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Manhood often feels like navigating through uncharted territory, but you don't have to walk alone. Join us as we guide a conversation about how to live intentionally so that we can join God in reclaiming the masculine restorative presence he designed us to live out. Laugh, cry, and wonder with us as we explore the ins and outs of manhood together.
Jesse French
Hearing that part of the story is that's so helpful and just makes the context that much more, I think helpful and makes sense because I think there's that resonance of your words are there's a sincerity and honesty to them that is easily recognizable. And so to hear that they were born out of a time period where of challenge and some struggle. And I would say, you know, the engagement of some of the mundane, right? Of like, Hey, here I am, you know, I'm an Uber right now and
That only lends to the, I think, to the credibility of those words, in addition to what you're saying around the practical skills of songwriting and screenwriting. Man, Doug, thanks for sharing that background. Yeah, it makes sense. I'd love to ask about this latest book around rites of passage. And I've just loved starting to unpack that and enjoy it. It's remarkable. I'd love to hear, how did you come to the place of saying, Hey, I think this next category of liturgies that I want to write.
I think it should be in this, this rites of passage space. Yeah. How did that come to be?
Doug McKelvey
Yeah, there's a whole other story there. I don't know how long it would take to unpack all of it. So I'll try to just do broad strokes, but shortly after volume one was published, I had the idea that it would probably be a beneficial thing for young people to have, you know, a collection of prayers that would meet them in that time of life. And, you know, that, that could help to shepherd them through.
a lot of what they experience in those years of emerging into adulthood. But there were other ideas for possible books as well. So it was just one of quite a few. When I finished volume one, and it was a difficult year of writing that it felt like the wheels just came off in pretty much every part of my life during that year. And I was just kind of shell shocked and stumbling through it, just dragging myself, you know,
day by day back to the computer to try to keep making progress on this. And all of that, you know, those dark clouds pretty quickly dissipated once I reached the end of that process. But there was a long list of potential topics for that first book. The most significant one that is not in the book was a liturgy for the morning of a funeral. And I had just thought there's something really important to address there about
grief for people in that immediate experience of a fresh grief. But as I got within the last couple months of the publication deadline, the print deadline for that book, I just did not have the emotional reserves left. I was just spent and I just couldn't bring myself to jump into that topic and try to wrestle through that.
So when we sent the manuscript off to the printer, I already knew there's this gaping hole in the book, but I thought, well, at some point I'll write that prayer and we can make it available online if nothing else where people could just print it off and have it if they need it. Cause there wasn't a specific plan yet that there would be another book. So it,
Took me a year after completing volume one before I was in a space just emotionally, spiritually, where I felt like I could turn my attention back to trying to write another prayer, especially that prayer. So a year later I set out to do that. It turned into like a 12 page prayer, which was way too long. I knew that from my experience with writing the prayers for volume.
And so I started looking for what can I cut and I couldn't find anything to cut. was like, these are all important things. So then I thought, okay, maybe it's two prayers. Where can I split it? It turned out it was six prayers. So I split it into six different prayers, retitled them and you know, started spending time working on each of those. At least a couple of them, probably I was able to finish up.
pretty quickly, but others just started expanding on their own into other topics. then I called the publisher, rabbit room press Peterson there. And I said, Hey, I think this needs to be its own book, but I think, you know, because it's topically focused on prayers about grief, you know, maybe 35 prayers, as opposed to the first book was a hundred prayers.
So I said, I think we could just do a smaller trim size, you know, a book for this. he was like, that sounds great. So I kept working on it. It wasn't long before I thought, oh, well, these are prayers for people who are grieving. What about prayers for someone who's gotten the news that they have nine months to live or three months? There's a lot of different topics there that.
It could be helpful to someone to have these things articulated in a way that, you know, as they walk through that descent into the valley of the shadow, that there are these companion prayers for them. And then I thought, well, what about caregivers? And so it just, it just kept expanding, right. And it went from something that we thought, in three months, this will be written. It ended up being a two year process. was actually a lot longer than volume one was.
