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Eric Swithin, Executive Director of Outdoor Adventures, joins Stephen today to discuss how his program utilizes nature to encourage bonding and transformation with mentees and their mentors.
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http://www.outdooradventures.org
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What is You Can Mentor: A Christian Youth Mentoring Podcast?
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You can mentor is a podcast about the power of building relationships with kids from hard places in the name of Jesus. Every episode will help you overcome common mentoring obstacles and give you the confidence you need to invest in the lives of others. You can mentor.
Speaker 2:Today's episode is an interview with probably the most manly person I've ever met. His name is Eric Swithin, the executive director of Outdoor Adventures. He's a marine who follows Jesus and leads mentors and fatherless boys on adventures in the Rocky Mountains to initiate them into manhood. Wow. We hope today's episode gives you or your organization value.
Speaker 2:And if it does, we'd love to hear about it. So leave us a review, rate the podcast, and share this episode with someone you think would benefit from the content. Thanks for listening. If you're listening, welcome back to the You Can Mentor podcast. My guest today is Eric Swithin.
Speaker 2:Did I say that right? Eric Swithin?
Speaker 3:You nailed it, buddy.
Speaker 2:Come on. And he he leads Outdoor Adventures. Where is Outdoor Adventures located? It sounds like it's in the mountains.
Speaker 3:We are in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, which is just east of Durango and about 4 hours 4 and a half hours south of Denver.
Speaker 2:Come on. That's awesome. So where where where is, like, your place that that you consistently go to just kinda get shored up in the Lord and just go out into the wilderness?
Speaker 3:You know, for me, I am an off trails sorta dude. So I love a day where I can load up my 4 wheeler in the back of my Silverado. I I head out into the woods, probably take me 15, 20 minutes to drive to the trailhead. I'll go at the speed of sound on my 4 wheeler to the end of the trail, maybe walk for a mile or 2, and then I'll just go in search of new things, man. I'll run into swimming holes and waterfalls and bear dens and, my probably my all time favorite thing is to get up above Timberline.
Speaker 3:So if I can summit a peak that I've never heard anybody summiting because it's just it's not tall enough for those guys that are trying to bag the big ones, and it's too crumbly and crazy for those to use ropes. I just like those nasty, peaks that are jagged that nobody thinks you can get up, but you have to work extra hard to get up. So I love sitting on the top of those, feeling that wind on my face, and just spending time with Jesus and the silence, that you can only find up there. I mean, your phone's not gonna work. You're gonna have a view that's just unforgettable, and, there's just always something that happens along those trips.
Speaker 3:I always feel like I come out feeling filled up. My knees don't feel that way, but everything else feels filled up.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's amazing. When you said bear dens, I'm I'm, like, trying to imagine what this looks like. And all I can think about do you remember that movie with Jonathan Taylor Thomas? It's like Yeah. Wild America with his brothers or something.
Speaker 2:And did you watch that movie growing up?
Speaker 3:I did. I did. I confess. Yeah, man. It's one of the things you're like, I I carry a pistol when I'm out there, but you find yourself saying, dear lord, please don't let me run into a mountain lion or a bear.
Speaker 3:And then a sentence later, you're like, please lord, let me see a mountain lion or a bear. You know, it's like you don't wanna see it, but but you do wanna see it. And, it's just cool every time. You know? And we don't have grizzly bears out here and so you're just seeing a lot of black bears and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:But, man, it's just needing it to run into a moose to run into an elk. There's just something about it. To run into something face to face that's truly wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I love seeing I love seeing those videos on Instagram of guys with bows that are that are right next to, like, this, I mean, godly moose that's just, like, walking by, and they're, like, shivering. And they they respect the animal, so they're not gonna shoot it. But they're just like, if you come for me, like, I I will let go of this thing. It's just like that thing is 10 feet tall, and I'm I'm used to, like, hanging out with dogs.
Speaker 2:So I'm I'm, like, I'm peeing just watching this this thing. So, I I always remember that movie because the there's always for some reason in a bear den, there's a predefined bed of rattlesnakes right at the front. I don't know if you've seen this, but I remember I was with my grandma and this and one of the snakes in the movie jumped up, and I threw my drink in the movie theater up in the air, and it, like, landed on all the people sitting behind us. And I was just I tried to, like, just curl up in a ball to make sure no one knew it was me. But that that's kind of a picture of who I am.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm not the the greatest adventurer when it when it comes to the wild beasts. So thank you for being on the podcast to teach teach men how to be more manly than me. So really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Well, you're very welcome. But, honestly, man, I don't I don't have a mustache or any I mean, you look 10 times manlier than me from from my vantage point. But, you know, I'll tell you what. As long as you didn't blame grandma for throwing the soda, then you're alright, man. That happens to us at least once in our life.
