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Welcome to the Men of Faith podcast where we’re dedicated to calling men up, not out, to live a life dedicated to our God.
This is more than just a podcast, it’s a community and a brotherhood. In each episode, we'll explore topics that touch the core of our spiritual and daily lives—from the sacred bonds of marriage and the joys and trials of parenthood, to practical advice on health, fitness, and managing our finances wisely.
Our journey begins now and we want you with us, so please subscribe on your favorite listening platform.
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Learn more about Project Church: https://projectchurch.com/
Connect with Project Church on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/projectchurchsac
Caleb Cole [00:00:00]:
Anytime my wife says, hey, I need to talk to you about something. Pause. Turn everything off. What is it? Because I give her all of my attention. She feels valued, she feels loved, she feels seen. It's crazy that me just doing that sometimes. She just needs five minutes. You're listening to Men of Faith, the podcast dedicated to calling men up and not out.
Caleb Cole [00:00:30]:
Join me as we listen, a life dedicated to our God. What's up, Men of Faith? Welcome back. You are listening to the Men of Faith podcast. I am your host, Caleb Cole, and I'm here with my co host, Brandon Miller. Looking good as always, my friend.
Brandon Miller [00:00:49]:
Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Great to be here. Men of Faith, great to be with you today.
Caleb Cole [00:00:54]:
Yes, I know, Brandon, you've been coaching football and battling through the heat of summer. So I'm just grateful that you're a man of faith and a father that's involved in his kids lives. And I just like to let everyone know how manly you are as a football coach because it doesn't get more manly than being a football coach.
Brandon Miller [00:01:13]:
You know, usually I get out there and I help coach the offensive line, but this year we're missing a QB coach and, you know, helping with offensive coordinating duties. So my son's a quarterback, so I'm out there faking that I know how to be a quarterback because I've never been a quarterback. But thankfully he knows a lot of drills because we've had him in some training. But, yeah, good time, man. If you can be a part of your kids lives in any activity or sport, great memories that you build another opportunity to connect with them differently. Now you're connected on the team and connecting, you know, around the players. And I just found a lot of joy in that over the years with all of my kids.
Caleb Cole [00:01:53]:
Yeah, and we heard in the last episode how Brandon's even taming his tongue with the language that comes out on that football field. So well done, man of faith.
Brandon Miller [00:02:03]:
I'm working on it, man. I'll tell you, that's a work in progress for anybody that has worked on tame in the tongue and you've allowed some bad habits to get there. You gotta keep a rain. You gotta keep it rain. Cause for me, it's usually gonna be connected to frustration or anger. Some stuff's gonna come out and then I. A bad habit forms and we've got to rein it in. So I appreciate that reminder, Caleb, because that's definitely something that I want my mouth to edify.
Caleb Cole [00:02:27]:
God, what chapter in James? Well, it talks about the tongue being a fire that no man can quench. Look, we know it is difficult. It's funny, my twelve year old, he's getting ready to start 7th grade. He's a basketball player, baseball player, and he was on the court the other day and, you know, they don't swear. And he was on the court and he let out a very loud expletive. It totally caught me off guard because he's just still like such a little kid. I've never heard him cuss him out. And, I mean, he dropped it for the whole gym to hear.
Caleb Cole [00:02:58]:
But I was like, well, this is a good opportunity to teach him and coach him and talk to him about his emotions and how we manage them. And, you know, I had to after the game, sit him down and say, hey, man, like, I was disappointed by that. But let's talk about what happened, you know, and he was disappointed in himself, angry. And it came out that way. And I'm like, hey, we've all experienced it, but now how do we honor God with our tongue? And, you know, so I encourage them, hey, you need to talk to God about this. You need to repent. But it was a good teaching opportunity. And then also a reminder for me, like, hey, you may think you're a great dad, but your kids will still cuss, too.
Caleb Cole [00:03:35]:
So those pks, man, you got to watch out for them.