But with volume one and two, I absolutely knew the entire time. These are works that God has prepared in advance for me to do. He has set these good works in front of me and he has prepared me over my life for the doing of these good works. And I'm utterly dependent on him to bring them to completion.
Right. then volume three was a different thing because I invited 60 other writers. We invited, I don't know, six or seven artists to provide illustrations for that one. So it was very much this community kind of thing. mean, I, I wrote 15 prayers, I think, and I co-wrote maybe another 20. I don't know, but it was very much this community effort and I was more editor than writer on that one. But then I didn't know, I didn't know where to go next.
In terms of what I wasn't sure that that wasn't the end of the Every Moment Holy project, because it felt like, okay, we have the first one that addresses a wide cross section of moments of life. We have the second one that addresses this really important topic that's been largely avoided or ignored in the church in the West in the last, you know, 50 to a hundred years, that there's really a need.
for those kinds of resources and conversations to happen in the church. And then volume three is inviting the body of Christ broadly to be a part of this expression, which is a way of saying now go and do likewise. So it kind of felt like, well, maybe that's all complete. Maybe that's all there is to it. And I don't want to just persist because now it's become, you know, something that's had some success in terms of sales.
or whatever, if God is no longer sort of leading in this endeavor, you know, if Elvis has left the building, as it were, I don't, don't want to just keep hanging around and try to convince people that Elvis is about to come back on the stage for another encore, know? So there was, there was that kind of wrestling that was going on because I just didn't have a clear sense of, here's something, you know, to move to now. But there were people who for years.
had been asking me about this book because they are involved in college ministry and just saw the need for this and were so passionate about it and they wouldn't let it go. eventually it reached a point where I said, okay, in the absence of this like internal sense of here's the thing to do. I'm going to let the voices of community in the body of Christ.
be my direction and I'm going to launch into this and see, you know, if there's anything here, I'm going to try going down this path. And it was such a different experience. ended up taking 27 months to write and through 26 and two thirds months, I had no sense that.
This really is what I should be doing. There was, I didn't know there was doubt. There was confusion because it was such a different experience. You know, I didn't have that frequent experience that I had with volumes one and two of just sensing that I was co-laboring with God, the spirit was meeting me and undergirding my efforts and making the whole more than the sum of the parts in a way that, you know, that
I'm just bringing my few loaves and fishes and, know, I know I can't feed 5,000 people. it actually was a, you know, it was like walking through a fog and again, in a different way, just trying to drag myself back to keep doing the work, but always wondering, is this not what I should be doing? But I didn't have something else that I thought I should be doing.
And it was only as I got right toward the end of it that it felt like that curtain got pulled back. And I mean, through the process, I was sending these prayers, various iterations of them to my publisher and to Ned Bustard, who's doing the artwork. And both of them are saying, these are really good. think, you know, these are the best work you've done. And I just did not feel it. I was just like, okay, you're saying that, but that.
means nothing to me because it just feels to me like I'm, you know, I'm just wandering and I feel like I'm, I don't know. I don't, I don't have a sense that there's any spark at these. And there were, there were two things that happened toward the end of the process. One was that these were prayers that I wrote the first draft of most of them within the first few months of that 27 months. And then I tried to shepherd.
all of them, you know, into the fold iteration after iteration. So I was working on all of them sporadically. you know, so every three weeks or so, you know, I would return to a given prayer and give it another pass, another edit, another rewrite, whatever it needed. So within the last few days, there was a remnant of a prayer I had edited. I ended up with several that I had to
print out the six or seven pages that I had and actually cut the paragraphs out, lay them out on a table, rearrange them, you know, in order to get the most concise version that said what it needed to say. But sometimes that meant that there are a paragraph or several paragraphs that I'm like, this is really good, but it doesn't serve the prayer it was in. I feel like there's something here that
that needs to happen. And so there was one that came out of that kind of process where there was a paragraph that sparked something else. And I started working on that one and it was just so, such a different dynamic from, you know, those couple years that had gone before where in the space of a few hours, I wrote this prayer and I felt like I was just chasing a rock that was rolling downhill.
just trying to keep up with it and capture these ideas. And that was a liturgy of intercession for my generation. And that was the first and only time in the whole process of writing this book during the writing of it that I felt like, I'm being met. being carried in this process. I'm, you know, somehow the spirit of God is involved in working in this one. So that gave me hope finally at that point, but for the overall
project, it was only when I went down to Covenant College where Ned Buster, the illustrator who also does the layout for the books, he was teaching at Covenant College for a semester. So I drove down there for several days and we spent that time organizing the book. the, you know, it's a massive undertaking to figure out what are the categories for the prayers, which prayers, what sequence, and then, you know, fitting together all the layout.