Speaker 2:I didn't. She would and she was completely asleep. So
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:I mean, she just looked purely innocent anyway. So there's no way I could do it.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:Well, Eric, I want you to share with our listeners about Outdoor Adventures, how you started it, and what is the mission of Outdoor Adventures.
Speaker 3:Well, at the end of the day, I have to start just by saying that I believe our calling in life sits at the intersection of our deepest wounds, our deepest brokenness, and our gifts and talents that God's blessed us with. I think a lot of our compassion stems from where we've been hurt, where we've been wounded, where we're insecure. And, and so that's really how I stumbled upon God's calling for my life. And and truth be told, at this point in my life, I feel like I'm smack dab in the middle of his will. I've never felt more alive.
Speaker 3:I've never felt like I've had more purpose in my backbone. And so that's actually how it all happened. I tried to compensate for all of my insecurities, dad not being around for years years. I I, now looking back, I realize I was just seeking validation in so many ways, seeking approval. And and truth be told, I joined the marine corps, when I was 18 years old.
Speaker 3:I just become a Christian. I was a baby Christian. I met the Lord my senior in high school, and and so, you know, even joining the Marines, if I'm honest with you and everyone listening, for their benefit and and just for humility sake, you know, I think I joined the Marines for notoriety, for glory. That was the motive behind a lot of what I wanted to do. And and, yeah, you know, I was excited about free college and this and that.
Speaker 3:But, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of what I've done in terms of chasing girls, chasing glory, being the crazy guy on the mountain, whatever I've done in the past, be it on a surfboard or be it with a rifle, it was oftentimes not about God. It wasn't even about me. It was about impression and what do people think, and how do I prove myself? How do I initiate myself? How do I become something that's worth something?
Speaker 3:How do I know I'm a man? And so, in the marine corps experiencing combat in Iraq, when I came home, it was unmanly to admit that you're beat up. Right? You just don't do that. You know, someone said, how was it?
Speaker 3:Oh, it was great. And you don't talk about the dirty stuff. You just pretend to be really tough. And and so I buried myself in my work. I went into the business world and I just worked myself to death and basically pushed down everything that hurt.
Speaker 3:And as I've come out of that, I I found myself in a state of claustrophobia. I just felt like I was boxed in like a caged animal, and I knew something was about to give and and it did. And I went through a season of life where I just needed to get outdoors. I don't know what it was, but I pack up my truck. I'd be on the road for a couple weeks, and I
Speaker 2:would
Speaker 3:just hike, fish, climb, do whatever I could to get outside. And in that process, I realized, getting on top of a mountain that Romans 120 was coming to life. Like, I could see God in his creation. I could get quiet. I could get away from the man made distractions in the concrete jungle, and I could actually hear myself think.
Speaker 3:I felt like I could breathe for the first time in years. Right? And so as I began to experience that, I felt the Lord heal me. I felt him begin to to validate me. In fact, I remember this one time climbing at sunset, which you don't do.
Speaker 3:I'm I'm rock climbing when the sun is going down in the Rocky Mountains. I've got a headlamp on and a water bottle and a 44 magnum pistol strapped to my chest, and I end up sitting on top of this granite boulder and underneath me is this roaring underground river. Behind me are 2 or 3 waterfalls. I've got this giant elk femur that's 24 plus inches long. I'm holding it like a scepter, part of it's resting on my right knee, and I'm watching as the darkness is coming knowing I gotta make it back down to camp in the pitch black.
Speaker 3:And I just felt the Lord tell me, like, you have what it takes. I love that there's not many other dudes out there that would have climbed up this hill at dark, which is actually pretty foolish just to get up here and get quiet and go on an adventure. And so I just had all these encounters with the Lord where he was just speaking into me. I remember very clearly taking a fatherless boy out for the very first time, and I remember sitting on a rock overlooking a lake on the continental divide and I just clearly felt the Lord tell me this is what you were meant to do. And so from there, I was already plugged in to inner city ministry and naturally, most of those kids, I mean, a vast majority of them don't have a a father figure in their life, and it just clicked.
Speaker 3:Let's get these kids out into the woods and see what happens. And it and it became something that was absolutely supernatural overnight. I saw a Hispanic gang member embracing and weeping with an African American gang member around the campfire. The day prior, I had tortured their minds and their bodies getting to that site. These guys were from sea level.
Speaker 3:I got them up to, like, 10,500 feet in a day. They were dying, and it just broke them down. Right? And here they are, they've never been outside of the city, and they're in the wilderness where you're hearing coyotes, you know, and around that fire, they just bonded over this idea that dad's not around. They for whatever reason, God cracked them open, and I immediately knew we had something special.
Speaker 3:And so I think that's it. I think the wilderness is a tool. I believe that the fatherless epidemic sits at the root of most of our societal ills. And more importantly, I believe with all my heart and the Bible teaches us this, that God our father has a heart for the fatherless, the orphan and the widow. And so we have a commission, a very specific commission to go after the hearts of these kids.
