Word Of The Year 2023 Final After Hours

Hi, this is Roy Jones with Man Talk Radio Podcast. Our mission is to break down the walls of race and denomination. Your chosen Truth Radio broadcast will be starting in just a few seconds. Thank you. This is the Truth Network.

Coming to you from an entrenched barricade deep in the heart of central North Carolina. Masculine journey after hours. A time to go deeper and be more transparent on the topic covered on this week's broadcast. So sit back and join us on this adventure. The masculine journey after hours starts here now.

Oh, yes, it does. And today, how fun. We're doing our word of the year after hours. And so we have some new folks that haven't done a whole lot of words of the year. And now to kick off the whole idea from a rookie's point of view, like the first time you heard about the idea of the word of the year, like you could be sitting there right now going, what in the world are you talking about?

Word of the year. This is how you found out about it, right, Danny? Like, you were like, what are you guys talking about a couple years ago? Yeah, we're sitting around in the pre-show, and everybody's talking about, we're going to do the word of the year. And I'm sitting there trying to be the ultimate poser that I found out later.

Like, you know, I'll just kind of go along with whatever's going on. And I realized, what are y'all talking about? I have no clue. You thought it was like a common word of the year that everybody shared? Yeah, and nobody had told me.

Yeah, exactly. We left you out intentionally. You were the new guy. Yeah, we'll get the new guy. We'll show him.

We'll just throw him on the air with nothing. That was my word for the year, nothing. You got nothing.

You got nothing for Christmas. But that was my experience. I did ultimately ask, okay, explain to me what y'all are talking about. And it has meant so much to me over the last three years or so. So from your perspective, from somebody that's listening, what is a word of the year? It is a word that you ask God for a word that kind of is your go-to word for the year that ultimately, He builds upon it and speaks into your life with this word. And it's a reference point. To me, it has been an anchor this year that is some place that I can hold on to when the world seems to go crazy. But it's a word that I know I got from God and that He is enlightening me in aspects of my life through this word.

How did you get it? I prayed for it and asked Him for it. And how did you know it was Him? I did not know we were doing 20 questions from Robby. Well, I'm asking the questions every listener is wanting to know. Like how did you know, like you heard a word, how do you know it wasn't some – how do you know? I'd have to contemplate that, to word it right, I guess. I just knew it was Him.

Let me try some stuff and see how it fits. So it's in your heart, right? It's not necessarily in your head? Yeah. That's well said. But, yeah. And it kind of sounds like something, but you knew it didn't come from you, so you had a pretty good idea it must have come from Him, and it didn't seem anti-Scriptural or in some way inflammatory? Yeah.

It usually lines up with Scripture and lines up with His word and everything. So last year, real quick, to help Danny bail him out a little bit. Please, Andy, help, help, help, mayday. Not to try to – I've already talked enough on the first show. But anyway, mine was I'd come up and I kept saying, Christmas, I wanted to be present, I wanted to be present. And God had put that on my heart. You wanted a present is what you said. Yeah, I wanted presents. I wanted presents. More than one. No, no, not presents.

I want presents. No, but there was that. And then I think I told you guys I felt like it was present. But then my daughter, we go out shopping for my birthday, and she picks up this card, and this card says Jehovah Shammah, which means the Lord is there or present. And it was a confirmation. And that doesn't always happen, but last year that was kind of – because I was kind of in limbo. And sometimes it just feels right.

Sometimes you have to be mid-year before you're like – And the kind of cool thing is, when it says Jehovah Shammah, what it's actually saying is God hears. I know. You told me that last time. Well, yeah, that's kind of like – And in order to hear, you've got to be present.

That's right. You've got to be present. You've got to be present to win.

Yeah, exactly. Must be present to win. I was going to try to step in and bail you out. Sorry. Please do, Jim. Please do, Jim.

Go ahead. But this is Andy's show, so – I'm kidding. Actually, your question was a trick one, because I don't think I've ever gotten my word the same way twice, just like I've never gotten a name the same way or reacted to it the same way. Art doesn't know this, but he gave me my word for next year, this morning, and I said, no, that's not it.

And then it got confirmed a couple of times. And, no, I'm not going to tell you, so don't even ask. Bella is the word for you. I want your other name. It's Squeaky Ball.

