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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.
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Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Restorative Man podcast. My name is Jesse French and I'm excited to be joined by my good friend and colleague and co-host who is... Buriff. Hey everybody. Cody, good to see you, man. Good to see you. Good to be here. Yeah. Yes, it is. And we are joined by a good friend of ours, someone that we have known for a bunch of years. And most excitingly, we can now call him colleague because...
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just even within the last year, he's joined staff at Restoration Project, a fact that we are so grateful and excited for. And that is Greg Ehlert. And so, Greg, good to see you, man. Thanks for being willing to join us here in this conversation. Yeah, absolutely good to be with you guys. It's going to be fun. Looking forward to this. Great to be together. Love it. Just give us a little sense of where we find you here in this conversation, Greg. Yeah, sure. So like you said recently, just came
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on staff with RP in legacy partner development and advancement for restoration project and looking forward to, you know, learning all of what that means. But the biggest thing that I'm excited about is just being able to get to know all of the different men that our RP is touching and to get to know some more of their stories. My wife and I live with our youngest son out in San Diego. Our oldest son just graduated college and our middle son is in college. And so we have a hat trick of boys.
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that we've been trying to raise and been saving for their future counseling fees and so forth that they'll probably have to have, but you know, it's all good. It's all good. Well, thanks for joining us, man. Well, I'd love to tee up our conversation just with a question towards the three of us. And here's the quick prompt. Give three words to describe yourself. And I'm going to give some ones that are taboo, right? If you're playing that game, like you can't say these words. So.
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man, husband, father. I'll just go ahead and cross those off so we can hopefully get into more of the unique particularities of who all of us are. So you can go anywhere you want. You can go deep, funny, any vein, but yeah, three descriptors for who you are. Well, I guess I'll start. will say pastor, motorcyclist, and hummingbird watcher. Oh, okay. That's fun.
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I knew some of those. did not know all of those. is good. I'm going to say creator, not as in like God creator, as in like creator. Yeah. Creator maker, outdoorsman. And I'm going to say Jeeper. Yeah. Those are three that are kind of Love it. think I will go with loud introvert.
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is one of them. Colorado is another one. And then for my last one, I'll say fly fisherman. So those are my three. Just don't want to say cowboy poet. You're too kind to your friend. We're looking at Jesse right now wearing his what is that called a 10 gallon hat, five gallon hat, whatever it is. I just wear it on a Tuesday morning. sitting out. Lushing too. mean, you know, it's like stop it. Stop it.
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Well, it's an interesting, like we're joking and thanks Cody for putting me on the spot, but it is an interesting piece. it does highlight, right? This interesting dynamic of like, how do we describe ourselves? Right. And even maybe deeper than the descriptive words, like who do we understand ourselves to be? Like, you know, Greg said pastor, Cody, you said maker, like a creator. You know, I said I'm a Coloradoan, right? Like it gets to below the descriptor, right? It is naming a piece of some of our identity. Right. And so.
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Which I feel like as soon as we enter some of those spaces, we're like kind of in the deep end of the pool, right? To be able to name or to wonder to hear from someone. Hey, this is a piece of my identity, right? We're in, we're in deep space. we are. Yeah. Absolutely. I don't know whether it was Cody or who I was talking to recently, but in this kind of new role with Restoration Project, I have lots of opportunities to try to describe to others what RP does and what RP is about. And I think
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One of the ways to get at it is restoration project is part of what we do is we journey with men along the path of self understanding. And I think that's huge, which is another way to talk about identity. Yeah. Yeah, that's well said. So I sort of prefaced right the question of beginning of saying, Hey, here's a few descriptors that are, that are off limits for, for the conversation. I'm want to wonder around a descriptor.
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that I feel like in the last couple of years, organizationally a restoration project, we begin to give some more language to, would say, of individually, you know, knowing what I know about you guys, there's been a deeper exploration and wandering around another role that we believe is actually really central to all of us as men. And that's this identity of us as sons. And obviously by the fact that
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We're here and we're living and have been born into the world. There's the biological reality of, us being sons, right? To our parents. And that is true. But this notion of us actually being sons of God, right? This idea of being beloved sons. And I want to just continue kind of our wading into the deep water around that space and maybe just ask you guys like, when did that idea or that concept begin to like take root in your life?
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And we'll get into more, some unpacking of what that entails, but when did that idea find some resonance and find kind of a foothold in who you understood yourself to be? know for me as someone who, well, became a Christian, came to faith growing up in a non-Christian family, but experienced really acceptance and love and kindness from a local church after
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college and having just made my faith my own and having a teaching career for a while, I realized that really at the end of the day, I cared more about the hearts and stories and frankly, self perceptions and identities of people in relationship to God probably more than anything. And so I went into seminary. And when I was in seminary, I had a professor that taught a class called person, family and culture. And this professor had
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been mentored by Eugene Peterson. had done his PhD on Henry Nowen's work in the L'Arche community. His name's Kevin Reimer, great guy. But in that class, he showed a brief sermon that Henry Nowen had given back in the 90s on this idea of belovedness and sonship and adoption that when I saw it and I heard it, it just awakened me to this being really seminal, really foundational and fundamental.
