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. 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. Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours.
We're glad to have you with us. And we have a wonderful topic. I'm just saying that because Jim picked it. But no, Jim, it's a good topic. And so you want to tell us a little bit about it? Every once in a while, Sam will slip up and pick one of my topics. I try not to. I feel that.
Know the love is there. It is forever young, which I thought was a pretty good thing to come after being sages, being older. And it really was. Yeah, we're not going into that sagacity. I guess that kind of blows the keeping this short so we could get all the clips in. It is about what that means to us, being forever young. And if you want to hear what I thought, go back to the first show and we're going to kick this one off with three more clips during this segment, I think. Yeah, we were a little bit all over the place, like we often are. But what we do, if you're not sure, is we get a topic and then we get kind of a little bit of a starter on where to go with the topic. And then we all kind of take it where God takes us. And so you get right along on the journey with us.
And so we're over to Robby with his clip. Yeah, so it's a journey. There's no doubt. I had a lot of fun because to me, a big part of forever young is to have fun, right? As we've heard in a clip in the last show, it's like, man, it's so much about fun. And I think it's the joy of the Lord is our strength. It clearly is. And in his presence is fullness of joy.
And so if that's not part of it, it's not church from my standpoint. It's not what it's supposed to be. And so this particular clip is a montage of kind of forever young and what you pick up along the way, which really helps you enjoy being young even more than because, as we've talked about throughout it, that you have all those stages, but you keep each one. Like you're still a little boy, but you're also still a warrior. And you're also still a lover, as Harold so wonderfully pointed out in the last show. So here we have sort of from Get Smart, one of the funniest movies ever produced in the history of the world, as far as I'm concerned.
As much as Jim likes Princess Bride, I like Get Smart. And the chief is just absolutely one of the most hilarious people. But in this particular scene, Agent 23, who's played by The Rock, right, he's kind of the bad guy in the thing.
Spoiler alert. And he has been put into the office and he doesn't like office work very good. And this guy goes and he blocks up the copy machine, right? And so he's expecting some help, you know, like he should have unblocked it. And then when the guy didn't react critically, like he should have, then Agent 23 takes a stapler, Lidley, and the staple thing you can't see in the clip is he staples a staple into this guy's head.
Okay, that's the setup. And then obviously here, how the chief reacts to that is hilarious. And it's a lot of fun. In my opinion, it's just fun. But then we hear Anthony Hopkins, who's very much a sage, and he's going to give some sage advice, which I just really liked the advice in it. But it's also the advantage of having as much fun as we're having over here with Agent 23 and also enjoying, you know, what comes out through it. And the thing that I was really looking for and I didn't find in the clip I wanted was one of the joys of forever young and we will for eternity be learning. Like you learn a little something about God every day, right? And I love the idea of prayer from a standpoint of God continues to just show different ways to teach you that he's right there.
I'm like, I'm right here, Robby, what are you doing? A week ago Sunday, I was battling a kidney stone. And I was in a lot of pain, and I was just kind of breathing in the bed. And as I'm trying to deal with that pain, and I'm sure a lot of people, you know, you're trying to have fun, but it's not so easy. And I look up, and this is just God, you know?
The ceiling fan in my room was casting the shadow of a giant cross over my bed. And it just took my breath, and it was like he was just winking at me going, I'm right here, Robby, we're all good, it's all good. And, you know, it was like at that moment where you really needed something to say, yeah, it's painful, but it's fun. And so play the clip.
As a former field agent, I'm very much aware of how difficult it is to make the transition to office life. You know, Chief, he didn't unjam the copier. And we have rules here, you know that. And if you don't follow the rules, then what are we? I'll tell you what, we're not. We're not people who jam staples into other people's heads.
That's CIA crap. All right, look, Chief, I'm your best guy. I don't belong in an office making copies.
I should be out there with Max. Look, 23, no more stapling today. Three things that you must come to accept. Most people ignore the last one. One, self-control is strength and calmness is mastery. You have to get to the point where your mood doesn't shift based on the actions of someone else.
Don't allow others to control the direction of your life and don't allow your emotions to overpower your intelligence. Two, stop being afraid to spend money. You go out and spend $100 on good food and drinks. So what? You had a good time with your friends. You spend $1,000 to travel. So what? Your time on this planet is a gift. You can always get back money, but you can't get back time. Three, in three generations, everyone who knows you would be dead, including the people whose opinions stopped you from doing what you wanted to do all along. I love that.