So we had done all that work and then he went to teach his classes one day and I spent 10 or 11 hours straight, just sitting at the computer, going through the entire manuscript, reading the whole thing, you know, making little tweaks. If I found a typo or whatever, but as I read through it that time, I mean, I don't know how many times I teared up or had spontaneous sobs because that was the first time.
I had the experience with these prayers of realizing, this actually is going to be a gift to young people and this is going to shepherd them. And there is something here. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. So that whole experience for me of going through what felt like a darkness of that more than two year process of writing it.
think it was just God taking the training wheels off. Right. saying with the other books, you got to have that experience of knowing, I mean, of sensing my presence with you working on this. Now it's time to mature and to, in the absence of that sort of emotional affirmation of experience to.
day by day, try to be faithful with the thing, you know, try to be a faithful steward of your gift, even in the midst of confusion, in the midst of doubt, in the midst of self doubt, you know, to, it just felt like that, that, okay, this was a different season and, it was not easy, but, know, it made me think of it in hindsight, it made me think of
You know, reading that toward the end of her life, Mother Teresa, after all of her selfless service to the poorest of the poor in India, had confessed to someone that it had been decades since she had felt the presence of God with her. just knowing that there are times and seasons when God gives us, I guess, the opportunity to practice faithfulness.
when we don't feel some immediate reward, right? So it actually is a harder, there is more of a cost. And that's part of, you know, just in this life where we do have to live by faith and to hope in God's promises and to choose to trust day by day, moment by moment, hour by hour, that once the new creation hits, there's not going to be any faith required.
And our confessions, maybe unless there's something that I'm not able to envision, our confessions of God's worthiness are not going to be costly at that point in the way that they are now. When we live with this veil still covering our eyes to some things. And it's like, when we experience the grief, when we experience the doubt, when we experience the pain.
That is when we have the opportunity to say even so, Oh God, you know, you are worthy. I don't understand this. I'm confused. might even feel disappointed in you or angry with you, but I will still choose to trust you. And I will trust you with those emotions and I will trust you with this life circumstance that I can't make sense out of. that is painful.
Right. Because I believe you are who you said you are, who you revealed yourself to be in Christ. believe in your mercy. I believe in your love. I believe that you will redeem even this. I choose to praise you even in this circumstance when it costs me something to confess that. So, yeah. So that's again, I feel like I'm giving you very long answers, that's the long answer to that question.
Jesse French
Thank you for your generosity and taking us into some of what that season was like as I'm listening to you speak. think your story and the wisdom that it has for us around fidelity, around what is ours to do, around the mysterious presence of God, around creativity, like those themes and those invitations, think I'm grateful for it I think they apply to all of us, despite whatever unique field we find ourselves in, despite the work that is uniquely ours to do. Hearing you speak about.
this work, the pursuit of that, the surprise of that, the laboring with that. It's encouraging and hopeful just to hear of another person's commitment, the wrestling and, and to get a glimpse right of the wild movement of God. That is so unpredictable. but that is faithful. For those of you guys that are listening, I can't recommend this most recent version of Every Mont Holy.
enough, the rites of passage volume that Doug has just been talking about. It is an absolute treat to read. Just a quick little teaser of some of the spaces that Doug dives into are some liturgies. I'll just throw a few out. Before an exam, a liturgy for when you feel stuck in your job. A liturgy for navigating a group project. I could have used that a lot when I was younger. A liturgy for before a first date, before a third date. A liturgy.