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to my work as a pastor. And I started realizing, oh, wait a second, maybe my work as a pastor is also dealing with this question as well, where there's kind of this reciprocal thing going on where what I want for the congregation is actually what I want for myself. And so I think that dynamic started, that probably would have been about 20 years ago, that kind of awakening for me. Well, yeah, it's a familiar, my story is a little unique in that I grew up as a pastor's kid.
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And so my sonship, my dad was my dad and our pastor. And so my connection to sonship and to the idea of being a son of God and even just my Christianity, my spirituality, my relationship with God was kind of tinged, I guess, in because of that. And so I probably grew up experiencing less the like.
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Being able to rest and enjoy identity as son and more so needing to fit into the role of identity as worker. So like even like the prodigal son story, you know, when he decides to come home, he's like, maybe I can just work for my father. I think I was a little bit more like, this wasn't like intentionally for my dad or anything like that, but I think.
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My vision of what sonship looked like was working in the barns or in the fields or whatever, you know, analogy you want to use. And so it was later on that even reading, uh, was a book by Tim Keller, Prodigal God, where he's talking about the older brother and some of those things and, and how the father actually also like invited the older brother into relationship and identifying with that more.
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Yeah, it was probably 15 years ago, 20 years ago, where I started into this space of basically being able to embrace the identity of son. I frankly, like, I still have a hard time calling God father. Probably 10 years ago, I was doing this study in John and we highlighted the word father in yellow. And in the book of John in particular, he uses the word father like crazy. And so there's lots of yellow highlighting.
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and I'm noticing that Jesus is referring to God as Father, and I never prayed as Father. And so that was convicting and told me something about how I was not actually seeing myself as Son and having a difficult time identifying God as Father as opposed to just Lord. So I said a lot there. Yeah, I think I'm far like less further along on the journey. I feel like even just for me, even in the last
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three or four years, it feels like that concept of view myself as a son kind of was introduced. And like you said, Cody, like he said a lot there and it's good and right. Cause it feels so, so complex, right? Cause as we think about, yes, the space of identity is inherently layered, but to think of ourselves as a son, a son of God, like man, it just feels like this massive piano worms to which, was probably why we wanted to talk about it.
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today, right? Is to say like, how might we begin to explore some of that and understand that maybe and try to engage some of that in our lives in few ways. So yeah, Greg, like you said, I mean, just chronologically have been kind of on this path for a while, but for someone maybe who's hearing this idea for the first time or is like, huh, my belovedness, like, what do you mean by that? How would you begin to articulate some of that reality and some of what that really looks like?
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Great question. I think there's different ways to come at it, but I think one way that's kind of a biblical paradigm that maybe we can get our heads around a little bit is this idea of adoption and adoption, say, maybe as opposed to orphanhood. There was a family at one of the churches that I was serving who adopted a son internationally and from a place really far away. And it was a process where they had to do some research. They eventually found this organization.
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that had an international adoption operation in a faraway land. And honestly, years of prayer, financial investment, and then physically they had to leave where they lived here in the US and go be in this country for several months. And then eventually were able to then meet who their adopted son would be. And watching that process of just how that child was prayed for, delighted in, invested in,
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and enfolded into the family and how the posture and disposition of the parents towards this child was one of delight and anticipation and expectation and gladness and gratitude. Oh, I mean, it was, it's just such a great metaphor, I think, for starting to get our heads around the way that the Father sees us. Because one of the things that Naaman talks about is Jesus's baptism.
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before he's done anything, before he's preached anything, right? Before he's even taught anything, healed anybody, before he's even gone through and been tempted out in the desert. We're told that at his baptism, the Spirit comes down upon him like a dove, and you hear a voice from the Father saying, this is my Son, whom I love, and with Him I'm well pleased. You could also, you know, translate that, in whom I delight. And I do believe that part of the incredible good news of
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the kingdom of God and gospel is that what is said of Jesus is said of us. And I think at the end of the day, for Jesus, at least, it wasn't just some concept to know in his head, but it was a living reality, like operating at the bone level, right? Like it was in his bones, as it were. And I think that's the kind of life we're invited into as sons. We're not orphans in the sense that with no eyes of a loving parent on us, separated.
