Adventures With The Father

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This is the Truth Network. It's 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 Masculine Journey. We are glad that you're with us today and we're excited about this topic. We're excited about the adventure God's going to take us on on this topic because that's our topic.

Adventures with the Father. There it is. There it is.

Ta-da. Alright, thanks for joining. See you next week. See you next week. That's our adventure.

No, we were talking about a topic. And so Harold had sent out a text saying, Sam, you've been gone a couple weeks. There's got to be something on your heart. And I'm like, eh, not really. And the more I thought about it, I started thinking about this topic of the times that God takes us on an adventure. Sometimes those are somewhat expected, you know, like we planned an adventure, right?

And other times are not expected. You know, the outcome is often unexpected, right? Because it's truly an adventure if you already know the outcome. By definition, adventure would be an unknown outcome to some degree.

You have a hoped outcome potentially, but how you get there may be a totally different path than what you planned. Yeah. Right. And so that's part of what makes an adventure. An adventure is the element of unknown. And so that was just the topic.

And it was as simple as you can, you can define what you think an adventure is or expected or unexpected and kind of left it up to the group. And so we will be all over the place today as usual. As usual. Yeah.

It's pretty much a business as normal. Yeah. And so the first clip I'm going to play is from the trailer from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And if you haven't seen that, you know, I'm probably going to ruin some of it for you because it's like 30 years old. So you probably should have seen it by now.

Except for you, Harold. I know you haven't seen it. You get a pass, you know, because I don't know why. Because you're old. No, I wasn't going to say that.

I was trying to be a little nice. I don't know why. Yeah. Take the gloves off.

Yeah, I will. It's early in the show. You know, I've been gone a couple of weeks and so... Dave is not here.

David, I've already picked on him. I'll tell you about that after the show. But anyway, the reason I like this particular trailer is not as much for what's in the trailer itself. It's the whole concept of the movie.

And so I'm going to play the trailer and then we'll kind of come back and talk about the movie. But in this, what you have is you have Indiana Jones is on this adventure to go find his dad who is just missing. Right? And ends up on an adventure with his father, which is not what he planned. Right? And so we're going to kind of listen to how some of the story plays out.

And then we'll talk about more of it after we listen to the clip. Here we go. Indiana Jones is on the quest of a lifetime.

But for some adventures, one Jones is not enough. Dad? Junior?

Don't call me that, please. Follow me! I know the way! A race across three continents.

And in this sort of race, there's no silver medal for finishing second. Hang on, Dad! We're going in! Into the homeland of the enemy. Nazis. I hate these guys. Anna!

Our situation has not improved. It is search for the Holy Grail. How dare you kiss me? Are you crazy? Don't go between them!

Go between them? Are you crazy? Where's my father? In the belly of that steel beast. Dad!

Junior! You call this archaeology? The quest for the Grail is not archaeology. It's a race against evil. Germany has declared war on the Jones boys.

Those people are trying to kill us. I know, Dad! It's a new experience for me. Happens to me all the time.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade have the adventure of your life, keeping up with the Joneses. So when you listen to that, there's a couple things in there that you probably didn't pick up on. But if you watch the movie, you will learn about it. He keeps calling him Junior, and a couple times in there he says, Don't call me that.

Don't call me that. And so that's the last time he didn't. Of course, that was a stressful situation, but it came around, I think, is the idea. Yeah, we'll use a clip later in which the dad changes a little bit. But there's a whole reason that he doesn't like to be called that and why he chooses Indiana and why his dad doesn't like to call him Indiana.

But you'll have to watch the movie to kind of figure that out. But the reason I like this clip is the concept of the movie is a son that goes on a reluctant adventure with his father. And for me, that happened with me sometimes when I would go on an adventure and realize God's there with me.

It wasn't always something I planned, and I didn't appreciate it for what it was. But as this plays out in the movie, and again, if I'm ruining it for you, sorry, but there's a book in which the dad has written a lot of notes and a lot of diagrams and things that are important, and it ends up saving Indiana's life several times because he follows his father's instruction written in an age-old book. And that's some of our story. Yes, we have the ability to talk with God. That's still there, but we're going to primarily hear things about God or of God through his word, through his written book. And that's what I really liked about it.

And as it goes on, Indy would not have made it through this particular adventure without his father. And that's our story. We think we can do it on our own. We think that we're bigger than all that.

We think, yeah, people try to kill us all the time, or this happens to us all the time. But yet, we need God's presence. We need his input.

We need his direction to kind of get through these things. And looking back at the movie, I saw it differently this time because of this topic. It makes me want to go watch it again. It's one of the few really good Indiana Jones movies. There's two that I could say, but two out of five.

But anyway, I've only seen four. Sam just went into his Cisco and Ebert mode right there. I did. I did.