Brandon Miller [00:03:38]:
You'd like to think your kids, you know, choose different paths than you or don't go. Paths that you didn't go and you find out, that's right. They're individuals and they have their own temptation and they have their own journey. And as a parent, we get to be there to help be that voice to guide them along. Because I'll tell you on the adult side of that story, some of the stuff you get to hear and listen to him like, all right, pick your spots. Dad can't speak into everything. Pick your spots. It never ends, Caleb.
Brandon Miller [00:04:08]:
Never ends.
Caleb Cole [00:04:09]:
Well, we'll get the parenting one of these episodes, but today we're actually going to kind of continue piggyback on the last episode. Last episode was about just how we connect as men, connecting with one another. But today we wanted to shift it to still connection, but connecting with our spouses. So if you're single and you're listening, hey, this is some game for you for the future, because I know you most likely are aspiring to be married unless you have that unique call from the Lord, which very few have to be single. As Paul encouraged, he also said it's better to marry than to burn with passion. So that's why me and Brandon got married. But a lot of the men listening, I know you're married, maybe your dad's. But we want to talk about connecting with our spouses today, what that looks like, how we connect emotionally, how we connect practically.
Caleb Cole [00:04:59]:
I think that this is a big issue in marriages today, not just in the church, but in general. I think, you know, there's a lot of challenges within marriage. How do we connect? Because naturally, men and women are different. We know that, right? Not just biologically, but we're different emotionally. We're different in how we connect. And so we want to talk to you about how do we connect on a deeper level with our spouses. I've been doing this for 16 years in marriage. Brandon is at 31 years.
Caleb Cole [00:05:32]:
So we have some experience in seasons of being disconnected. Right, Brandon? I know you've had some seasons of that. I know I have. And then some seasons of being very connected. So I want to start there with maybe talking about the disconnected seasons. And what do you think led Brandon, like, in your life? Probably those seasons of disconnection that you found with your spouse.
Brandon Miller [00:05:54]:
I'm going to preface mine by saying 31 years of marriage, I've never been more in love with my wife. I've never been closer. This is literally the best season we've ever been in together. There's not even a close second. Like, this has been the best of marriage. I am living that right now. We hit 30 a year ago, 30 years of marriage. Went and spent three weeks by ourselves together.
Brandon Miller [00:06:16]:
And someone joked, well, if you can stay together for three weeks and endure it, you might make it another 30. And I kind of chuckled, and then I went a minute that might have been real. He might have meant that, like, how do you do by yourselves, unplugged from the world, which is what we both tried to do. Unplug from work, let kids, you know, be managed. Well be there for them, of course. But we walked out of there with a couple skirmishes, a couple challenges, because thats who we are. We meet sometimes in hard places, but got through. And so I can contrast that to very difficult times, times where we really were on opposite sides and not in a healthy place.
Brandon Miller [00:06:56]:
For us, it always comes down to the big l, and that is, will I listen to her? Will I hear what her heart is trying to say to me? And for her part, and this is, I give her a lot of credit, Annalyn is very good at saying a message, repeating a message, diversifying the message to try to get me to listen, not just hear it, not just acknowledge it, but really listen. And the times where we've had the greatest difficulty, usually when we are just not meeting. And I don't mean to cast this as she didn't have her own part to play, we both do. But for the part that I know matters so much to my wife and I don't think she's unique when she is talking, sharing, inviting me into that sacred space where she's going to share things with me she can't share with others. She wants me to listen, Caleb, and she wants me to respond and she wants me to understand. And often, if it has to do with her and the two of us, it has to with our relationship. She wants to understand how I'm going to take action based on what now I have listened to and sadly, there was a time this was 18 to 24 months extended where we were two ships passing in the night. The work that I do at that time required extensive travel.
