Holding Back From God

Hello, this is Will Hardy with Man Talk Radio. We are all about breaking down the walls of race and denomination. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few minutes. Enjoy it, share it. But most of all, thank you for listening to the Truth Network Podcast.

This is the Truth Network. 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're glad to have you with us today. Today, we have a special guest with us in the studio. There we go.

Now I can hear myself. Okay. All right.

Sorry, I didn't have a button push. There we go. Welcome to the show today. I'm glad to be back. It seems like forever since I've seen you guys.

It's good to see most of you. Since David's not here, I can say it's good to see all of you. David's not with us this week. We are praying for David. And just got some health stuff with some family going on and all good things, but hopefully that's going well for him and he'll be back with us next week. But we're excited about today's show and we're going to get onto the topic here in a few minutes.

But first, we have a special guest in the studio with us. We have our friend Vinny Menino that passed away. Gosh, Vinny, when did your grandfather pass away? Two years ago? 2020. 2020, so three. I think March. Yeah, March of 2020, so that was three years ago? Yeah.

Yeah, so dang, time passes so fast. You know, it's hard. But it may get a little confusing because it's also in studio is Vinny Menino, his grandson. And so Vinny is going to share with us a little bit about his journey and his walk with God and a little bit about his story. So Vinny, if you'd like to just tell us where you'd like to start and we can kind of go from there. Well, sure. Just, I guess, a brief background on my journey.

It kind of actually starts in 2016. 2016 November, I was, unfortunately, the victim of an assault. And I was in the hospital for about, I think, 42 days.

Mid-November through Christmas Eve Eve, actually, was when I ended up getting released, which is pretty fantastic. Science did what science does and doctors did what doctors do. And in my recovery, trying to come to grips with everything, facing PTSD and major depressive disorder, I had support from peers and doctors, therapists, and they were just trying to tell me that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, you know, I kind of tried to accept that for years and years, that it was just a random accident. It was part of no real plan.

Just one of those crazy things that happened. Well, things didn't really go so great for the first couple years after my recovery. Things really started to go downhill in 2020, which is kind of almost a redundant statement because 2020 was pretty terrible for the world.

Yeah, it was. With COVID taking a grip on humanity, it was pretty awful. As stated before, the year I lost my grandfather did not lose him to COVID directly, even really indirectly.

He had had terminal cancer and had his last rites read in late 2019, but he hung around for quite some time through March of 2020. Personally, that's just around when things started to get a lot worse for me. I ended up pretty depressed, not really wanting to try and improve things, and even got suicidal. But I had the situation where I have the good angel on one shoulder and the bad devil on the other shoulder just kind of arguing with each other about whether or not I should jump.

Obviously, the angel won. The strong argument was that there's a lot of good people in this world that would be disappointed if I wasn't here anymore. Really, things changed a lot for me. I lived in a different place, and then a church opened up nearby where I was living.

It's Redemption Hill. It's over where the old Hanes United Methodist used to be. I ended up becoming friends with the people that were renovating it, and I started going to that church. I went to their open house first, and then they invited me to come to the church for service.

I started going on the first day of first service. It was Mark 1-1 because they read the Gospel verse by verse, chapter by chapter, and they were going to go through the whole book, which ultimately ended up taking 42 weeks. Of course, during Easter and Christmas and New Year's, they were topical to the holidays, not necessarily staying in the book of Mark. Fast forward several weeks into September.

Well, actually not even fast forward to that. Really, on Easter is when I really felt like the believer in me was becoming stronger than the skeptic in me. I'd heard all these words before. I grew up Catholic. I was an altar boy. I was on the altar ringing the bell, washing the father's hands during the consecrations, everything.

It never really hit for me when I was a child. But now, decades later, I started going to this church, and things ended up a lot different. Going to Easter service, hearing these words, but hearing them differently, and really coming to believe that Christ is the Son of God, died for our sins. Sometime after that, I was definitely interested in getting baptized. So, I had the idea of having that baptism as a bookend to the book of Mark. It would be on the last day of the book of Mark, and I ended up getting baptized on Mark week 42.

And I know that my grandpa is up in heaven, smiling down on me. Yeah, I guarantee that his prayers were answered when you began to walk with Jesus in a more intimate way. I know that that was a big part of his prayer life was for all of his family.

He loved his family deeply, you and Paul and your mom, and that's all he really talked about was just how much he loved you guys and how much he prayed for you. And of course the Mets. That was always part of the conversation.

It always had to be something with the Mets. So, it was such a great thing to hear from Robby about some of your journey, and it's great to have you here to talk with you a little bit about it. I know your grandfather is incredibly proud wherever he is.

