Disrupt, Dismantle, Healing And Restoring

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast, our show.

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Welcome to Masculine Journey. We're glad that you're with us today. And I'm glad to be back. I listened to last week's show. You guys did an amazing job.

Danny's not here, but Danny did. It was his topic. And so it was being a good steward of your pain. I think it was. And a lot of really good nuggets in that show. And so if you haven't had a chance to listen to it, I recommend that you go get that at any of the podcast locations. You can get it. If it's a podcast location, it's there more than likely. All the big name ones were on those sources. And so whether you have an Android or an Apple iPhone, you can get it on any of their podcast stuff too.

So it's on iTunes, any of that. But it was a good show and it really prompted a lot of thought for me this week. So I appreciate you guys doing that. And made me think about some of the things you talked about. But that also kind of led into some of the topic that we have for today. And so we're going to go back and visit a topic that we've done a couple times.

But honestly, this is a topic we could probably do about once a month. God is constantly up to these four things in your life in some shape, manner, area of your life, or in multiple areas of your life. But he's constantly disrupting, dismantling, healing, and restoring in your life.

And he does them simultaneously. And so he may be disrupting you in one area and healing you in another. Or the disruption is going to lead to healing. But the first two are all about getting to the other two, the healing and the restoration. Right? And the goal is the restoration.

Right? And so that's where we're headed. But how would you guys help describe when we talk about disruption? What's some examples of like a disruption or what's God up to when he's disrupting in your life?

Well, the one we talked about before the show was losing a job. That'd be a disruption. You know, that's something that hits a man specifically really hard a lot of times. Right. Right. So to me, you know, it's coupled in with repentance to some extent that you're going to change directions, right, in some way. But in order to change directions, when you're talking about matters of the heart, it's more than, oh, well, I got to go this way instead of going that way, because your heart was kind of set on going that way. Right. And so now we're going to have to really inflict some pain in order to get you to turn in the other direction. And that's where you get the whole disruption.

And like, oh, my goodness, it could be small. Right. But often it's brutal. Yeah. Driving alone is usually a disruption. Right? I have a plan of where I'm trying to get to by a certain time.

And I'm going to do it in this manner. Doesn't usually work out that way. You know, that's why I don't like driving a whole lot, because driving is constantly a disruption to what I have planned. Right? I hit traffic I didn't anticipate, or I get in front of a, or get behind a driver that doesn't really know how to drive that well, according to me.

They may drive quite well, but according to me, they don't. Right? That type of thing. But disruption is just, again, the changing of your plans.

Right? You know, I had a plan for my career, Rodney, to your point, and all of a sudden, I no longer have a job. That's a disruption to that plan.

You know, I planned to be married my whole life. And that doesn't end up going there. That's a disruption to that plan. You know, that type of thing. And so we'll talk more about disruption later.

So let's move on to disbanding. It sounded like a Beatle, you know. Because I think it was John Lennon that said, life is what happens when you're busy making plans. Right? Have you heard that? I don't know, but I have now. Yeah. But it's very much, you know, I think about it, you know, often like, yeah, tell me about your plans. God gets a good laugh out of that. But no doubt, you know, just along those lines, I can't help but think, yesterday, I had to do Truth Talk Live at four o'clock. Now, when it shows live, you pretty much have to be there.

Explain that to us. You know, the clock is ticking, and that's obvious. Well, you know, I'm on my way to the station.

Got plenty of time. It's like 2.30 in the afternoon. And my wife calls me, and she says, well, I just hit a big, huge pothole on I-40, busted my tire, and I've got a flat tire, and I'm sitting over. And that's not the bad part, is Lila's got to be, my granddaughter's got to be at driver's ed at 3.30. So what should we do?

Punt. Right. So I go pick up Lila, you know, which is quite a ways away. Pick her up, get her to the Reagan High School for the driver's ed, and I'm on my way back to the station, when apparently there was some construction on Yadkinville Road. And you know how it is when one line stops, and the other line goes, and the other line keeps going and going and going, and 10 minutes later, they're still going.

Wow. And I'm, and it's now like quarter till four. And I'm like, whoop, whoop, whoop.

I did make it, for those of you who heard the show. But I, you know, I was, God was like, hmm, what do you have in mind here? Because this is very unsettling. Yeah. Very disrupting. Yeah. And dismantling.

It was dismantling all my plans. Yep. Yep. So moving into dismantling. Right.

And dismantling can be lots of different things. It can be how you look at things. Right.

Dismantling the way I look at finances. Right. Dismantling my theology. You know, I believe something this whole life, and then God shows me the truth of the situation. Right.

