things in Scripture it also says is in that suffering we become in a brotherhood with Christ to a deeper level. One of the cool things about that talk that I enjoyed was the fact that, you know, it talked about the people that go to war together, the people go through like a rescue or hostage situation, they're connected for life, right? And that's the type of connection you get when you suffer, you know, with Jesus or in Jesus' name is you get that brotherhood that can never be broken.

When we pick up our cross and follow him, we can identify with him. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we do have an entrenchment coming up April 28th. You go to masculinejourney.org to register. It's just you click on it. You put in your email.

That's as simple as that. We'll reply to you. I also have a boot camp coming up in November, but it's not posted yet. We'll post it soon. Talk to you next week. This is the Truth Network.