He was always proud of you, but he's proud for different reasons now than before. So, that's pretty cool, and we're really glad to have you with us. Yeah, this is all pretty much from the seat of my pants, off the cuff. I did want to touch back on what I had mentioned, that the doctors and therapists in my early recovery were trying to tell me that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, when I was listening to a service on New Year's Day, the pastor was talking about Ecclesiastes, and how everything happens for a reason, because God has a plan. So, I guess I'm walking according to God's plan, and that I wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time, I was in the right place at the right time. And I needed to be humbled and knocked down several pegs, hit my rock bottom to be able to climb back to become who I am now, and whatever lies ahead of me. Yeah, whatever you continue to become, right?

Because as God continues to grow those things in you, we all become different as we travel this road. I'm excited for it. I'm looking forward to moving forward with a different perspective on things, different belief.

It's pretty incredible. Well, great. It's great having you here, and we're looking forward to visiting with you more as we go throughout the show. When we get back, we'll talk about this week's topic, we'll give you some more information on what we're talking about, obviously. But also go register for boot camp coming up the weekend before Thanksgiving, that's boot camp November 16th, I think through 20th it is.

masculinejourney.org. We'll talk to you after the break. 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. The first one I had no clue what I was walking into, and then realizing that other people were in the same boat, and you know how open everybody was to share their struggle. It was a great group and a lot of contacting was able to be done. It is a tight bond of men, everybody's the same, and each and every time that I've come to boot camp, I've learned something different. And not one man that's ever been there neglects not to take time out to talk or to share.

It's serious business. And you need to come one time to break free with the men and fellowship, feel the atmosphere, hear the people pray, and get down to earth about what's going on in life and get real. Register today at masculinejourney.org. Living in my agony, I don't care what anyone else thinks when I know truthfully that that's the furthest thing from how I feel. But I'm too proud to open up and ask you to pick me up and pull me out this hole I'm trapped in.

The truth is I need help, but I just can't imagine who I'd be if I was happy. Welcome back to Masculine Journey. That is a song that I had never heard before about a week ago, and actually I don't think anyone in the studio had heard before a week ago. I don't even know how old this song is. I think it's relatively new, but the way it kind of came about and the way the topic kind of came about, and we'll talk a little bit about that as we get into the second half of this show and then into the after hours, my son Caleb, who's been to four or five boot camps over the years and helped with some and attended, and so every once in a while I'll just get a text with a clip. Sometimes it's a movie clip, sometimes it's a song, sometimes it's, hey, you've got to go watch this.

You know, sometimes there's explanations, sometimes there's not. And so last week, sometime last weekend, I got an email from him or a text from him that just had this song in it. No lyrics, just the song. And so I tried to listen to it and couldn't figure it out because I'm not good at hearing songs, you know, unless I read the lyrics initially.

And I knew my group here is very challenged with that. I went and found the lyric video and sent it to everybody, but it's a song called Happy, which is not exactly what the song's about, but the song's called Happy, and the artist is NF. Don't know anything about him.

The initial's NF. That's all I know. But it is a very, very good song when you get past Jim's things he has with the way it's formatted.

That's really more of it. The lyrics and the authenticity of the song's quite good. And what it's about is he's singing about, you know, I really could be happy basically if I just get out of my own way and let God lead. You know, I still have my pride.

I still have these things. And he was singing, and that little bump is, you know, I don't know what keeps me from letting him get me out of the hole I'm trapped in. You know, I don't even know what I would do if I could just be happy.

Right? Because happy is available to us. And happy is beyond our circumstances, obviously. But the question became and the topic became some version of what is it that we hold back from God, that we hold on to ourself, you know, and what keeps us from giving those things to God. And so I'll go ahead and play my clip first because these guys all give me a hard time if I don't play my clip first. Part of the lyric I really did like, though, was when he said his self-esteem had been destroyed. Because until you get rid of that, you're not going to move forward. You know, pride stays in the way. You know, and there was so much in that song.

And Jim, I'm right there with you. I gave you a hard time. I'm not a big fan of the way it's formatted because just as I'm getting into it, it pauses. It's got weird pauses in it, but that may be part of the way the song is supposed to be, I guess. But I do enjoy it, and I really enjoyed the authenticity of it. And I enjoyed even more than that the text conversation my son and I had for about 30 minutes afterwards talking about what we were getting out of the song. And so if you haven't ever listened to it, go look up the lyric video. It's Happy by NF, and you can get it on YouTube.

It's there for free. But this clip is actually a clip from TikTok. So I've got a lot of things going on here. I've got TikTok and stuff, and wasn't sure what clip I was going to use. And then I heard this, and it just made sense. And so I'm going to play the clip and then come back and talk about why I chose the clip. We'll come back to that here in a second.

You guys may have been hearing it, but we weren't hearing it here in the studio, so we will go from there. Let's try it again. I bet it was just I didn't have something pushed. So here we go with a clip. No, still not.

Maybe we're clipless in Seattle or something. Well, hopefully you got that. We were listening to it. We were having a little bit of technical difficulties. But what it was is it said, I prayed for patience, and God gave me difficulties to work through. I prayed for love, and God gave me challenging people to deal with. And it was different words than that, but that's really what it came down to. And it made me realize that a lot of my aversion over the years of giving stuff to God was misunderstanding what God was doing in my life.