We came from Art. I know it is. I put up a picture with Bella, with Bella Claire, my dog, and she had a squeaky ball in her mouth. That's all I can think of. I knew it had to be. I'm sorry, Andy. It wasn't. So anyway – It was Grant. How did you hear – how did you know it was God once you heard it from Art? Well, it was the third time I heard it, and God has to repeat things to me quite often, and that's not unusual. But every once in a while I've gotten it, this is it, and that was it, in seconds, if that. Wait a minute.

Here comes the world's largest stretch of the mic when he had two feet from him on the other side. I think it'll be a word that God knows something you need to work on. Yeah.

That he needs to help you deal with in one way or another. That's pretty good, because every year your word has really somewhat been challenging, isn't it? Yes. More later. I'm sorry. We digress. It is The Danny Show, so by all means, Danny, go ahead.

My clip comes from a movie called Love Comes Softly, and I actually watched it with my wife several years ago. That's what the LCS means. Oh, you didn't know, Robby? I didn't.

I was like, is this some kind of... That's your letters for the year. Is this coming a Mormon clipper? Sometimes we really are serious on the show, you know?

Rarely. But the scene is, this is a man and a woman who've gotten married because they're out in the Wild West, and her husband has died, and his wife has died, and she was going to go back home after the accident, but winter was coming, and so they end up in this relationship. He's a very spiritual guy, and he has this little bench church out there, and she's asking him questions. All this tragedy has hit, so she's questioning everything, and so he takes her to church, and we can pick it up a little after you play it there, Robby. Why do you think he'll answer your prayers? He always answers my prayers.

Really? Did you pray for this? Why? Did you pray to have Ellen taken away from you? Did you pray that little Missy would grow up never knowing her real mother?

I just don't understand why the God that you pray to would let such unthinkable things happen to decent people. Come with me. Where? What about the children? Oh, Missy can watch Erin for a little while. Where are we going? We're going to church. Missy could fall down and hurt herself, even if I'm walking right there beside her.

That doesn't mean that I allow it to happen. If she knows her father's unconditional love, I'll pick her up and I'll carry her. I'll try to heal her.

I'll cry when she cries, and I'll rejoice when she is well. In all the moments of my life, God has been right there beside me. The truth of God's love, it's not that he allows bad things to happen.

It's his promise that he'll be there with us when they do. So my Word of the Year was Beloved. I love what Harold led into because it's something that I have struggled with most of my life, is being a beloved Son of God or not receiving God's love because it's always been in my own mind based upon my performance, which is usually miserable.

This clip, I used it in the beginning of the year. God's love is not based upon our performance, thank goodness. It's based upon his true nature. I love what Sam says.

It's kind of in his job description. But the reality of that as it pans out over a year when he gives you this is amazing. I went on a trip with Dad to see my great uncle and aunt. God's timing was awesome because Dad's been wanting to go down there. They were getting on up in age and he'd been wanting to go since his mom died two years ago. It was his birthday, so it would just give him a trip to Moorhead City for his birthday. He and I got to spend a lot of time together. My great uncle passed away the day that we were on our way back home.

So we got to see him just literally in the nick of time. We got to spend a lot of time with Dad and love on him. He loved on me. He was actually willing to eat Japanese food, which scared me really bad. I was pretty sure Jesus was on the crossbow coming back because Dad didn't do Japanese food. Those kinds of things. Throughout the year, being beloved by my own wife and letting her love me for who she is, there's been moment after moment. In the latter part of the year, he's begun to speak into being fathered by God himself. Some of the things he's done, I got it in my heart that I wanted to go deer hunting for the first time in 40 years.

Man, what an adventure it's been. All the deer have been safe so far. Darrell Bock They're going to walk right there in front of you.

That way, they'd be out of harm's way. Darrell Bock That's right. I'm pretty sure the last buck to come out, God whispered in his beer, we're going to give Danny another chance, but you're going to be okay. The amazing part is that I've stepped into this adventure, Andy, and that the way people have loved on me and the way people have offered their not so much advice but lovingly pointing me in the right direction and the things that they've shared with me.

I'm not the first person to ever miss deer in a season, but our dear friend Robby here told me what he did in the beginning to improve after the season was over target practice and that kind of thing. Everybody has given me those things, and my brother, who we live distant apart in more ways than one sometimes, but his heart has come alive. He wants me to get a deer more so than I probably do at times.

He's just so excited that I'm engaged with this thing again. There's so many facets of being a beloved son and letting that out pour into my own children and that kind of thing, which has been a really tough season on some aspects there, but what an adventure. Robby, you talk often about, and you spoke about it earlier, all your words of the year and how they come together and that kind of thing, and he showed me that at boot camp because I started out what I think heritage and in contentment, and now we're at beloved. I'm not sure what we're going to do next year yet, but he showed me how that all lines up and what he's coming after and then we get into a whole other kind of thing, but it's been really, really, really cool to see.