Maybe I've heard this from not good kings in the past have given me this impression of how things are, and it's really not that way. So dismantling how I think, you know, those types of things. Something that would be, I would classify it as like foundational for you. Right. Yeah. Right. You know, I think that just marriage, when you get married, is a very dismantling process. Right.

Because you come into it with an expectation of this is how families are based on the family that I grew up in, or this is a family I don't want to have based on the family I grew up in. Right. But that has to be dismantled because you both have expectations coming into it, then neither one are aligned correctly. Yeah.

That's something we often have is misguided expectations with the way things ought to be for me. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

And so it's just that dismantling of how I have built things in my life, or how I look at things in my life, and breaking it back apart. Yeah. Not to mention, I often think of it, you know, when you get married, your expectation is that your wife is going to be Jesus. And her expectation is that you are going to be Jesus.

Wrong. And at some point, you realize, ogre, right? You're an ogre, and oh my gosh, she's an ogre.

Yeah. Like I married an ogre, and I am an ogre. And so it's quite a disruption, and quite a dismantling, actually, how God brings that into your life, to where you realize that, you know, he is Prince Charming.

He is, you know, the girl of your dreams, however you want to put that. But he's the one that's going to rescue you. And you and your wife get a chance to live life, you know, in that, essentially under his guidance, in order to be able to, you know, become more like him.

Right. And I know for me, it's dismantling my parenting style with my daughter moving in. I mean, I think actually, me and you had a conversation about that one time, when I said, you know, Sam, does it ever get easier, these battles that I keep having with the enemy? And you're like, you know, sometimes you are battling the enemy, but sometimes it's God coming in and disrupting and dismantling things in your life. Because I thought we were going in one direction, and this is the way I parent, and this is how we're going to do things. Well, you know, God is, will have a different clip in the after hours, but broke my legs of that pretty, pretty quickly so that way he could carry me through it and ultimately walk the path that I needed to for my daughter.

And now I can see it. And he's in the process of dismantling things in her life and trying to get her back on path as well. Yeah.

Yeah. And so then we move into healing, which initially sounds great and healing is an amazing thing, but it's also, as we'll talk about a little bit later, can be a painful process to go through. Each one of these can have pain associated with them, which we'll talk through in a little bit. I remember when I fell out of the tree, for those who are not familiar with the story. Which time? The one I went 35 feet on my head and my shoulder broke, you know, almost all my ribs. And, you know, I remember the nurse looked at me. Now I'm in unbelievable amounts of pain, right?

It's the day of the accident. And she says, you know, the worst is over because it's all healing from here on out. And that was really sad.

I mean, like, you gotta be kidding me that because it's hurting to breathe for you breathe. And the worst possible thing you could do is laugh. And there's this movie on, you know, I don't know why I'm flipping through the channels and Will Ferrell is like, I don't know what it is, but he's playing with this spear gun and I know he's going to shoot himself. And I'm sitting there knowing I can't laugh.

And he shoots himself. And it was almost like the end of my life. It hurts so bad. Cause I wanted, you know, I was trying to laugh and hold it and hold pillows and whatever else, but I was healing.

But all my goodness was it painful. Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, and so healing is where God takes us, you know, from that place of being unhealthy into a healthier place. Right. And we definitely want to get there because that takes us into restoration, right?

Which restoration can be defined in a lot of ways, the way I would say it, and you guys can say it differently, but it's putting it in the place that God intended us to be to begin with right before life came and stripped us of things before our decisions stripped us of things that, you know, we ended up the decisions we made, the choices we made, the consequences we had to play out robbed us of what God intended. Right. And so that restoration process is God writing a lot of that and putting us back into the place where maybe it's an identity. I've lost sight of my identity. Right. And God's restoring how I see myself because I've gotten so far off through all the things life's thrown at me that there has to be a dis, a disruption, a dismantle through some healing to where he can get to the restoration, to where I can clearly see myself as his son. Right.

And that's my primary identity. But there was so many years and there's times I still fight to live like that. Right.

And so I'm still in the restoration process on that, but I'm so much further along and I'm grateful for that, but it's restoring back to the way things were intended. I don't know how you guys would say it differently. Darrell Bock Except I'm not all that far along.

Darrell Bock Yeah. Well, it's in comparison. From where I need to be, I'm light years. Right. From where I was, it feels like light years. It's probably like an inch.

But still, it's a big movement. And so we're going to go to break here in about a minute, but when we come back, we got some clips for you like always. We got some more conversation, but we do have a boot camp coming up. It's an advanced boot camp.

It's coming up April 4th through 7th. In order to go to the advanced boot camp, you would have had to attend a entrenchment or a basic boot camp. And so if you haven't, I'm sorry, you won't be able to attend one of those, but there are some other boot camps in the area we can let you know.