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just trying to find our way in the world and survive. No, in fact, we are adopted. And so that's one paradigm that I think we see in scripture that we could use maybe as an honor to get our heads around it a little bit. That's good. Yeah, I appreciate the language around delight, around the eyes and the presence of a parent for their child, right? Just that beloved feels kind of like a big word, but when you break it down,
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into, this is someone in whom you delight in, right? I feel like that paints such an image picture of what that looks like. Yeah. And I think what Cody, what you were saying, you know, I think of there's a book that I read quite some time ago called My Father, My Son, Healing the Orphan Heart with the Father's Love. And there's this like list in there contrasting the disposition of someone who's living out of an orphan kind of mindset.
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versus someone who's living out of an adopted, beloved son. So like Cody, what you were saying, one of the first things it says is our view of God shifts from seeing God as a master to God as a loving father. Like there's this shift that starts to happen. Now that doesn't mean that God isn't still a master or Lord in the sense that what he says goes or that what he directs us to, want to follow, but it's getting to the dynamic, the way that we experience the father, the way that we
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not only understand in our heads, actually even in our bodies in that confident, calm, non-self-conscious, just welcomed containment of a loving father. I think, you know, thinking that way about the contrast between maybe how an orphan would operate before they're adopted, right, can be helpful. Greg, I'm just curious, as you think about that, I'm aware that for guys, it's one thing to say that we shift from
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seeing God as master to seeing God as father. But it's not something that we can necessarily choose per se. It's something that has to kind of transform within us. What do you think keeps that transformation from happening? What keeps us seeing ourselves as orphans and seeing God as master as opposed to seeing him as loving father and taking on the identity of sons? Holy moly. Great question. I do think it's many things. So let me try to name a few. This is coming from
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both my own experience, also watching the process in like pastoring and spiritual direction. So I think one thing that I've heard said in our peace circles, and maybe it's from people like Chris Bruno and others, but Jesse, think you said it as well as children were really good observers, but we're not terribly good interpreters. So when we see something or experience something in our younger years, that's difficult. Maybe dad's angry or a coach is furious or
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we can overinterpret that and think that we're the source of that anxiety or that anger, right? So what I want to say about that is I think it's easy for us to project those kinds of experiences onto our concept of God. That would be kind of a key fundamental way that that kind of goes wrong. But I also think it's easy for us just in life as men. I mean, I don't care whether it's a preschool playground or an elementary school sports team or
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recess time gathering, like you learn pretty quick that you've got to protect yourself from the onslaught of being made fun of or any of those types of things as well. And so we just develop tons of, I would call them like protective strategies or different ways to kind of present ourselves in the world that help us feel a little less vulnerable. And when we do that, we can over identify with it. And so I think it's easy for us to think about
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Okay, God's going to accept me like the older son that I think you were talking about, Cody, that, you know, I have my role and my place in this world because I do a good job, or because I toe the line, or whatever it might be. Right? Which you could even say maybe is a harder place to get free from than seeing yourself, whatever we over identify with the things we do well, I think we also can over identify with the things that we don't do well. Right. And so that plays out in 1000.
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thousand places. And I think we really well said, and you called it, I think, protective strategies, like, I think we over identify with the things that keep us safe, right? And so like, yeah, the orphan mentality, although there is like poverty to that existence, there is independence to that, right? That is, that is different than the dependent son or the dependent daughter. That's interesting. You say that because that actually the second thing on that list in that I was mentioning earlier about orphan versus adoption.
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is this idea of dependency, that the orphan heart is one that feels like it's self-reliant and needs to live independently. And the spirit of an adopted son is interdependent and acknowledges his need. Right? And there just aren't even many spaces where, whew, that is encouraged, invited, set up for, and frankly, even our churches seem to be at times the least safe place to be the most honest. Right? And not to be a judging, but it's just the way we set things up.
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right? Which is, know, and then as a pastor, you have a privilege to, you will, behind the curtain to the lives of people because they seek you out individually. It's kind of like, oh, not that we want to air our dirty laundry publicly, but is there a way we could organize our gathering together where things like interdependence and our need and acknowledging our need is more common? Because, you you asked, how do we get from an orphan disposition to an adopted one? I think we need to experience
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We actually need to experience things like acceptance and kindness from one another for the reality of the truth of some concept to get it really installed into our being, into our way of thinking, our bodies even. Greg, would you maybe give us a few more insights into what the differences are, some of the distinctives between this kind of mindset as orphan versus son? are some other things that distinguish those?