The whole idea of continually learning and being able to taste wisdom and kind of savor it, right? And that idea, you know, a lot of these guys came back from their adventure over the weekend, and they had talked about, apparently they had recently lost one of their favorite members in this group. You know, it was similar to our own band, only they were in Ohio. And apparently, from what everybody described, this guy was just like awesome. He was a super nice guy, but he's dead.
And about three of them, you know, I heard that about the third time. He was just an awesome guy, but he's dead. I mean, it's just the point is, you know, 20 years from now, people are saying, you know, Robby was an awesome guy, but he's dead. And so I just think it's hilarious to think about that truly, 20 years from now, all those people's opinions of whether they thought you were a nice guy and all that stuff is really somewhat immaterial compared to, again, the experience that you will have of continuing to learn about God and what you shared along the way about what you learned about God so other people could go have all that fun too, whatever that may be. And I love that idea of, oh man, other people's opinion will stop you from doing stuff, but it's just crazy. What do you say about money?
I savor that too. That, you know, I think we've all come to experience that, oh my goodness, you know, what it means to have fellowship, to be at a boot camp. You know, I can't imagine having anybody pass one up because they didn't have the money, right? Like that's why we do scholarships or whatever we need to do because you can't get back the experience, right? If all the boot camps that I had a chance to experience, I can't imagine not having that time, you know, and to have passed it up over money is just a crazy idea.
And so if you do want to come to a boot camp and money's an issue, let us know and we'll see what we can do to help you. So Rodney, we're over to you with your clip. Yeah, I really hung on the part when Jim described everything as eternal perspective, looking out into eternity. And that's where one of the things that I was like, it sounds like something out of the Bible that he was saying, because I was like, where did that come from? But I was like, I finally found it. It was like, this is 2 Corinthians 4.18, which basically reads a lot like what you sent out for the idea and suggestion for beyond just for every young, but what you were thinking. While we look not at the things which are seen, but that the things which are not seen, for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
And that just kind of really hinged me on, yes, I'm going to stay with eternality. And I was struggling to find a clip, a movie. I was like, well, what movie would even have this?
I even went to Wing Clips to go look that up and finding out tonight that they may be shutting down even. But trying to figure out how am I going to find a movie, because most movies don't have much of that in them. And then just happened to finally think about the book of Eli. And I was like, that is a really good movie where the perspective is far beyond what anybody has. You've got one man with that perspective and nobody else with it. And he is headed that direction. He's headed for eternity. He's saving the Bible. He's – that one book, he's doing everything he can to save it. And through the whole movie, you're sitting there just watching it going, wow, man, this guy just tears people up, kills a bunch of people, because they're trying to kill him, right?
He's just really defending himself, but the only way he's going to walk away is that they don't. And then as you go through and you find out at the end, well, he's talking about being guided by the Holy Spirit. He's blind, yet he goes across the country and travels and takes care of all these people that are trying to inflict him. And that's kind of where I kind of stuck with just making sure that how can I have that eternal perspective, because I know the few times that I'm able to get there, it really helps me, because it keeps me out of the thing that just happened to me, the thing that I just saw happen to a friend, a loved one of some kind of family member. These things, yes, I do mourn and I hate the loss of things and don't like when bad things happen, especially in this world we're living in now, but in the end, God's got control. And the eternal and knowing who wins in the end does give me way more joy.
It's not this giddy excitement of, oh, I have to feel something and jump up and down with the emotion, but it is joy in the midst of whatever's happening, and that's where this movie with the book of Eli kind of took me. Thirty winters ago, the war tore a hole in the sky. Only a few survived. Our only hope is in my hands. Take off the pack nice and slow. Put that hand on me again, you won't get it back. There should be the ground for our sake. We're out of the ground, you were taken, and to the dust we shall return. I told you, you weren't going to get that back. This little town is just the beginning. All we need is that book.
It's different than the others. You're not going to be able to make him do what you want him to do. This is your last chance, give it up or I swear I'll bury you. I don't want any trouble.
That's too bad. Nobody touches it but me, you understand me? I love this guy. Shoot him, please. We're the crew together, we're going after him. We'll go back inside.