And we do have a basic boot camp coming up in November, the weekend before Thanksgiving, so you can go ahead and plan for that. But we'll come back and we'll talk about that. We'd love to hear from you. Please reach out to us. If you want to reach out and ask any of us a question, it's our first name at masculinejourney.org.

Again, it's our first name at 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 are 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 the time out to talk or to share. It's serious business and you need to come one time to break bread with the men and fellowship. Feel the atmosphere.

Hear the people pray and get down to earth about what's going on in your life and get real. Register today at masculinejourney.org. And welcome back to masculine journey. That is a Pat Barrett. And the name of the song is canvas and clay. And it's hard a lot of times to pick up things from lyrics, especially if you don't know the song, but what he's singing there in that little snippet that we had was when I doubt it, Lord, remind me that I'm wonderfully made. You're an artist and a Potter and I'm the canvas and the clay. You make all things work together for my future. And for my good, you make all things work together for your glory and for your name. And the song goes on, it's a very good song.

I had not heard it before yesterday. And so don't know much about it, but I do like the concept of it where he talks about, you just got to have the right perspective. When we let life come at us and what the world gives you your perspective, it's going to be skewed at best.

Even if you're a few degrees off of what would be right, if you go long enough, you're miles and miles away from where you began, that old adage. And so it can be close, but if it's not from God, it's not going to be the right perspective. And so having the correct perspective as you're going through these life events are key because he is the artist, he is the Potter, and we're the canvas and the clay. And it's keeping that in mind that he's up to something in our life. He's always up to something. He's never passive. He's always engaged. That gets into the trust factor of what he's doing. Sometimes my father kept drilling in my mind, don't lean on your own understanding and in all your ways acknowledge him. And he'll direct this.

He'll put it together. Because life is a process. It is.

It is. He's processing us through Christ to get us, well, he went to prepare a place for us and he's wanting to prepare us for that place he's preparing. So there's preparation on both ends going on so we can meet, I think, from the heart, the mind, you know, the soul. Darrell Bock Yeah, somehow I think God's got a lot less preparing than he does in me. Yeah, because I've got a long way to come.

He doesn't have a far to come. But thank you. Robby, you actually have the clip that we're going to play in this segment. So go ahead and tell us about it.

Darrell Bock Yeah, I heard this years ago. I always liked it. God doesn't waste pain. And last show we talked about pain and so we got a little more pain for you this week. And of course, anybody that was familiar with the show from the 70s, it was called All in the Family and it was loaded with pain.

Because it was kind of the first reality sitcom featuring Archie Bunker, for those of you who did not know, he was sort of a bigot, I guess most people would describe him as that and definitely a male that was kind of hard on his wife and hard on his kids. But here God's disrupted him and he dismantled him and he's lost his job. And so you get to hear, you know, even one of those people that usually think so highly of themselves, how they have to kind of rethink things, when all of a sudden, you know, God pulls the rug. But it's so fascinating to me what you said that, you know, when we look at the world coming at us, it's always, you know, Satan is going to spin that like God's against you, when really God's always for you.

But if you begin to think at all that the reason this is happening is God's against me, then Satan's, you know, kind of got you where he wants you. And when you listen to Archie here, he's struggling with that. Your father lost his job today. Oh, there goes the old ball game. Why did you have to say anything, huh? All right, as long as you're all standing here with your mouths hanging open, let's ease. I'm sorry, Arch. Listen, if there's anything I can do to help in any way- Oh, that's nice, Mike. See, Archie, we got each other and everything's going to be all right. Oh, geez. Don't go breaking up on me there, will you? Suddenly everything's going to be all right. I just got to go get another job.

That's all. Listen, I'm a guy who always has his nose to the brimstone, you know? It's always darkest behind a storm, you know that? And in every crowd, there's always another horse of a silver lining. And when the going gets tough, they say that's when the tough get going, and that's me. Tough, right? Yeah, right. So what's the problem?

So what are you going to do, daddy? Well, that's the problem. And, you know, I think that line, the more I've thought about it, I actually love it where he says, you know, I've always got my nose to the brimstone. And, you know, that is the problem. That when we're beginning to think that what's going on is against us, then our nose is to the brimstone.

You know, that's kind of the struggle that we have. So, you know, it certainly plays out in my life that I had been in the car business for 40 years when, you know, I was kind of betrayed by my office manager who embezzled a great deal of money. And we ended up losing, you know, our life savings and our dealership and my job all in the same thing. And I had actually, you know, not taken a check for the last four or five months that we were there trying to save the dealership and plunged my family into this unbelievable financial crater.

And, you know, warehouse was, you know, essentially being what I forget what the word is. Foreclosed. Foreclosed, right.