God was always active. I just didn't have the eyes to see it. I didn't really know what was going on. And so it made me just kind of realize that part of my issue was I need to just trust what God's doing. When you look back on the past and you can see where God's hand's been involved, it becomes very clear.

But when you're in the middle of it, it's muddy water at best. And that's where faith comes in. That's where trust comes in.

That's where history comes in. And so I just have to let down my own pride and let down my guard and say, God, I do trust you because you've proven many, many times, and you don't have to prove to me you don't owe that to me, but you chose to prove to me many, many times you've got my back. Even when I can't see it, even when I don't understand it, at the end of the day, it's the things that are best for me that you're taking me through. And so it helps me to be able to let down the guard and let down the control a little bit and say, God, I do trust you in that. You know, some of the areas I still struggle, we'll talk about in the after-hours, right? But, you know, one of the areas that I've really grown over the years is finances.

That's the one that I held back to the longest. And, man, the freedom that's come from just giving it to him, it doesn't mean that every time I know where the next bill's going to get paid, every time, how that works, but I don't worry about it. Because I can look back historically and it just worked out. Yeah, there's moment of setbacks, there's moments of this, but at the end of the day, I'm here. I've got a mirror, I know I'm still eating because I can see that I'm not emaciated and thin, right?

That's not my problem. And so I know God's got me. And so just having the faith to walk with him in it. And you're not alone in that, Sam.

I think it was Martin Luther. But some biggie said there are three conversions, the head, the heart, and then the pocketbook. And I went through the same thing.

Yeah, that's exactly it. You have to go through those things, and it's a continuing, evolving thing. Because I promise you, I would have a hard time sitting with somebody and have them look at me and then honestly say, I give God 100% of everything in my life, I don't hold anything back.

I'm like, yeah, I'm having a hard time buying that one. You may be at the 99 percentile, but I bet there's still 1% there somewhere. If we're really, really honest, and knowing you guys and knowing your story, I know that's our stories. We've grown tremendously over the years, and we continue to grow by listening and watching each other and walking with God.

But there's still stuff we hold back. And we'll talk about some of that more in the after-hours. But Danny, I think you're up next, if I think I have the clips right, your interview with God, right? I didn't interview him, but it was a movie, yeah. Yeah, he probably had a higher name than he was taking the interview from. That's right, yeah.

Yeah, okay. Well, will you tell us a little bit about it? Well, wait, did you hire him? I hired him. You did an interview with him. Did you hire him? Absolutely. He has the job?

Yeah, he's got the job. It is a movie called The Interview with God, and evidently this guy. I've never seen the movie, but a couple of people here have, so I'm going to take it that it's either a good movie or a bad movie.

I couldn't tell from their reviews. Harold's got a thumbs up, so we're going to remember that one. And this is the guy's final interview with God, and he is, evidently, he had a traumatic experience in his life, and he was about to commit suicide, and he had prayed. And the interchange with God is, he's asking God, where were you, why don't you help us? It's basically what he's telling us, and God's given him some divine wisdom, obviously, because of God. But, you know, it just spoke to my heart as the way the interchange went by because I've been that guy interviewing God many times.

So you can play the clip and we'll talk about it. Every minute of every day. And you know that, you said it yourself, and it's very sad. But the truth is, most people only seem to notice bad things when they happen to them.

And maybe that's the saddest part of all. You really need to sit. Why don't you help us? I hear you.

I hear it all. Why is there war, starvation, poverty, disease, fire, flood, a child goes missing, a man loses hope? Do something! Yes, do something. You have more power than you know, Paul. Food can be grown, diseases can be cured, wars ended.

A troubled veteran can be helped, and a marriage saved. So, when you ask me why all this is happening, start by looking to each other, and that's where I'll be. So, I need a miracle.

Miracles happen every day, and sometimes the miracle is you. What's happening? You never know. No. No. Give it time.

I told you. Sometimes bad things do happen to some very good people. You know, so often we hold back on God, because our view of things is what we have a lack of trust, because we see things one way, but He obviously sees things in every way. And, you know, so often in my own life, that's the way that has been. And this took me back, this topic. I understood your song and your topic, I think, but there was a short period in my life, right about age 18 or 19, when lots of different traumatic things happened. My grandfather passed away. I had my first marriage, went down, had a daughter.

And then, after my grandfather passed away, my ex-wife took my daughter and went to New York for five and a half years, six years. So, I didn't see her. So, I viewed that as, God, where were you?

And was really mad. But, you know, hindsight is 20-20. And, you know, with healing and that kind of thing, I began to see God was at work in lots of different things. And so, that's kind of the short version of that. Well, that's good. Sorry to cut you off on a short version of that. Maybe we get to more of that in the after hours. But thank you for listening. We're going to talk more about where we are challenged in our walk with God of giving the reins to Him and what keeps us from going there. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the upcoming boot camp the weekend before Thanksgiving in November. We'll talk with you next week. This is the Truth Network.