Close your eyes. I'm always trying to remember there's more than what meets my eyes. And one of the pod, actually Chad Robichaux was on two podcasts this week that I just listened to the last couple days. That he's a former Marine, he was in Afghanistan when that debacle happened to try to get people and rescue people out of there. And then he went into Russia and Ukraine, went to Ukraine and he was actually called into there before they even went to war to try to get people out because they saw everybody masking on the other side and stuff. But just listening to him talk about that because he has a book out now I guess with his son and his son was involved in this, he goes through a bunch of that.
But it was just interesting, it's like no, everybody's talking about the war and all these other things and who's, you know, basically there's no good players in the whole thing, right? But he's like, I'm going over there for a bigger purpose, I'm going over there for the people that we're rescuing. Nothing more than, forget about all the other stuff, the political talk and all that, it's just I'm going to go rescue people. That's a higher order thing to think about each individual and to be able to go through that. And I just thought it was wonderful because one of the things that, you know, even there, like the guy comes up and says, good teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? We all ask this question, we all want to know and I love the advice that Paul gives to Timothy, take hold of the eternal life to which you were called. So we're called to it but we have action, we can't just sit by and do nothing, we have to take a hold of that. And that's where I love this band of brothers because that's what you guys do, you take a hold of that eternality of your life and knowing that I can be funny and giddy and laugh and have a good time and be very serious at the same time, that's what I love about the Christian walk. It's never just a one-sided coin, it's always two-sided, you got to figure out ways to stay out of the ditches on both sides sometimes.
But there's always more to things than just a simple answer and you just got to live in that. Thank you. Andy, you have the next clip? So this clip is from the Shawshank Redemption and it's easy for me to say, I know. And not any easier for you to spell because you... Yeah, you spelled it Shawshank. He almost said it that way, maybe that's it. Alright, alright, alright, quiet down, quiet down. Get an dictionary.
Get some tape for your mouth and be quiet. But it's not the most uplifting movie, but this particular scene is. And what you have is Andy Dufresne who was framed and ended up in jail for something he didn't do. And then Red who's been there a long time but committed the crime in his youth. And this is a conversation between them when Andy realizes he's going to get out. And he kind of sets up Red to get some money once Red gets out legitimately.
And it's all to meet down in Mexico. But you hear some key words here that kind of give a picture of this idea of forever young. Of not allowing life to beat you up, not allowing jail to beat you up. During the movie, Andy is constantly doing things to bring life and bring youth. And helping guys that have been in jail for all their lives trying to bring us to them. And he makes so many friends.
And he does a lot of kind things that actually change these guys' lives. And he just continues on but he has hope and a vision for what he wants life to be. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you and finds you well.
Your friend, Andy. Get busy living or get busy dying. So hope is a good thing.
That's an obvious statement. And then either get busy living or get busy dying. And that is an idea of somebody who is forever young. You can live like you're in jail and you cannot experience life as God intended. Or you can get on busy with living and not dying.
And I think that's what they did. Just so much how many people's dreams are killed in the jail they live in. Whether it's their own mind or their circumstances.
Or real life jail, they're a prisoner to it. And it's that youthfulness I think. The purpose of life is enjoying the goodness of God.
And not just live in a moral code even though that's an important part of it. But that forever young also to me is always, or not always, recently in finding identity. You go back to who you are before you get all messed up a lot of times and life beats you up.
And you go back to that what you did like a kid you do now. I went back and loved to spend time on the river back as a kid. Liked to get out in nature and do things. Loved to go to ball games. So on this trip, why I brought this Shawshank Redemption clip was I went to visit a friend and we happened to go. He lives near the place where this film was shot. We went there and they're celebrating a 30 year anniversary. And all this stuff was really familiar. The prison.
Yeah the prison. I busted out. Obviously I'm here tonight. But then before I came back I went to a ball game. Something else that just brought me back to my childhood.
And just not going so much to watch the game but just enjoy the ballpark and that whole atmosphere. But you know again you can make doing the things you did as a kid. You can make those idols. You can make it to where all you're doing is enjoying and heaping stuff to yourself. That's not it though but God gives you those things as a kid I believe. And to get back to that as an adult after you've just tried to live out this life and do all the right things.
It brings a lot of life to you I guess. I know I'm kind of rambling here but that's my experience. Okay that was our experience too.