Speaker 3:So all that to say, out of my brokenness, my dad not being around and, we've since reconciled and now I'm walking him through terminal cancer. Through my brokenness, through just naturally wanting to be around kids, especially boys, I began to just gravitate towards those kids that are doing the same things that I did, trying to validate themselves in all kinds of unhealthy ways. And then mix that with just the healing nature of getting out into the woods and and being able to communicate with God and commune, with him without distraction. When we brought those two things together, magic happened, and that is what led to our mission, which is to erase the fatherless epidemic through mentorship. And we encourage our mentors, we encourage our ministry partners to do everything in their power to get kids out in the woods, get them to see God and his creation, and, and to spend time with them out there and see what happens.
Speaker 2:That is insane. Insane. And I I just I love it. And I I feel like every man's spirit is, like, coming alive just as you're talking. And I'm thinking I'm I'm I live in Dallas, and I'm, like, looking out my window looking for a mountain to climb or just somewhere to go be with God.
Speaker 2:And I think there is something about the wild that just draws out the heart of a man and even particularly a boy who hasn't had the influence of a man, Mike. And and so how do you find how do you find these kids? How do you prepare them for a trip like this? Because I'm sure that most of these kids have probably never gone camping, never made a fire, never hiked up a mountain. Like, how do you how do you take them from the streets to to there?
Speaker 3:Well, you brought up a a a good point unintentionally, and that is and you can imagine. Right? The first time I went hunting, what comes to my mind. Right? Well, I don't know how to do this.
Speaker 3:It wasn't taught to me. You know, first time I learned to change the oil on my car. You know, anytime these kids experience something that is quote unquote what a man should do or, you know, they've seen it in the movies, insecurity immediately comes to the surface because it reminds them their dad wasn't around, and and whether every dad teaches a kid how to hunt or not is not the point. The fact is most kids think a dad should teach them how to hunt, and so we're constantly reminded of our father's absence absence anytime we try to venture out and do something that's new or scary. You know, I can't even begin to tell you the first time I picked up a bugle tube and started ripping some bugles and got a a bull elk talking back to me.
Speaker 3:You know, and this is something I've taught myself from the ground up. I've taught myself how to do a lot of things. And so for these kids, they are completely 100% out of their element, and it builds their confidence. So when they come out of the woods, imagine you've never experienced anything like this. Imagine putting a backpack on your back and going into the wilderness for days, you know, filtering your own water, coming up with your own food, you know, it's it's no joke.
Speaker 3:Surviving the elements, I mean, we typically in the Rocky Mountains have storms that are so gnarly. I mean, it scares it scares me half to death when I'm sitting in my tent. I've got aluminum poles, and I got lightning striking trees next to me. I mean, it's nuts. So, I mean, this is a raw territory that we're in.
Speaker 3:How we find our kids is pretty cool. We don't wanna reinvent the wheel, you know, we wanna find ministries like 4 Runner Mentoring. We have ministries around the country who are doing a bang up job, and that's what's beautiful is, you know, the kingdom of God has no competition in it. So what I'm seeing is that the Lord is putting this mission and this vision into the hearts of men around the country. And so you can go to almost any city in America, and there's gonna be 1 or 2 or 3 ministers who dedicated their lives to the fatherless or to the inner city kids.
Speaker 3:It's just naturally happening. And so what do I wanna do? I wanna partner as much as I can help those ministries partner with local churches, and I want as much as possible for the the body of Christ to use and utilize, leverage all of its gifts and talents. And so we just form these partnerships. They don't all come underneath the umbrella of Outdoor Adventures.
Speaker 3:We're just there to serve people like you, to serve 4 Runner Mentoring. Provide them with an opportunity to get out in the wilderness without having to buy all the gear, without having to learn all of the intricacies to become a wilderness expert. We have people to support you in that, and so that's it. We just want to equip and encourage mentors and their students to get out into nature together, and that's the key. So how do we vet our kids?
Speaker 3:Well, camps are a big tool that we use. We will participate and support camps all over the place, and during those camps, we're constantly trying to identify the kids that are at the precipice of manhood. Boys that are at the precipice of taking their walk with Christ more seriously, stepping into leadership. So we're really cultivating through resources, through discipleship, all over the place, but we're always trying to identify that boy that's ready to take the next step. And when they are ready to take the next step, we want their mentor to come with them.
Speaker 3:We are adamantly opposed to these events where kids come out for a week, they experience Jesus and have a spiritual high, and then they go home. We just that's just not our our our niche. Our niche is bring the mentor with them, and we will use this as a tool to forge a much deeper bond between the mentor and the student, and that's what we've seen. I mean, it accelerates that relationship by years. In the span of a week, you can develop a relationship into a a greater depth than you could if you just kept doing what you're doing, you know, hanging out once a week for a couple hours for the next 2 or 3 years.