Brandon Miller [00:08:28]:
So I'm out of the house a lot and, you know what comes with a woman not feeling listened to, Caleb. Insecurity and now things that were really not issues on my part, they became huge things to my wife. And what I learned through that is if I am suffocating you from time and attention and really attention listening, then you have nowhere else to go. But then start imagining, presuming thinking what I must be thinking. And that's very hard for us as men, we don't like to be told what we're thinking. In fact, we push back really hard on that and I am no exception. And so, Caleb, in those difficult times, man, I can say in front of all these dudes, I failed. I was not listening.
Brandon Miller [00:09:24]:
Because if I was, what I simply would have heard from my wife is I know your job requires you to travel. I know we've agreed this is part of building your company. But when you are with me, I want your attention. I don't want all of your attention, but I want your attention. I want it directed at me. And, man, if I could go back and tell that version of Brandon, you know, grab him by his shoulders, brother, she just needs you to pay attention, Mandy. She wants affection, she wants listening, she wants concern, she wants t I m e. When you have it, give it and give it in purpose.
Brandon Miller [00:10:04]:
And so that was huge for me. It was the big time when we were not connected. I was not listening and I was not paying attention.
Caleb Cole [00:10:12]:
I resonate with that because, you know, probably two years ago, Christy and I, I would say we're in the worst place we've been in all of our marriage. Now, to say it was bad, by some comparisons, people would be like, come on, Caleb, it wasn't that bad, right? Thankfully, we. We've always connected physically, regularly in intimacy, talking about sexually. So that, like, was the one thing keeping us together. I actually have told our church, like, man sex saved our marriage for a few years there because we knew biblically this is a command. And so a week didn't go by that we weren't having sex. And that kept us connected on some level. I wasn't really doing what you were saying.
Caleb Cole [00:10:56]:
I wasn't listening. I wasn't listening to understand. So when I was listening, and here's what I would say, for me, what's really changed the game is I started just listening to understand it and not listening to fix it. Because most of our marriage, anytime she tell me anything, I'm like, you shouldn't think that way. You shouldn't feel that way because that's not how a God honoring person feels or thinks. And I would say those things to her. And it was, guys, you know, under spiritual language and spiritual leadership, we're the spiritual leaders of a church. You can't get your feelings hurt because someone leaves our church.
Caleb Cole [00:11:35]:
Like, get over it. Rather than, dude, just listen to understand. Like, I could understand how that would be hard for you. It wasn't until I started doing that and making that change that we started connecting. And just to help people out there with some resources, we actually went through connection codes as a couple and read keep your love on, actually, as a couple as well. And those two resources, keep your love on book by Danny Silk. And then connection codes, it's an online course. We actually provide it at our church every quarter.
Caleb Cole [00:12:08]:
But you could go online and do it as well. You know, it changed how I processed emotion, how I processed her emotion. I started being very intentional about sitting down with her every day, every week to really listen to her. And I just needed some tools to teach me. And those two tools helped me. I needed the connection codes because it gave you this tool, the emotion wheel. So now every Friday, our date day, we sit down and we go through the emotion wheel. It only takes eight minutes, but she shares her core emotions and when she's felt them and I share mine and we just listen.
Caleb Cole [00:12:45]:
And I'm not listening to fix it or correct it or change. And, man, that simple, regular, consistent practice for us these last two years, I would say now, and she would agree we're in the best place we've ever been. So I'm with you, Brandon. Like, this is the best our marriage has ever been, the most connected we've ever been. But it really took me, first of all, being attentive enough to listen to her feelings, emotions, thoughts, and she has a lot of all of that, to be honest. I was selfish. I was lazy. I didn't want to take the time to sit and listen because it was mentally draining, emotionally draining.
Caleb Cole [00:13:21]:
It was stressful for me. And it was like, bro, get over yourself and serve your wife by just sitting and listening. And actually, I put all this pressure on myself that she wanted me to intervene and fix all these situations and even fix what she was feeling. And now I've realized, no, you put all this unrealistic expectations on yourself to fix what she was feeling, dealing with processing, and all you need to do is just sit there and then respond with empathy and care and love. But I was taking on the weight of. I got to make it better. I was deceived. And so now that I've learned, stop being selfish.