when you feel stuck in your hometown. Like this is such a quick snippet of just the depth of what's present in your work, Doug. For those of you listening, graduation season is right around the corner. And so this book is a delight. And I loved what you said earlier when you referenced some of these prayers as companion prayers. And I think that's, I think that's really well said that these words really, they do feel like companions in the midst of navigating life. so Doug, thank you for joining us. I want to just end by asking you.
kind of one question, maybe it's a little bit of a curve ball and we'll have links in the show notes for where you can find Everymont Holy Lee, where you can get this most recent edition. But I want to ask you, Doug, what encouragement might you offer to someone who is listening to this today and has felt some sort of intrigue around writing their own liturgies or have found some resonance of the crafting of their own liturgy? What words might you offer them?
Doug McKelvey
Well, I think that there's a posture of honesty and humility that we should be writing from and that is maybe kind of built in if we truly are writing what we need, what we recognize our own heart needs and, or what we recognize the people around us need with the things they're encountering, the things we're going through, that we can see these as gifts that we can offer to others.
Right. That it is a way of serving. It's a way of serving the communities that we're a part of. And then, you know, if it goes beyond that, that's great. But I got an email from a friend. Well, this week we were having some, back and forth conversation, not on email, but WhatsApp, because he is a doctor who came from this area, but who is a missionary doctor in the country of Burundi. He and his wife both are.
I'm working in very difficult circumstances where, you know, many of their patients, they don't have equipment and medicine in their hospital. You know, there are treatments, they know we could do this to help this person, but we just, there's no resources here for it. So I was with him a year and a half ago, I think over in Africa, and we, had some conversations about this and he said,
You know, I know pretty much that one out of every seven patients who walks into my hospital that I'm going to treat is not going to come out alive just because of the lack of resources to deal with these things. And so he talked about the long-term trauma that all of the staff in those kinds of situations carry because death is a daily kind of occurrence there. know, people are traveling.
days in some cases to reach the hospital because it's the only resource in the region. you know, you are just witnessing a lot of death. But what he sent me the other day was just this beautiful thing. It's a book that he has written inspired by, you know, the every moment, holy form of prayers. And I guess by something he said that I said, which I don't remember saying, but that's part of the course.
about writing for the communities that you are a part of. So he has written this book of prayers. don't know, it might be something like 30 prayers, but addressing different topics for people that are medical providers in missionary contexts in third world countries like that. And I haven't had a chance to read all of them, but they're, they're well written. One of them I saw that I read through was.
a liturgy for walking past the line at the morgue because, know, there is so much death in that context that you have these lines of families, you know, waiting to retrieve the bodies of their deceased loved ones and just working through emotionally what that does to a doctor.
As they're leaving the hospital and they're going to go back to their home in the compound to their family who are healthy and you know, all of this. here are these people who came here hoping that you could be their savior, that you could save their loved one and you couldn't. And also you can't enter their grief. Really? You can't feel what they're feeling. So how do you, how do you navigate?
that just the awkwardness of it, the pain of it, how you feel about yourself, how you recognize that you have to have this emotional, I mean, that you can't live your life without some emotional distance from, you know, the pain that does over time build up into PTSD for a lot of missionary doctors in those kinds of situations. And I would assume for the national doctors as well, who aren't there as missionaries, but just aren't working in those conditions. So.
I just thought that was so cool that he had done that. mean, how many people are his potential audience for that? A few hundred, maybe a thousand. If it gets the reach through various missionary organizations, if it actually gets published, as opposed to him just offering it digitally to, you know, the people in his organization or whatever. But what a beautiful gift for those people. know, so I think that's the place to start.
more than any is because you can't control whether a publisher is going to pick up your book. If you write a whole manuscript, you can't control if they're going to actually put anything into marketing it, or if it's just going to die on the vine without anyone ever finding it. You know, you just can't, you can't control if it's not going to get published now, but in a hundred years, your manuscript is discovered somewhere and it becomes, you know, this.
This thing that serves people, but you're not going to reap the glories of it, right? Not in this life. so there's no flourishing spiritually for us to chase down those commercial measures of anything. And I mean, it can ruin the beauty of what you alone might have been created to be able to offer as a gift to the people around you.