Speaker 3:So when you go out into the woods with your mentor, you're gonna be bonded. Straight up, you're gonna be bonded. And and so that's what we take pride in. When we do bring kids out here, we initiate them in demandhood through a rite of passage, which is very biblical. And culturally, it's something we've lost, and so we torture them.
Speaker 3:We initiate them the real way, and, and then we hold ceremony where they really do know on this day, in this year, I became a man. Chapter 7, I was a boy. Chapter 8, I was a man. And the bookmark between the 2 was when I went on walk about with outdoor adventures and my spiritual dad was right there with me. And so that's key, and then out of that, most importantly, these kids without fail, they take their walk with God more seriously.
Speaker 3:I've yet to have a kid who came out of the woods that wasn't closer to Jesus or had surrendered their life to him for the first time. And most of these kids we baptize when they come out of the woods. And so they begin to step into a leadership role and that's when we really start to push them into leadership. I think the most relevant leader is a young adult male who's come through the program himself, and he's ready to step into that. He's a lot more relevant than an old guy like me.
Speaker 3:That's just the truth. They've been through it. They're closer to it. They're more related to it, and, they can walk the talk a whole lot better than I can. So that's what we wanna do just like you.
Speaker 3:We wanna cultivate leaders.
Speaker 2:It's so good, man. It's so good. And I I love your your vision to to have the mentors come as well, and it's not just the kids experiencing this, but you're forging a relationship. Something we always talk about is just, like, how much time time it takes to build a relationship. And so if a mentor is coming every other week, it's gonna take him about a year to get what he could get if he just went on a trip like that.
Speaker 2:It's like anytime I did college ministry, I did college ministry for 7 years, it was always about where are the weeks that I could just get with you guys and we just do life for a week straight. And those were always the defining moments in our in our relationship and think the same is true for for mentors, but it probably accelerates if you don't know where you're gonna eat your next meal and you don't know if you're gonna survive the night. And, just being in that environment where there there's a lot more boldness and mystery and risk involved to think that that just naturally like what you said, it creates a bond. I love that. I wanna hear more about the rite of passage and the torture.
Speaker 2:Can we can we go in I don't know I don't know if you can go into specifics. We might get this podcast, a warning rating or something, but we'd love to hear about what what that rite of passage looks like for you guys. Is that just you give them a map that's, like, super unclear and you're like, you need to get to this place and eat this animal and what does that look
Speaker 3:like? Well, our trips out into the woods are full of tradition. Right? So some of them are silly traditions, but we take them so seriously. And everything's on a point system.
Speaker 3:So one of our traditions is the Jake series and everything you do from having a good attitude to being a good team player to whatever the case may be. Maybe you picked up a piece of trash without being asked. You're gonna gain points, and there's a a pretty amazing award at the end of it and an an amazing prize. And so one of the big contests we have on day 1 is to build an outdoor toilet. And so this year, of course, the leaders, we all get together and we build one that none of the students could ever even touch.
Speaker 3:This year, we, used the spine of a dead elk as the, backboard for the toilet and we called it the throne. And it was amazing. It had a toilet seat. It had a toilet paper holder. This thing was I mean, there's literally a a trail that was carved out that went to it.
Speaker 3:And so we do all kinds of fun things like that. Every day, we play 9 innings of wiffle ball in the wilderness. We use rocks for bases. We we have an outfield. We have a home run line and a and a foul line.
Speaker 3:I mean, we take it seriously. Every day without fail, we have wiffle ball. So we have all these traditions that we've become, really, really proficient in that just turn the experience into something unlike anything else out there. But as far as the initiation, so we consider ourselves a a fraternal order. And when a kid comes through, what we offer, we do not graduate every kid.
Speaker 3:We take it very seriously and it starts on day 1. When they show up to camp, they put their cell phone in a box. They don't touch it until they get back. And we have some initiations that are scary. At no point are these kids in real danger, but they think they are.
Speaker 3:And and so I can't go into too much detail on what they are just because of the nature of what we do, But I could tell you this, if you were to go through it, you would try really hard not to laugh on some of them. And then on other ones, you probably feel pretty bad for some of the kids because they're just so out of their element. Imagine climbing a mountain and you've never been off of a flat ground in Texas or whatever the case may be. So it's pretty hardcore. We push these kids pretty hard, be it taking a shower and a waterfall that's, you know, under 40 degrees early in the morning.
Speaker 3:There's just all these things, and and I think as men, I know it sounds crazy, but I just believe with all my heart that there's something in us that needs those things. We need tough, you know, we need challenges. And and what it is, I think, is it addresses our insecurities directly. It's like, you come out of the woods after doing the things you've done, you know, what you're gonna hear just about every single kid say without fail. They're gonna say, number 1, it was the hardest thing they've ever done in their life, and then number 2, they're gonna say it's the most amazing thing they've ever done in their life.