Brandon Miller [00:14:01]:
In our world right now, I think we all intrinsically know, Caleb, that something that is valuable, that people are spending millions, billions, trillions of dollars to get human attention, right? Think about all the energy that goes into ads and tracking us and watching our every move and where they can find eyeballs. We know this. We know intrinsically that attention is really valuable, and so does our spouse. Our spouse is very aware when they have it, and they are very in tune to when they don't. And although there will be other things in our life, right, so work will command attention. Sports that many of us follow and like will command attention. Video games command attention. Social media commands.
Brandon Miller [00:14:47]:
The kids, friends, hobbies, lots of things, you know, golf alone, for some of us, commands attention. And so if we know this, and it shouldn't surprise us, that primary person that we've committed to in our life wants to know that they have it. And they have it not all the time, but when they require it, when they're asking, when they're expecting it, that we're giving that to them. And it's something that I think even in my own professional life and in my own personal life, friendships, I've come to put a greater emphasis on this because as I read scripture, so I'm making my way through the scripture with you this year. You know, go through the Bible in one year. I'm being reminded over and over, you know who else wants my attention is God. Right. He wants me to pay attention, to listen, to move closer in.
Brandon Miller [00:15:43]:
And therefore, you know, when Anna Lynn is asking me for it, reminding me of it, I like what you just said about your marriage. I have to be careful not to confuse that signal with some kind of accusation. It is not an accusation. It's not wanting my attention. It's more of an invitation. Hey, can you give this to me? Because I don't just want this for you for the sake of wanting it. I need this. I need you to give this to me.
Brandon Miller [00:16:11]:
And I. That's been a really important turning point in my marriage.
Caleb Cole [00:16:16]:
That's a powerful thing. The idea of attention, what we value, gets our attention. And so if we're giving our attention to all these other things, what we're really saying to our spouse is, I value those things more than you. And as hard as that is to hear, it's the truth. It's the reality. You know, we quote Ephesians five all the time, you know, loving our wives like Christ, Christ loved the church, but actually it goes on. And later in that chapter in verse 33, it says that each one of you should love your wife as he loves himself and love your wife as you love yourself. And we're really good, especially in today's day and age at self care and self love and prioritizing self.
Caleb Cole [00:17:01]:
And Paul saying, yeah, you need to love your wife, though, as much as you love you. And in reality, most of us, if we were honest, don't. Like, I know for me, I'm still selfish. I still battle that. And when I wasn't giving her attention, because that was a big part of it, I mean, my phone has definitely been a distraction. Sports, like, all these things that get my attention, and then it's like, okay, let me give Chrissy the leftovers even. I'm a golfer, man. I love golf.
Caleb Cole [00:17:33]:
I'm gonna play golf. I try to play once a week. Like, I'm quick to schedule my golf time with the boys. Have I scheduled a date night with my wife? Have I been intentional about that every week, connect we said we were going to have. When she does say, hey, can I talk to you about something? Do I go, maybe later, or, I'm watching something. And this has been a huge game changer this year. Anytime my wife says, hey, I need to talk to you about something, pause, turn everything off. What is it? Because I give her all of my attention.
Caleb Cole [00:18:04]:
She feels valued. She feels loved. She feels seen. It's crazy that me just doing that. Sometimes. She just needs five minutes.
Brandon Miller [00:18:12]:
I'll tell you something I just heard yesterday in a business meeting and this was a roundtable of CEO's and the facilitator. He said, look, when you have your mobile device on your desk, you decrease your intellectual capacity at minimum, 25%. At minimum, you're going to hear less effectively, respond less effectively, have the ability to engage less effectively. Now, he was talking about this from a business context, but carry that home. Just think about the power of these devices and how much weight they can carry, you know, in the middle of the people you love the most. And so a really practical call up, put your phone away, leave it away. You know, if you have this device, I happen to have a, you know, a watch. Yeah, I'll see if something has to come through.