I'd love to, as I've listened to you, because Danny is a wonderful disciple, and so at the beginning of the year, you were into the Psalms a lot, and of course David being the beloved, and his name actually means beloved, and so you can't help it if you know Danny to see the David in him, but there was a lot of those Psalm studies that really were right up your alley. Yeah, I'm trying to remember them. My head is in a fog after the Christmas holiday. There's been kind of a tough season, but yeah, digging into the different things about, I think one of the ones you were talking about is I think the eye. Right, exactly. Yeah. The apple of his eye.

The apple of his eye, which we use as a term of endearment, but when you study that out, the pupil is the apple which protects or is protected by all the other parts of the eye, and to be that, what he's saying is, I will protect you as the center of my eye. That's the focus, right? That's where the focus and the light comes in, so that's been kind of interesting. I'm glad you brought that up. I'll have to go back and visit that now.

I'll be busy for the next four days in the wake of it. Well, I just remember it as being fascinating, especially when you consider that that was your word, the beloved. It was David that wrote that, and you think about that whole idea of being the apple of his eye speaks to it so in volumes, and just even to what Andy talked about, same kind of thing, and even mine, and you just can't help but see if you're sitting there from me listening, everybody's own word is certainly seeped deeply in relationship with him. Well, one of the cool things is we've been talking last several weeks about calling out people's glory, and one of the things that kind of lit up at me was that that is, and Andy, you said something about it almost sounds like heresy, but in reality, it's not.

It's that he wove into you that comes to life when you come to Christ, and that's the glory that comes out is that you can't have a new life without Christ, and when that is birthed and comes alive, then that's good stuff. So poor Jim, he's about ready to jump out of his seat. Hand him the mic, for goodness sakes.

He's got to go. Well, I figured you were waiting until I had 48 seconds left, which is my normal after-hours time. How much time did we have? He must have at least four minutes. Oh, 10? Oh, my goodness. You can wax eloquent.

Ten seconds. Waxing eloquent, the waxing gibbous guy. Actually, I was excited about your word beloved because at the boot camp a while back, beloved son was given to me as one of the names, and at that same camp, I think there were five or six other campers that heard the same thing, but until we can believe that, we can't travel very far with God. And I guess I am going to ramble on here, and I want to thank Andy. He helped me discover that I didn't really have a word this year, but being old, two years, one year, same difference, right, Harold? You got a mic. You can't speak to it.

He's glaring at me. He's thinking one decade, another decade. Yeah, once a decade.

I actually said that yesterday. What happened? Well, this time last year, and yeah, there was a cruise involved, but right before Christmas, I had a couple of toes shortened and got to stay in bed the week after Christmas, and then we went to cruising for my recovery, and the first week, I was in a wheelchair, and after that, I received my, I guess I'll call it a rod of God because that's what came to me first. It was Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. No, it actually had a name. It was a yellow octopus on top of a really huge stick that I got.

Oh, I remember that. And it really was a rod of God, but being a yellow octopus doesn't sound exciting, so I named him Gelpkraken, which sounds much more dangerous. Gelpkraken? Krakken. Gelp. Yellow octopus in German. Well, say kraken one more time. Krakken.

Oh, that's wonderful. But the word— Was Davier kraken? He was a crock at—he was a little crock. He was born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, from what I understand, but anyway.

Killed him a bar when he was only three, yes. We're old. We're showing it. My word was and still is until I got my new one from Grant, and I'll correct that from earlier, but it was peace in English, but I always like to play with Hebrew because it's got a much richer meaning in Hebrew.

Thank you. We're both Hebrew fans. We just come at it differently. But shalom was my word for the last two years, and it came out of integrity, and this clip I've used now for three straight years is from—and this is dedicated to Rodney, who's not with us tonight, but from one of our favorite movies, The Outlaw, Josie Wales. Yeah, so we're hoping by the year, you know, 2027, we'll have watched the whole movie on the clips from The Masculine Journey. We're working on it.

We're close. That's my word of life. And your word of death. It's here in my pistols, there in your rifles. I'm here for either one. These things you say we will have.

We already have. That's true. I ain't promising you nothing extra. I'm just giving you life, and you're giving me life. And I'm saying that men can live together without butchering one another. It's said that governments are achieved by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all commands you to see, and so there is iron in your words of life.