Speaker 3:Isn't that funny that that can be said in the same sentence? Those two things, simultaneous. So so that's it. But what I'd encourage you to do is come out here and see what those rights of passage look like for yourself. I think you do wonderfully.
Speaker 2:Oh, man. Forerunners coming. You better believe it. You're awesome.
Speaker 3:You're you're invited, and I'll tell you, we will drum up sponsorships. If you can get here, we'll take care of everything else.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. Something you said that stood out to me was that every time a boy runs into a a situation or or doing something that he's never done before, it immediately reminds him of his father who who wasn't there. And I I think that that's a really challenging a challenging thing to consider, about all of the obstacles that boys face when they don't have a father figure in their life is that there there's a ton of things that they haven't done before. And to, in a in a way, feel paralyzed by just being reminded that you didn't have something that you should have, I think that that that's a sobering thought. I think with this with this outdoor adventure with the walkabout, you're giving them so many reps in in doing that while at the same time addressing kind of those feelings and emotions behind the the not knowing how to do something.
Speaker 2:And so I I don't know if you have kids that have emotional just like, what happens with their emotions on on these trips?
Speaker 3:I'd say without fail, most kids at some point are gonna be in tears and things are gonna hit them pretty hard. When you sit around the fire and it's dark and you can literally see the Milky Way above you, there's just something about that fire pit that just burns insecurity. It's like all the guys can stare at the fire. They don't have to look at each other in the eyes. And when you have a guy like me who a lot of times these skids will gooey as some some tough dude because I was a marine or whatever, But when I start to share my vulnerability, I start to share some of my pain, and I I share some of my story.
Speaker 3:You know, as a teenager, I was stabbed and almost murdered, and I was a I'm a former drug addict and a former sex addict, a former alcoholic, and and I came up in in the welfare system as a young kid and dad wasn't around, and they start to see, wow, this guy has a lot of the similar a lot of similar stories to me and and so that kinda starts to crack them open a little bit and and then you have, let's say, one of our junior leaders who graduated from a walkabout the year before and now they're interning as a leader, and they start to share their story. Imagine a 20 year old who looks like walks, talks just like the kid that we're trying to reach, and they start sharing their story. Before you know it, you have some kid who's sharing his testimony for 2 hours. Everybody's crying. You got kids that are putting their arms around this kid just comforting him, and it's just unbelievable.
Speaker 3:And that's what the wilderness can do. That's what a campfire can do. That's what vulnerability as men can do. So we found that to be super amazing. And then as far as, you know, being reminded of what we can and can't do.
Speaker 3:Right? It's like, the whole world is conducive to this problem. We have outsourced everything and we specialize in everything. You You know, you don't find somebody who makes shoes anymore, you find somebody who makes shoelaces, and another person makes soles, and another person puts them together, and then a glue company makes all they do is make adhesive. You know, the old timers, they were masters of a whole bunch of stuff.
Speaker 3:Right? They were good at a lot of things. They were well rounded, and so that has fed into this problem. The second thing that's fed into it is that we just outsource everything. As dudes, we're afraid to tackle something when, and honestly, we have the best tools at our fingertips of all time.
Speaker 3:I mean, I can't tell you. I I repointed a chimney a few years back. I had no clue what I was doing. I YouTubed it. I YouTubed this thing.
Speaker 3:I made the mortar, and I repointed a chimney. And And I'll tell you, by the end of this thing, I felt like I was banging my chest. I was so pumped up that I had figured out how to do something like this, and and we just have gotten terrible at it. We outsource, our lawn to be mowed by someone else, to someone to to clean our pools, someone to do all these different things that we should be able to do. To get our tires changed or put some brake pads on, or and all these things are not manly.
Speaker 3:I'm not some machismo, you know, testosterone filled chauvinist. That's not what I'm trying to say, but men were created for these types of things. We come alive in them. They're not just chores. These are rights of passage in and of themselves.
Speaker 3:And and what I found with the fatherless is they don't want to venture out into the unknown. They're afraid to take a risk. They're often nervous to to learn new things. And in mentorship, I'm I'm a big believer. Our primary goal is to glorify Jesus.
Speaker 3:Our secondary goal is to make disciples. But in the midst of that discipleship, I believe in teaching life skills. You know, with our, unofficially adopted fatherless kids, I wanna teach them how to change the oil, how to balance a checkbook. I wanna teach them how to mow the lawn. You know, it's it's those types of things that also forge deeper bonds between the mentor and the mentee that are fun to learn together.
Speaker 3:And one of my favorite things to do is I'll pick something I have no clue how to do. And instead of being alright. I'm the expert. Let me show you, son, how you do this. How about I say it like this?
Speaker 3:Hey. I'm terrible at this. I've never done it successfully. How about you and I learn together? Let's do this thing.