Brandon Miller [00:19:00]:
But for the most part, you know, get this, Caleb. 20 years ago, you found out about stuff the next day and, you know, your world kept moving. Like you didn't have to know real time what was happening in the world. And you know what? 20 years ago, we didn't have to know real time. Everything happening right now, that's not a real thing. Friends, you know, sometimes practically because you brought the mobile device or the pad or whatever it is, sometimes it's just, all right, this needs to stay over here. This doesn't need to be in the middle of our mix because I was really challenged by that. This was just yesterday.
Brandon Miller [00:19:33]:
Even in my business context, I know that if I'm talking to you and my device goes off and I pick it up, you feel diminished. It doesn't matter if you say it out loud, you think for a moment, well, that must be important because you just grab that while you're talking to me. And if you start texting while this person's talking, I don't care who they are, they're very aware. Your attention is probably 5% now because you can't think two things at the same time. You have to do what's called brain switching. You now have to focus on the text. You didn't hear any of that pause texting. So real practical in this one could be that we set things aside to do what you just said.
Brandon Miller [00:20:15]:
Stop typing, stop watching, hit pause, do something else.
Caleb Cole [00:20:20]:
That's a great call up for us today, too. I've tried to practice it. Even with meeting with my staff, with my friends. I try to not even have my phone face down like I've been trying to more often either. Leave it on my pocket, put it in my backpack. When people come over, my wife will take our phones and put them in the other room. And I'm like, all right, you know, like, I know why. She wants us to feel like we're giving them all of our attention and the message that it sends, you know, that you are my priority here on that, you know, prioritization of our spouses.
Caleb Cole [00:20:54]:
I think that as men, we have a hard time just shifting gears a little bit. We have a hard time connecting emotionally because we're not always great at sharing emotion. And so within your marriage, I know you said you're in the best place you've been. Is sharing emotion something you've gotten better at? Brandon, what have you done to do that? Or is it more of a, hey, I just got better at listening, and that was enough. Like that. Fixed it.
Brandon Miller [00:21:18]:
It definitely gave room for me to be more open with what I might be feeling. And here comes the rub. In my world, I actually am pretty good at sharing where I'm at and why I'm there. I'm a verbal processor by nature, so if I'm feeling something, I'll usually try to talk my way through it. So one might consider in my marriage that I have to be aware of oversharing. I have to be aware of too much. So I have to calculate back at times what I need to process with analyn and what I don't. And so what that has allowed for is she knows that if I'm working through something, she'll probably hear about it.
Brandon Miller [00:22:02]:
Now, with that said, if she wants to bring something vulnerable or personable to her, I do have to still be very intentional to pause and let her verbal process, to let her work through it. I'm by nature impatient, so I jump to the end of people's explanation because I know where they're going to. But there are times where the journey is actually the reward. So my wife actually wants me to hear the whole thing all the way through. Even if I know, like, I know where this is going, she wants to do that. And I have had to come to terms, Caleb, with respecting the journey she has as she respects mine.
Caleb Cole [00:22:43]:
I think that's helpful. I just know that there's a lot of men that have come to me and they're like, I don't know how to do it. You know, I don't know how. My wife is asking me for more. That was me two years ago. She was like, I need more from you. And I'm like, woman, this is who you married? Like, that's what I told her straight up. Like, this is who you married.
Caleb Cole [00:23:00]:
I'm not changing. I'm not some, like, over sharer, heartsy feely, emotional dude. Like, I'm just not that person. And I was stubborn and prideful and was like, I ain't changing. And then it hit me, like, if I won't change for Chrissy, the person that I went to the altar and said, till death do us part, like, if I'm not willing to die, who am I willing to die for? Like, probably nobody. God really getting a hold of me and saying, you got to make some changes or things aren't going to get better. They're only going to get worse, because she said, I need more. And you've told her, sorry.