No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of tin bearers carry the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life or death that shall be life.

Tin Bears and Josie Wells were both major warriors, and at one point in this movie they had soon killed each other and looked at each other, but they came together in strength to find the shalom, the peace there. And in English peace just seems like an absence of conflict by most people's definition, but to truly have shalom there is a battle to fight to get to the other side of war to peace, and that was a big part of the battle that has been, and it's appropriate it went two years because it's been a battlefield for that and many things have happened over the last two years, but I am ready to move on to the next one. And integrity was part of this too, and these are two men of integrity, and I said it before and I'll set it up and Harold will be ready to respond, but I feel like often for me at least having peace with others is having low expectations of them. Expectations is a terrible word, but when I have expectations for myself I want people to meet it. When I have expectations of others it usually revolves around integrity, which was the previous word, but well he's looking at me again wisely, so I know he wants to jump in, but what Harold had said is he has high expectations, but that can lead to warfare and the low expectations. So speaking of expectations let me just dive in right here.

I made a lot like great expectations when I read it. So when you say shalom, which is an amazing word on all sorts of levels, that you can hear these sounds. The first one is an S sound right that you hear the sh sound which is sheen. You're right. You can say it however you want to, but it's the idea of fire in so many different ways. And then you hear the M sound at the end of shalom, right, and that M as you know is a mem, right, however you want to say it, and it has to do with water. Well fire and water on earth don't play really good.

I mean they just don't play well together. However, in heaven it's what God sends down. He sends down rain and he sends down fire. Darrell Bock And lamad connects them, so tell us. Lamad, lamad, lamad. Darrell Bock Lamad.

That's all right. Darrell Bock Oh, we pronounce that one the same way. Darrell Bock Yeah, lamad. Well, lamad has to do with loving and learning. And so interestingly as we learn more about the fire, we learn more about the water, which is Jesus of course, all of it, then all these things come into harmony because they were meant to be connected, they were meant to be gathered in great faith, but in a way shalom, and you know this, means completed, right. And so when fire and water can finally come together, then it is on earth like it is in heaven. And that's the beauty of that whole concept in my world, like man, because if you hear shamaim, that is the word for heaven.

And here again, you've got fire and water in the same place at the same time, and it's that same kind of neat thing. But again, getting back to expectations. Darrell Bock Oh, I didn't want to get there.

I want to stay on the shalom. Darrell Bock Well, we'll get there with expectations, because you know ultimately your expectations are about God, right. If you have some expectation of whatever person, you know, really if they let you down, who really let you down?

If he let it happen. Gary Barnes That goes back to the last clip. Darrell Bock Right. Gary Barnes But one of the, and the reason I wanted to jump on this is because it just hit me, one of the things I learned in Hebrew class, a lesser known way of interpreting that is death to your enemies. Darrell Bock Right.

Gary Barnes But it occurred to me that that should be singular, because ultimately shalom does destroy our true enemy, and our enemies are not each other. Darrell Bock It's not Harold. Gary Barnes No, I love Harold to death. Darrell Bock You have high expectations, huh? Gary Barnes I'm not sure whether it would be his or mine first, because he's doing better at hanging in there than I am. Darrell Bock Anyway, grace fits in there beautifully, and the idea is that as we have grace for one another, right, then God has grace for us, and the way that fits together.

So Harold, we're going to give you the last word, buddy, because you didn't have a chance to share your word, but here you go. Gary Barnes Let me jump in there first. Darrell Bock You jump, Grant, you jump, but jump on the mic so that we can hear you. Gary Barnes My words, my word is love, but then again, tonight I heard beside Christ beside me. Darrell Bock That's like you're in his presence.

That sounds good. Gary Barnes And since this is radio, beside him is Harold, who's going to get the last word. Darrell Bock I think it's somewhat interesting that the two people in this room that differ the greatest in stature also have a difference of opinion about the expectations.

The tall guy has low, and the short guy has high. Darrell Bock That was a dunk shot from Harold. Darrell Bock We know Jesus is always around Harold. Gary Barnes I'm with you always. Darrell Bock Even to the end, and cutting a few stumps while you're at it. So yeah, by all means, we appreciate you all listening so much, listening to our shenanigans, but we want to remind you, we've got a boot camp coming up in April, if you go to masculinejourneyradio.org, there you can listen to podcasts, certainly the Joyride, which will be fun to see what Keith does with all this shenanigans, and again, we'll be back with you next week. Thank you so much for listening. This is the Truth Network.