Speaker 3:I wanna by the end of today, I wanna learn how to make this thing. You know, one of our mentors, Thomas Oscan, out in Houston, he, just started 27 Woodworks in honor of his dad who passed away, and he teaches young men how to do carpentry. So you can imagine just getting together and having something to do, not just teaching the Bible, but teaching life skills, things that really matter. You know, it's one thing to teach the Bible all the time. A lot of times these students feel skeptical.
Speaker 3:Man, all that this guy wants to do is talk about Jesus. All he wants to do is talk about the Bible. And and and there's nothing wrong at all with that. That's our primary objectives, to glorify Jesus and make disciples. But at the end of the day, if you wanna really show them that you care, give them some more of your time.
Speaker 3:Not when you're supposed to meet with them at the church at Thursday on Thursday afternoon, but what about on a Tuesday afternoon, you take them to do something really fun. You guys learn how to fish together, or you learn how to do something creative. Right? Learning to do it together. So you're showing them how to learn a new skill, you're showing them the humility to admit, hey, I don't know how to do this, and it opens up a conversation.
Speaker 3:I'll even say, hey, listen, you know, this sort of bugs me that I didn't learn how to do this from my dad. I wish I had, but we can learn this together. And then we could teach this to our sons. How cool is that? We could teach all these skills to our boys.
Speaker 3:We could pass it on. We could break this generational cycle where we don't know how to do anything.
Speaker 2:A mental picture came into my head of, like, what if what if Jesus, when he showed up, all he did was just show up to the synagogue and preach and then go home and then come back and and preach again and then come back and preach again. It's like, yes, his teaching, his his giving them understanding of the scripture was, like, extremely helpful and powerful and revelatory. But, like, the sauce was, like, the discipleship of walking into the unknown and into all of these different environments of life and seeing what happens and watching how he responds and how he teaches them, how he models faith. He models healing, he models all all of these things. It's like showing them how to live.
Speaker 2:And it's like, that's the sauce of mentoring. And I I love what you said just about the we're not experts of, of anything anymore. Not even just the one thing. We're we're not even the guy with the adhesive. We're we're just we're just guys who are looking to outsource all of all of the things that experts should be able to do.
Speaker 2:I have this moment the other day with my my mentee where my truck wouldn't start. And so I opened up the hood and we looked at it and the battery was all corroded. And he was like, oh, you gotta get that checked out. I was like, that's what we're doing. We're checking it out.
Speaker 2:He was like, oh, no. You gotta get someone else to look at that. I was like, no. We're looking at it. Like and we we took a brush and we cleaned it up and then took the connections off and realized that the wires were corroded.
Speaker 2:And and so I started cutting off, like, the plastic, like, electrical tape around it. He was like, you can't do that. I was like, no. This is this is what you do. And and now granted, I had never done that before, but I was like, I'm sure this is what you do.
Speaker 2:And I cut off the corroded wires. He was like, you're gonna mess up your truck. And we plugged it all back together and turned on the truck and his eyes just lit up. He was like, we did that? Like Yep.
Speaker 2:I think those moments are are just so empowering for for kids to recognize that they don't have to outsource. They can learn a skill and and utilize the the things that they have and and not just give up.
Speaker 3:And you know what's crazy is you didn't have a a bachelor of arts in car battery sciences. You know, you you you figured it out. Right? And And it's I think it's tougher for people in in the city just because you're not as reliant on your own skills to get by every day. You know, where I live, and I've lived in both, but what I've noticed living out here is it's a lot harder for me to get supplies, and it's hard to find good repair people.
Speaker 3:It's it takes a lot of time and energy and money, and so I've sort of been forced over the years living out here in the woods. I mean, if I took this camera outside and show you where I live, I'm looking at the Rocky Mountains from my house, and we've just got nothing but trim. It looks like I'm I'm living in the forest other than there's a house right there. And so you gotta imagine I plow my own snow, things are breaking all the time, and as the years have gone on, I've been forced again and again and again to, like, do stuff. You know, I've gotta fix, you know, the sheer pin on a snowblower because I just sucked in some gravel and broke it.
Speaker 3:And as you do these things, it's, like, without fail, it's unreal. I don't know what it is, but something inside me smiles. I'm, like, yeah, I just did that. I didn't have to call for backup. I did it.
Speaker 3:And this well roundedness is developed within us that just it does something. It gives us greater confidence. It makes us come alive. And as we share that experience with, with our youngsters, man, with with the students that we're mentoring, I just see great great value in that. And you know what's cool is I do believe we're modeling it after what Jesus did, you know.
Speaker 3:You know, he was stoking the fire and using the coals as, you know, a story to tell. You know, he used the food they ate as props for for preaching. Everything he did, including the people he recruited. Hey, throw your net on that side of the boat. And as we do exactly what you said, which is we let our mentor and permeate every area of our life.