I just put a microphone in front of him. He does like to make statements on movies. What do you think about Robin Hood, Sam?

Which one? The cartoon one was pretty good. With the fox and the... Well, his trailer's great. The movie's not that great.

No, no. The movie with Russell Crowe was all about making a sequel. It was exactly what it was.

It was like, how can we make a movie just good enough that we can make a sequel? That was my opinion of it. But yeah, that's all. I'm not short of opinions.

You guys all know that. So that was kind of our topic. And so an adventure I wanted to share with you, and I'm sure we'll share lots of stories of lots of adventures as we talk through this today, but the adventure I want to share with you is one that I've shared on the air before, but it happened to me in 2009. I got moved down here in 2007 from a company I was with, had never planned on leaving Indiana, had never thought of even coming to North Carolina.

It would be one of the furthest places from my mind. I'd never visited here, but my company sent me down in late 2006 to come look at the opportunity of coming here. And so I did it just to kind of quiet them down. I didn't really want to come, you know, but I brought my wife and my oldest daughter, and we came down here, and something in my heart just said, yeah, you know, and something in my wife's heart said, yeah, not as much my daughter's heart.

But eventually she came around and liked it here, but we came down, and that was 2007, and the company I was with two years later shut their doors. And I didn't have a job. You know, I had some things kind of out there. I kind of knew it was coming, had a few feelers. Nothing was locked in yet.

It looked like I was going to have a job, but I wasn't quite sure. And so my wife and I decided to go down to a place called the Yakkin River. Down here it's a really pretty river that runs through the Winston-Salem area, and to walk along the river and kind of pray. And we prayed individually and then said, you know, we're going to give, we're going to fast for 24 hours, and then we're going to talk about it after we're done fasting. You know, we're not going to talk about our day. And so we spent the day kind of together but also kind of isolated. You know, I could see her, she could see me, but we were praying in different areas. You know, and then after the 24 hours we just felt like God said, yeah, you're supposed to be here. You know, and so we said, yeah, we're going to stay.

That's going to happen. And again, I didn't have a job. She wasn't working at this point because she was staying home with the kids. She'd had a career before, you know, the boys were born. And so we talked about, well, you're probably going to have to go back to work and some things like that, but nothing was solidified.

All I knew is I wasn't going to have a job, you know, for sure 100%. And what would have made sense would be to move back to Indiana where we had family support. We had her family. We had my sister that lived there. We had, you know, plenty of friends and things that could help us. It made absolutely not much sense to stay here with that part of the story. And so we stayed in, within about a two-week period, I had a job that lasted me the next three or four years before I moved on to my next job that I've been with now 10 years, a job I love, you know, currently, and that wouldn't have happened if I would have left. But what really happened was about two weeks, probably even less than two weeks, I got a call from a guy named Darren that said, hey, I found you out on the website of the Wild of Heart group.

You know, Ransom Heart at the time is what they were called. We found your ministry, and, you know, would you be interested in doing a boot camp? I'm like, absolutely. I've been wanting to do boot camps for years, you know, and God knew that. And it was never right in Indiana, and that's a story for another day. But it ended up being that, you know, Darren and I started talking, and Jim and Mark and some other people, and we put on our first boot camp in the fall of 2009. You know, this was in the spring of 2009, and six months later we did our first boot camp. And, you know, from that, many, many other boot camps have happened.

This radio show has happened, the podcast, all that stuff. None of that would have really transpired with me being in it, you know, being involved with it. I mean, God would have still probably chose to do it a different way. But for me, I would not have had this amazing adventure and this amazing band of brothers had I not went and said, okay, God, I'm going to trust you in what you want us to do. And my wife was right on board there, too, you know, that if she wouldn't have heard, yeah, we need to stay.

Because, again, it made absolutely no sense from a financial standpoint, you know, from a relational standpoint as far as we didn't know anybody here that much. You know, but coworkers that were getting ready to go out of state, you know, they were moving back to other places. And so for me, that started a huge adventure, an unexpected adventure, that's been an amazing adventure and still been very unexpected. You know, if we ever come to a boot camp, you'll realize as much as we plan for them, there's still unexpected things that happen. And so God's constantly got us on that adventure together.

You came out guns blazing right there. Because that wasn't like what we typically talk about in like casual adventure. That right there was some crucial and critical adventure. And we can explain that a little bit later.

Maybe after the break or I can talk about it now. But those were, I mean, big deals. Those were life-changing experiences. That was your Abraham moment. Yeah, it really was.

And at the time, you don't realize that, right? I mean, you're just saying, okay, I'm going to stay, you know, and we'll see what that works. And then Darren's like, hey, you want to do a boot camp? And I'm like, yeah, we'll do one. Let's see what happens.

God had other plans. And so speaking of boot camps, we have one coming up the weekend before Thanksgiving. It is November 16th through the 19th. Yes, I actually know the dates.