And the Andy Rambler. So you went to see a Reds game. I did and they beat the Cardinals pretty bad.
Who was my team. Yeah I saw the Marty Brennam and Joe Nuxall thing. I went to the Hall of Fame which is really cool. And the Rebs back in the day were like my second favorite team. So it was really cool. They changed ballparks from when I saw them. And you're down by the river.
Down by the river. Yeah it was a really good time. I crammed a lot not to mention meeting with the guys from the Ohio team. So we did some ministry of how this trip started out. But you know you just think about the things of you mentioned Scripture and Jesus. The stuff that he did. You know the youthfulness to me of whenever he fed the 5,000. That was not only a feeding event. But can you imagine the joy and the fun that was experienced by the adults and the kids during that. So it depends how you read the Scripture obviously. But you see some playfulness with Jesus.
Like to catch a fish to get the coin out of the mouth to pay the taxes. Very creative. There's this humor in that.
And so you kind of led me into the question that I kind of had for the team as we had the last few minutes here. How do you recapture that youthfulness? You mentioned some of the things. And for me it's creating things with my hands. Whether that's woodworking or things like that. But it gets back to dreams. When you lose your dreams you lose your youthfulness. You know and so dreaming what makes you dream or what makes your heart come alive is another way to say that. You know for me it's creating things with my hands. Or you mentioned natural beauty. You know getting out and seeing things in nature. Guys what other things makes your heart come alive that brings you back to that youth?
Well I think a lot right there. Learning we had talked about. You know you're always learning.
Robby's like hey you learn you learn you learn. I think that's one of the things that really keeps you alive and alert. And you're head on straight and going somewhere because you have something you're striving for. And again we're not to be here striving for salvation. But it's you know just striving for the truth.
Striving for good things in your life and fun and enjoyment. And having that time with your band of brothers and other things. I think that's one of the ways that works really good.
That's one of the things like you said like recreate or re-establish or something. But it's for me it's like well I think a lot of times it's we do cut. Like okay that was childish like Danny was saying before. Childish versus just childlike.
You know it's kind of the difference there. It's like yeah you want to have fun but you're not no we're not children anymore. We act like it sometimes. But that's the fun part is that you don't have to live in it. And just be just all the way down into just stupid stuff for the sake of being stupid.
You know all the time. You got to come out of it a little bit. So why don't I come out of that a little bit. To jump in before we run out of time I'm sorry.
No you're good. Work with youth. You know I recently did vacation Bible school at our church. How fun was that?
And then tomorrow night actually I'm bringing the youth group here to record a podcast. And you get around the young people and you know what it does? It drives you crazy? No no no no man it makes you it brings you back all the things that you used to think and thought. And you realize that the kind of that stage more. But at the same time you know you can give them you can speak into their lives kind of the wisdom that God gave you. And it's kind of a neat thing to be part of that journey. And I know that we were meant to live in a community where you know the youth were with the young.
We need the youth and they need us. And so to step back into it and coister ourselves is about the last thing in the world which would be I think what God had in mind. That you know we were to take advantage of what he's talking about.
To jump off of Rodney's clip because it is a big appeal. I used to really pursue knowledge that sort of thing. But now having that in my brain just takes up space because anything I need to know I can get on my phone. But traveling and experiencing other cultures and people as they really are instead of how we say well this group is like this and this group. I have not met an individual even ones I would be prone to dislike like a New York lawyer. I've been put in positions to love them and the only thing we take out of this life are our relationships.
The vertical one and the horizontal ones. And that to me is staying young. And we are all young whether we're 80 or 8 we're going to live forever so we're just starting. And just I feel like I need a disclaimer not all of us feel the same way about New York people Jim. I'm just saying you know I've had some really cool people from New York.
And that's okay also I had a great neighbor from New York. Yeah I just wanted to give you a hard time. Go to masculinejourney.org to register for the upcoming boot camp November 21st through 24th. It's the weekend before Thanksgiving and so it's coming up.
You don't have plans I know you don't because you're going to do something the next weekend on Thanksgiving. So make a plan to come join us at boot camp. And if you're female and you're listening and the camps not really for you. And the males in your life please send them. Right and again if you need any information need any help reach out to us on social media. Go to masculinejourney.org.