Speaker 3:I think we're modeling discipleship more like Jesus did than, like, what we have done in the church for so long. And so I can't tell you how many times these open up conversations for much deeper things. You know, you're teaching kids how to hunt. We're sitting there freezing, sitting in the snow for 3 hours, and we're shivering, you know, and if I told you the conversations that come out of that moment, it's unbelievable. You know, those experiences that are shared together open up the most meaningful moments for mentorship.
Speaker 3:They they happen more naturally because you're using life, you're using what God created, you're using props, you're you're experiencing emotion and toughness, and as you go through these things, it just opens up deep conversation. You're sitting there on a log after a long day's hike, and what do you know? You have the best conversation with your unofficially adopted son about what it means to be a good husband. Because he's seriously dating a girl and he's thinking about putting a ring on her finger, but he has no context. He has no example that he could think of where marriage was successful.
Speaker 3:So he doesn't know where to start. And those conversations just tend to naturally flow out of it.
Speaker 2:So good. Here's here's my last question and I I kinda asked you a bunch of questions, so I'll I'll save them for another time. But I I think this one just kinda hit. Climbing a mountain and don't be offended by what I'm about to say. Climbing a mountain does not accomplish anything.
Speaker 2:It's like it's like if you started a business, you made some money. The money went to provide for your family. You go climb a mountain, no one's gonna pay you. The the benefits aren't as tangible. So how would you say or how would you translate that?
Speaker 2:Because obviously, it's impactful. Obviously, the wilderness changes your life. Obviously, these kids learn skills and aspects of what it means to be a man, But they they may not focus on, like, all of those benefits. They're like, well, I if I practice being a basketball player, I could make it in the NBA. If I go out into the wilderness, what's the what's the next step?
Speaker 2:And, obviously, what you say is, like, this is teaching you manhood, and it translates into every other area of their life. But I wonder if you've you've ever considered that of, like, just how how someone may approach the wilderness and be like, well, that that's not accomplishing anything. And and maybe mentors feel that as the same. Like, mentorship is like I'm wasting my time. It feels like we're just doing stuff to do stuff.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you've ever had that had that feeling and what what you would say to that.
Speaker 3:That I think is an excellent point, and I I I think it speaks to this quid pro quo attitude we have about everything in life. It's like, elk hunting. Right? You know, if we can get an elk, we have 100 of pounds of the best red meat you could ever eat. It's way better than any cow you'll ever get from the store.
Speaker 3:And so there's even a quid pro quo in that, but what if you strike out? What if you don't get one? You know? Or your example of climbing a mountain, what are the benefits of that? Is there a quid pro quo?
Speaker 3:Why are we doing this? And, you know, I've never once had a kid ask me, why are we doing this? And it's because we've lost something. We have lost the attitude and the desire to just play, to simply do something because it's there. Why do I climb a mountain?
Speaker 3:Because god put it there. Why don't I just go to Pikes Peak and drive to the top? Okay. I challenge you. Go drive to the top of Pikes Peak, take your camera and your little your bag lunch, and sit there and have a picnic, and tell me how you feel about it.
Speaker 3:Take some good pictures, and then next week come back and I'll take you up a 12,000 foot mountain that will literally make you cry in agony by the time you're done. And you tell me which experience you preferred. Right? You know, the latter, you're looking at a map of this kid and you're showing them contour lines, and you're reconning the map to say, hey, I think this is the route we can safely get up, but it's gonna be tough. You know, this last summer, I took a group up a mountain that I'm pretty sure nobody's climbed up this mountain in the way that we did.
Speaker 3:And I found ourselves we're at, over 12,000 feet hunkered down in this huge cave. And we're looking back over a valley, it's stunningly beautiful. There's water trickling from the ceiling of this cave. We're all just sitting there in the sand hanging out, eating some food, laughing, and it was just ridiculous. So what do you get from it?
Speaker 3:Here's a bunch of dudes sitting in a cave. We've got another 1,000 plus feet of mountain to climb, and we're hanging out laughing, and we're just fully alive. We're drinking water that we filtered from a waterfall, you know, we've already run into wildlife on the way up, you know, grabbing berries on the way up and eating and foraging on the way up. And then we sit there, and I use rocks and my finger drawing in the sand to explain to them how we're gonna get up the next 4 or 5 pitches safely. And their eyes tend to bug out because I'm, like, so if we do this wrong, we die.
Speaker 3:We do this right, we get glory. We're on top of this mountain. And so they're I mean, they're paying attention. Right? Because it's so easy when you're scrambling up a a class 3 and a half, class 4 mountain, you know, to kick a rock down on somebody, and that's it.
Speaker 3:You can't stop yourself. So we're doing things as safely as we possibly can, but what's the benefit? It's it's indescribable. We're just being kids. We're playing.