So I think the more we can do that, the better. I just saw, have, I have to add this little bit because Alan Levi, he's active, you know, in one of the communities that I'm a part of that's kind of centered around art and faith and making this journey together. But without going deep into his life story, which is a pretty amazing and wonderful thing in his early seventies, he wrote a novel called Theo of Golden.
Self-published it with his niece helping him. And the thing has gone nuts. mean, it's been the number one seller in the country for several weeks now, is just, which is just amazing. And he is the, I mean, he is a wonderful emissary of Jesus to be, you know, having these conversations on a national level with the New York times and you know, the TV shows that he's been brought all of that anyway.
I saw a snippet of a conversation he had with Russell Moore for his podcast. And Alan recounted how early on in the process of self publishing the book, his niece asked him what their measure of success would be. she was asking for actual metrics. Like, you know, if we sold 2000 copies, would that be considered successful? And he told her, and most people to hear them say something like,
this, I would think, okay, you're just trying to look a certain way, but with Alan, you know, it is a hundred percent sincere. And he told his niece, far as I'm concerned, this book has already been successful because I wrote it. And at the end of my life, I'm going to take this to Jesus and I'm going to tell him, I wrote this for you.
So, you know, whatever happens with or doesn't happen with sales or, you know, any revenues coming from this or whatever, you know, that really doesn't matter to me. I mean, I don't think he cared really if it even got published. Friends wanted him to put it into print. He just wanted to see, could he be disciplined enough to exercise this gift and create this thing that
You know, he saw as a labor of love for his creator. And I think that is the true heart of it. Right. And that's hard for me. I mean, I think I've matured over the years to that point that I've described of frequently being reoriented to the idea of, okay, how can I serve the people around me? Right. But that's still.
maybe primarily thinking of this level of human interaction that, okay, I'm going to write this and I'm going to give these people something that's going to be meaningful to them. there's, you know, undoubtedly there's still some ego even in that. Yeah. Yeah. But what Alan was describing was just so profoundly beautiful and right. I think that
You know, it's a convicting challenge in a very good way, not in a heavy way, but for me just to re-examine my heart in that light and to say, okay, there's still a lot of riddled shadows in my motives. For sure. Yeah. know, but then there's the flip side of that is, can I begin to look at everything I do more in that light of, Jesus.
Jesse French
Yes. Yes.
Doug McKelvey
I want the way I interact with my wife. When I go to have this conversation with her to be a gift, I want it to be an eternal, you know, a kingdom building work that I will actually bring to you and lay at your feet one day as a gift. Right. And as well as the artifacts I create, but just the way I serve, you know, if I'm involved in this.
refugee resettlement ministry. Well, yes, I, used to do that with an awareness that I'm serving the least of these, that in a way I'm serving Jesus, that he said, you know, how I treat and love or don't love these people, that they're representing him to me in this situation. But it's a different thing to approach it from that standpoint and to actually recognize it as, I want to do this as an act of love, as a
gift to you, Jesus, out of gratitude. I want to make this choice. Yeah. It's going to be, it's going to be messy and hard and sticky. And I'm going to be dealing with some cross-cultural situations that feel awkward and everything. yet I can see it. can walk through that knowing I get to give gifts to my savior.
Jesse French
Yeah, that is connected
to the metrics, you know, the measurable impact type of thing, right? Like going back to Alan's work, like that is well, well said and reframed.
Doug, thank you. Thank you for that. I think that invitation to, I hear the invitation towards our communities, to the people that we are in relationship with, that we are distinctly aware of, and the sense of, again, this question of what gift can we offer that is ours to bring that is not dependent upon these downstream easy sort of measures of success. think that, yeah, such wise words. Doug, thanks for joining us. For this conversation, this has been a treat.
Thank you for the work that you continue to generously share in the world. Thank you for your most recent Every Moment Holy writes a passage book. Excited to enjoy that more and I'm grateful for the time we had today.
Doug McKelvey
Thank you, Jesse. I enjoyed it. Sure.
Jesse French
Thanks so much. Take care.