Caleb Cole [00:23:39]:
And basically I told her, I'm unwilling to change. And what a scary place to be, that we would say, this is just who I am. Well, I don't think we would want to be that way in any other part of our life. Do we want to just stay the same? I don't want to stay the same in any other part of my life. I want to advance in my career, my spiritual life. I want to advance in my financial life. I want to advance physically. Right? I want to get healthier and stronger even as I get older.
Caleb Cole [00:24:04]:
And yet in marriage, I said to her, like, no, this is who I am. I'm not changing. And so the Lord had to really humble me and get a hold of me. And then I had to say, you know what? I need some tools because I don't know how to do this. And what's cool is I started having that conversation with my wife. That was the start of it. And this is my encouragement to some of you guys. I went to my wife, I said, I don't know how to do this, but I want to.
Caleb Cole [00:24:29]:
I don't know how to connect emotionally with you. I don't know how to be an emotionally vulnerable, process emotion like you do, but I want to learn. So would you be patient with me? Would you pray for me? And then can we find some tools together so that I can learn how to. And that was the start of it for me. And because I laid that out for her, it was almost like that was the catalyst. There was way more grace from her towards me. And then we did connection codes. We read a book.
Caleb Cole [00:24:58]:
Connection codes gave us that tool. And now I do that every week. And so now I've gotten better at sharing emotion because I have to. Every week for eight minutes, I go through these emotions, and it tells you how to do it. And now we don't even use the wheel a lot of weeks because we just naturally do it. And I've gotten so much better at sharing and then also just listening. As you said earlier, that's the other part of the call up. So my challenge to the guys that call up that I would give to them is first of all, you have to humble yourself and say, I want to change.
Caleb Cole [00:25:28]:
I want to die to self. I made a commitment, you know, and covenant to my wife and I'm going to do the hard work to get better at this. And then you got to go find some tools and I've given you a few. I know, Brandon, I'm sure you know some others that we can maybe link in the description for this, this podcast, but we have to start pursuing it together with our spouse. But I think one of the call ups is you need to start by just going to your spouse and saying, I want to do this. I just don't know how. So can you help me? Can you pray for me? And let's go find some tools together of how to do this and commit to be better listeners.
Brandon Miller [00:26:02]:
As you said, I think the resources that you gave, excellent place to start, man. If you're listening to learn, you're listening to understand, you're listening to reflect back. The request she's asking, what Caleb's describing is probably what she's asking for. She wants your attention and she is going to want it in the form of some sharing. And so starting where you can start starting at a point where you, you get some tools, you're willing to make some initial steps. I think both Caleb and I can say it really works well for positive momentum in the marriage where you have more peace, you have more joy, you have more love, you have more intimacy, you're going to see the fruit of it. It's worth the effort.
Caleb Cole [00:26:47]:
Well, hey, thanks for listening, guys. Once again, we are on YouTube now. Go to the project Church Sacramento. YouTube search project Church Sacramento on YouTube there's a podcast tab on our project church page and you can watch these as well as listen to them. We come out with a new episode every other Friday on Spotify, iTunes, podcast as well as YouTube. You can watch it there. So, man, thanks for joining us. Brandon, always a pleasure.
Caleb Cole [00:27:16]:
Men of Faith, our mos keep going. Let's connect emotionally with our spouses. Better this week, this year than ever before. So love you all. Grace and peace.
Brandon Miller [00:27:28]:
Peace.
Caleb Cole [00:27:33]:
Thanks for listening to Men of Faith. If you've got questions you'd like us to talk about on the show, we'd love to hear from you. Join the conversation by reaching out in the Facebook group and we will definitely add it to our our list. Also, if you want to engage with us at any of our quarterly men's events, you can check out projectchurch.com for more information. Until next time, grace and peace.