Speaker 3:And our father in heaven is looking down and he's smiling. He's going, that's why I put that there. I put it there for you to look at it, for you to climb on it, for you to play on it. And and as men, we're bonded on the way up. We're bonded.
Speaker 3:We we suffer together on the way up. We're breathing heavy for 3 hours, and we're carefully climbing up some of these pitches that are just tough. And by the time you get to the top, I've never once heard a kid say, well, that wasn't worth it because I didn't get a, b, and c. They're just like, that sucked. That was horribly hard.
Speaker 3:You know, one of my unofficially adopted sons, Will, he's amazing. He plays rugby for Arkansas State, and he's, his his dream is to become a Navy Seal, and I think he has the heart to do it. And he'll tell you, he hated every step getting up that mountain. Every step was painful and he didn't like it. But then he got to the top and loved every single bit of it, and he'll remember it for the rest of his life.
Speaker 3:So I I think we gotta get out of the mentality of quid pro quo. What what do I get out of the deal? And just learn to play and and seek challenges just for the sake of challenging ourselves. Seek tough things just because it's good for our soul. And and I think that's where initiation comes into play.
Speaker 3:And since the beginning of man, right, every culture on this planet has had a rite of passage, and some of them were evil and morbid and full of witchcraft and weird stuff, like cut off your pinky toe and jump into a big pool of piranhas. And if you survive, you're a man. You know, like, that's not what we're trying to do here, but there's something about us proving to ourselves that we do have what it takes, we're strong, and we can attack a challenge. And here's what's beautiful, I've taken kids up that had very little confidence. I mean, they play video games all day.
Speaker 3:They're they have string being legs. They don't play sports. They're they're just not athletic, and they can get up a mountain. I've had kids crawling back to camp on all fours and literally couldn't walk the next 2 days, and yet they said they would do it all over again. And for the rest of their life, they'll tell you I climbed a mountain.
Speaker 3:I I climbed a mountain, and I met with the Lord up there. And I did it with my brothers, and I did it with my spiritual uncles and spiritual fathers. And so the quid pro quo in that is simply, there are intangible things that I think are vital to us as we mentor kids, man. There doesn't have to be a point to all of it that we can tangibly hold on to. A monetary value or our oils changed on the car.
Speaker 3:There's it's the journey more than the destination. As cheesy and as cliche and as fortune cookie as that sounds, it's true. It is totally true. It is not just about when you get to the finish line. It's all the stuff in between.
Speaker 3:The memories you make slapping each other on the back and encouraging each other, making fun of each other, jokes being told, it just bonds us.
Speaker 2:That is Eric Swithin with Outdoor Adventures. What an incredible interview. And I I I want you to give a challenge to mentoring leaders. Maybe somebody leads a mentoring organization. Give them a challenge to join you guys.
Speaker 2:Why should they they join Outdoor Adventures?
Speaker 3:You should join Outdoor Adventures because you're gonna speed up the bond between your mentors and your students. And not just that, I'll tell you this. Your mentors are going to, without a doubt, grow tremendously themselves. They're gonna come back feeling refreshed. They're gonna come back feeling filled up and connected with the Lord, and I'll even say this, and I'll put my money where my mouth is.
Speaker 3:Mentors that come out and experience what we do are gonna be more committed to the ministry when they get back. They're gonna be more plugged into what 4 Runner Mentoring is doing or any of the other ministries. And and the reason for that, they're gonna see a ton of fruit. They're gonna have a different level of confidence and experience in themselves as they come out of the woods, And there's gonna be, enough play, enough fun to where they're gonna see what it feels like to be fully alive in Christ. Jesus promises us an abundant life.
Speaker 3:It's the high calling, and I believe in in what's called the second emptiness. The first emptiness is when you don't know God, he fills your heart, and you enter into relationship with him through what Jesus did on the cross and coming out of the grave. The second emptiness is what most men in this country are experiencing, and that is they're bored out of their ever loving mind. And and even volunteering in
Speaker 2:the church or serving in
Speaker 3:a soup kitchen or all these other things that they could do. They've tried it. They've tried to participate in what the church is dishing out, and most men, if they're honest with themselves, would say, you know, I'm bored. This isn't all that great. That is not the high calling, and that's not the abundant life.
Speaker 3:I believe there's a point as a mentor where you can truly come alive in Christ, and you can realize that if you do Christianity right, you're gonna have the time of your life. It's the noblest of all pursuits, and it's the greatest of all adventures. And that's the truth. So you wanna come alive? Come out here and see what it looks like to serve Jesus in a different way.
Speaker 3:Learn some outdoor skills, torture some kids, and see the fruit. I challenge
Speaker 2:you. So good. Eric's living. We'll leave his information in the show notes. We highly encourage y'all to join Outdoor Adventures on a walkabout.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Eric. This is awesome.