The 16th through the 19th. Go register at masculinejourney.org. Register now while we're on the break.

We'll talk to you when we come back. 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. Welcome back to Masculine Journey.

That is Matty Mollins, and I've never heard of him until this song, and it's the only song I've ever heard of his. But that was our bump in, and it's called Into the Great Unknown. And so when you go on an adventure with God, sometimes it's a known adventure, as we talked about, but often most of it is unknown. When he called, looked back biblically, he called people on an adventure. They knew they were going somewhere. They didn't often know how they were going to get there, usually didn't know how to get there, and didn't know where the eventual place they were going to land was. Even David, who knew he was going to be king one day, he was told that early, wasn't told when that was going to be, wasn't told all the stuff he'd have to go through to get there. There was plenty of unknown.

And a lot of us, our stories, if he would have showed us what it looked like ahead of time, we probably would have tapped out our way. I'll pass. I'm out.

Way too hard. Exactly, yeah. So what that part of the bump in was is he's singing, it's a chorus, I want to break out, take me away from what I know, show me a life that relies on you alone.

I want to live loud and speak with a love that overflows. I just lost my thing here. The great unknown. Yeah, and so I can't read the rest of it because I can't read it. But we were to walk into the great unknown, so that part was unknown to me.

All by faith but not by sight, right? That's kind of how a boot camp goes. Yeah, sometimes you just kind of say, okay, we're going to punt. And so I just punted right there on that part. Exactly. God said you were too dependent on what you thought.

I was too dependent on my phone, and it's a new phone, and I don't know how it works. And so something happened, and I don't know how to fix it. So on to the next clip.

Rodney, you have the next clip. It's from a movie called The Great Outdoors. Yeah, we're going from the great unknown to the great outdoors, right? Yeah, it's great.

It's all great. So there were several different places to go for adventure, and as I was thinking through different things, this is one of them that kind of came up. It wasn't the first one, but the more I was trying to figure out, what am I going to go with for this show? I just love the fact that adventure for everybody is different. It is one of those things where I look at something, and I think, man, that's a great adventure.

I want to go on that. Or I look at some of the past adventures I've had, and like, those are great. Somebody else is like, that sounds horrible. I don't want to go do that.

And I would think the same about others. And it's not about, you know, like it is today so badly that, oh, I can't even enjoy the adventure because I've got to take a bunch of selfies and take pictures of my kids or my grandkids or some event more than just sitting back and enjoying things. Because for me, just sitting back and enjoying things is an adventure. Let the event, the relationship, the discussion, just let it happen. Don't force it.

Don't try to make it into something it's not. Just enjoy yourself in the middle of the adventure. And then, you know, the other part of it was with God the Father taking you on an adventure or going with you. And that's what I love about this clip of the great outdoors because you have Chet and Roman.

And Chet, you know, he's kind of the real family guy. He's got a memory of his father taking him on an adventure at this lake, and he wants to leave that off for his son. And in the middle of the clip, you've got Roman who's, you know, Mr. Business Man trying to make the world form and shape into his idea so he can make money.

That's all an adventure is for him is making money. So you can kind of hear that play out in this conversation. Here we go. I have great memories of this country when I was a kid, you know, and I used to come up here with my dad.

And I want the boys to have the same memories. Actually, I would look around you, Roman. This is beautiful country here. Take a good look. I'll tell you what I see when I look out there, if you want to know.

Hey, yeah, I'm curious. I see the underdeveloped resources of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. I see a syndicated development consortium exploiting over a billion and a half dollars in forest products.

I see a paper mill, and if the strategic metals are there, a mining operation, a green belt between the condos on the lake and a waste management facility focusing on the newest rage in toxic waste, medical refuse, infected bandages, body parts, IV tubing, contaminated glassware, entrails, syringes, fluid, blood, low-grade radioactive waste, all safely contained, sunken in the lake, and sealed for centuries. Now, I ask you, what do you see? I just see trees. That's what I see. More like Chet there. I see trees, and I like trees, and I like the lake and the water, and just God's natural resources just taking that in awe, looking up at the sky and seeing the stars in the heavens.

It's just something that's incredibly peaceful, knowing you've got a God that's that sovereign and can take care of everything, can make all of this by speaking, and that is incredibly comforting. I had an adventure that we went on a – it's not even a trip. For Memorial Day and Labor Day, we would go to – this guy's name is Minger, so it was Minger's Pond. He called it the puddle, so it was Minger's Puddle.

He had three little ponds on it. It's just in the middle of cornfields, nothing majestic to go look at, but it was awesome because you go out there and you just got away from town. I live in the middle of cornfields already. It's not like I live in metropolitan area, but you go out in the country even from there, and you just get to go be away and go fish. I got to shoot guns. He had a couple of trap throwers in there that were set for people that used to shoot trap quite a bit out there.