You would know that. They were flow closing my house. And I had to, you know, come up with all kinds of deposits. And I was trying to figure out how to get enough money to pay Duke Power because they wanted a gob of money in order to turn the power on in the house that we were hopefully going to rent. And so this guy I was working with, one of my salesmen actually at a dealership said, well, I throw papers. And I was like, well, how much money? And he said, well, man, I bet I could make $1,200 in a couple, you know, three weeks. And I said, well, hook me up with that.

So next thing I know, I go from a car dealer to a paperboy. And it was the dead of winter. And, you know, it was January and I'm getting up at two or three in the morning, picking up my papers, folding them and going over these apartment complexes and running stairs. And I hit some ice at one of these stairs about three or four o'clock in the morning and just busted my keys.

I'm laying on the ground. I'll never forget the moment. I looked up at God and I said, really, has it come to this? Like, you know, I was at this point in probably, I guess, probably 57, 58 years old and just totally dismantled.

Right. And totally disrupted what I did not know. You know, that obviously went from that to nightmares from years and years as God needed to pull the car business out of Robby.

It only took like the Egyptians coming out of Egypt. It only took a couple of weeks to get Robby out of the car business, but it took years to get the car business out of Robby. And I'm not talking about my habits or anything like that. It was just that my heart had been broken so badly. I did not know the nightmares that I suffered for years and years and years, wake up in an absolute cold sweat. I've got to sell more cars.

It wasn't like I need to sell more cars. I have got to in order to survive. And I did not have any idea that God was needing that kind of pain in order to extract that stuff out of my heart that was literally poison. And what he'd done is placed me at Truth Broadcasting and the job of a lifetime and working amongst amazing Christian people to do amazing things and see him in all corners of my life. And even obviously with you guys with Masculine Journey are a gigantic part of that, but it still was till at least 2018, 2019 before those nightmares began to subside.

And I still from time to time. So, you know, may God may need to do major surgery, but praise God, he's God. Cause you know, I really have a freedom from that that I never thought was possible. Right. So what I hear you say in Shrek is dismantling is like onions.

There's layers, right? Because you were dismantled a lot early on, but there's those deep, deep pieces that have to come out. Right. And so that dismantling process continues, even if you're in healing and restoration, there's still more that he has to unpack. Right. And, and praise God, he will continue to do it. And like I said, he doesn't waste pain. And so, you know, like it says, rejoice in your sufferings because there's great things coming.

And, you know, we had no idea when we were falling down into the hole, how far we had gone. Right. You know, and so I, it was definitely one of those things that I really think to be as good steward of that pain, you have to tell the story because other people could be in that hole and they have no idea that what's on the other side of that is going to be glorious.

Like God is really at work in your heart to allow you to be wholehearted because when you become wholehearted, then, then, you know, you can love again. Yeah. Yeah. I want to go back to something we talked about earlier as we're finishing up this show before we go into after hours, but you know, we talked last week's show was on pain and initially you would think, all right, there's really no pain. There's pain, obviously in disruption, there's obvious pain and dismantling. There's a sound painful. Anytime the word dis is there, it seems painful for some reason to me. Right. But you have those two, but you think, okay, healing and restoration, man, if I can just get to that, you know, I'll be past this pain.

That's not true. There's pain in all of them. It's a different type of pain. And I don't think we have to talk a lot on the pain of disruption. I think we've all felt that in our life.

We had a plan that's been changed and, you know, sometimes significant changes, you know, divorce, job change, loss of a loved one, you know, those types of things, you know, those are huge disruptions, dismantling. I think we understand pretty clearly what that looks like just doing that. But when you go into healing, how's there pain in healing? And I was thinking about my older brother had a surgery a couple weeks ago and it was for his betterment, right?

That it's going to help him live a longer life. Hopefully that's why he had the surgery, but he's in the middle of recovery and he's in lots of pain. Now he's healing from the surgery, but there's still lots of pain in the midst of that healing until you get healed.

Right? I mean, there could be pain all the way through the healing until you're at the point where you're healed. I think when you look up physical therapist in the dictionary, it says pain. May inflict pain. Exactly. Yeah. Then we kind of get to restoration and think, well, obviously there's none in restoration, but if you've ever had a relationship that you're trying to rebuild after it had been broken apart, there's a lot of painful conversations you have to go through to get to the restoration.

Right? There's pain in all of it. So don't waste your pain as we talked about last week and listen to the after hours. If you don't know where to get that, any podcast location, you can get it there. Masculine Journey After Hours, go to masculinejourney.org to register for the upcoming bootcamp. It's an advanced camp April 4th through 7th, masculinejourney.org. If you want to talk to one of us, send us an email. Sam at masculinejourney.org. Robby, anyone, just do it there. And above all, go this week as you walk. Love somebody well. We'll talk with you next week. This is the Truth Network.