You ride the motorcycle. There's just so many things to do outside. It was just fun, and then you had all the personalities because it was a lot of my dad's friends from work that would come out there, and he would just kind of have it for a lot of people to show up. You had the storytellers.

You had the people that would end up getting drunk, and you're just laughing at it because it's the same guy that got drunk last year. You just had these characters, and it wasn't a lot. I had a few family out there, but it wasn't a lot of family, but it just felt like that. You just get that feeling because I was with my dad the whole time. We slept out there, all that kind of stuff.

My mom's like, no, I'm going back to go home and go to bed. It wasn't really roughing it, but it was enough, and that was just peaceful, and it was wonderful, and it was just fun times. Those are the kinds of adventures you really enjoy because it wasn't big and over-the-top like, oh, we went to wherever and spent a ton of money to go to Disney or something. I would much rather go out there and just go camping than go to Disney.

It just doesn't thrill me, and those are the kinds of things that I could relate to here like with Chet and thinking through those, and those are the same adventures you want to have with your kids. Just spend time like you did this past weekend. Just spend time, have fun, and enjoy each other.

Yeah, I've shared that on the air a few times. When I went through my divorce eight years ago, I guess it is now, we changed some things. My sons and I, we decided not to buy each other stuff for Christmas. We still celebrate Christmas.

We just don't buy. We buy small things and instead spend the money on a trip to make memories, and so far we've seen some national parks. We've seen some parts of the country we'd never have a chance to see. We've been to New Orleans and realized I don't want to go back to New Orleans, but it was cool to go, and we've been to- Niagara Falls and realized you don't want to go back to- Yeah, Niagara Falls. I've seen it.

Got the T-shirt literally. Probably not going to go back, but it was nice to see. We've been to Badlands, Mount Rushmore, lots of different places. Those are things that they pop up on an app I have called Timehop. It'll pop up and show me things from previous years, and it's kind of cool to see, oh, this time last year we were here.

This time two years ago we were here. And you send those out to us often. Yeah, you do. I was wondering.

Yeah, I know that. So it's been pretty cool, and it's something my boys will send me and say, no, this is where we were two years ago. But it's part of those adventures. And so Rodney, I'm going to ask you a follow-up question. What about an adventure with your Heavenly Father?

Is there anything that comes to mind on it? Well, obviously I wasn't a believer when I was a kid then, but still there are a lot of things over my past that I've reminisced with the Father on. It's like, wow, the things that you had me do and showed me that cemented beliefs and strong points in my life. I've only been a believer now for like seven years, I think.

So coming late in life to be a true believer, I would have always told you I was, but I wasn't. And now that I really know the truth, it's one of those things where, for me, it's just an adventure of my growth and understanding Him. And that's where I love having spiritual conversations, like we get to have so often just doing the radio show or at boot camps and just getting to learn about my brothers or my sisters, just knowing what adventures they've been on. We had some people that had some real heartache in church because they've lost loved ones.

And some church wrote a book just to listen to some of their lives that were told through that book and them coming together and sharing things like that that is an incredible adventure to understand what God's doing in other people's lives as well as mine. Yeah, and then did you say sisters because Jim's a Carolina girl, as we found out on the radio years ago? Or no, it was like last year when he made that mistake. Well, he is our favorite Carolina girl. Okay, yeah, exactly. And again, we were talking about adventure before we came in, and Harold, you know, we talk about outdoor stuff.

Now, he loved to ride his motorcycle and stuff, but just for him, he could sit there and have an adventure in the middle of writing a program, staying all night, working all night, just dedicating himself to an adventure with code. And that's where I love being able to be broad with stuff like that. Yeah, I think a lot of the commonality that you see in what we discussed, whether it's a casual adventure, what we were talking about, just where you go out and have some fun, crucial I think is defined as like, you know, your job or what helps sustain your family, and then critical is your ministry or your calling, is that when you do that, whenever you have all these different opportunities to experience this type of adventure, and I lost my train of thought of what was the point I was going to actually make. But as you run into those, there's different ways that they do pop up in, oh, this is what I was going to say, they're all involved risk. You don't know the outcome.

Every one of them, all across those three categories. I'm just taking a road trip. I don't know where I'm going to end up. There's a certain amount of risk. It's lower risk, but you just don't know. And I think that's where people get messed up in doing their job all the time.

It's the same thing. They know what to expect. We, our heart craves adventure, and particularly with our father.

Yeah, and a road trip can be an adventure if you drive old cars. True, yeah. You really don't know the outcome it's going to be and where will I land. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the boot camp coming up November 16th through 19th. Plenty of space available, but it's filling quickly. Please go register soon. We'll talk with you next week, and go love on somebody this week. This is the Truth Network.