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Yeah, yeah. So some of the other categories like that this author's names Bruce Bradoski gives are something like the need for approval. So an orphan would really be in a disposition of feeling the need to strive for praise or for approval to perform, to receive acceptance. But someone who's living out of that spirit of adoption knows that he's totally accepted by God's love, that his sense of being justified in the world comes from God's kindness and grace as opposed to
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you performance another category might be like the source of comfort like it's easy as an orphan to try to seek a sense of comfort and regulation through counterfeit affections right compulsions escape is a business performance hyper religious activity or addictions where as for the adopted son they can seek times of quiet and solitude and rest just to be in the father's presence just to enjoy you know that containment knowing that
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The father delights in us as his children. So these would be like a couple of examples. Yeah. I mean, I see that playing out in my life for sure. The desire to find my value in my personal achievement and how people view me, how much I impress them or don't impress them, you know, kind of that, that insecurity factor, you know, living from a place of fear more than security. And yeah, it's a tough shift to actually believe that like, it's not up to that.
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You know, cause for my whole story, like evil has continued just to repeat that same message that you're not good enough. You're not good enough. You need to work harder. You need to be more effective, more efficient, more impressive. know, there's no space for rest. There's no space for delights or love or gratitude or generosity. It's more of the grind. And that's, I think that's all of our stories to some degree, at least definitely mine.
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For sure. And I think it's also, we see that in scripture too, right? Like Greg is taught, Greg gave a great example of Jesus receiving his father's blessing before he starts the public ministry, before he goes out to the desert, right? And he goes to the desert and what is he tempted by, right? He is tempted like, if you are the son of God, right? Is this the fundamental understanding of your identity and to question, to attempt, to cast doubt into that space, right? Because that, right, it's no accident, right?
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out of our understanding of our identity flows everything else, right? And so, so of course there's just this constant opposition, this constant questioning of an identity of belovedness of an identity of sonship, right? And I would say to your point, Cody, like, so that's true, which makes it really hard. And then the other thing, which I I'm with you, right? In the affirmation of how well ingrained those patterns of generating approval is the other thing is like,
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generally those work pretty well. the track record is not one of like complete inefficiency and unproductivity around that. It actually works decently well. So you have this combination of this opposition and a track record like okay for me, which feels like the stack deck of well to actually then move into, into, shift our understanding towards Sonship is a monumental task. Yeah. And I think that's right. It is a monumental task.
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but it's not a task that we're meant to bear, A, on our own, and B, we don't even actually have the power to make that switch. I think that's the thing that's so wild about this. I mean, how many times have I wanted for myself or for others to be able to just somehow flip a switch? Like, why isn't this connecting? Why isn't this happening? So I think of like, you another example from the scriptures is, of course, the apostle Paul. I mean, here's a man who kept the letter of the law.
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right? Hebrew of Hebrews, the whole nine. He's persecuting Christians. He's a brilliant legalist. And he, you know, I like to say he gets, you know, Jesus opens up a can of whoop booty all over him on the road to Damascus, right? He gets knocked off his horse, if you will. He goes blind for three days. And Ananias, who doesn't even want to go anyway, prays over him. And finally he can see. But what does he see? He sees that all of that striving and all of that, if you will, law keeping.
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All of that older brothering that we see in Luke 15 in the prodigal son is shown to be the farce that it is. But he doesn't pick himself up by his bootstraps. He just now starts to live what he calls in Romans, living from the spirit rather than living from the flesh. And I think this is why in Romans 8, he says, if Christ is in you, then even your whole body is subject to death because of sin. Got it. The spirit, life because of righteousness. And if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you,
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He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies. Okay. After this, he says, for those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God and the Spirit you receive does not make you slaves so that you live in fear again. Rather, the Spirit you receive brought about your adoption into sonship. And by that Spirit we cry, Abba, Father. So his Spirit testifies with our spirit that we're God's children.
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Right? So it's the spirit's job to make that shift from orphanhood to adoption. And he does it, it seems to me, not exclusively, but primarily through community. And so when as brothers, we have the opportunity to say, yeah, I can't get out of this striving thing, this performance thing, whatever the thing is. But we bring the reality of those, I guess you would say, those weaknesses or needs to a group of brothers who hold it with us.
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And then call out the reality of our adopted belovedness, our identity as beloved sons. The spirit uses that to bridge that gap. It's actually through surrender that process comes, which is just backwards to what we intuit normally. Yeah. I mean, just step back and look at restoration project for a second. I think it was a couple of years ago, Greg, you were probably still like participant. You weren't staff yet.
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Jesse, I remember, I think you and I had some conversations around this whole idea because organizationally we had the fatherhood piece in place, we had brotherhood piece in place, and those were kind of the two cornerstones, if you will, of kind of what we did. And I think what we began to realize was like, you literally can't do the fatherhood piece well without sonship, without being able to step into sonship yourself. And you need brotherhood to even be able to do that.
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You need to be fathered either by others and or by yourself, you know, frankly, and frankly, like it's accepting the fatherhood of God. But that happens in the relationships and the connections we have with other men in particular. And so I know that's part of why we ended up shifting and starting to focus a little bit more intentionally in the sonship space a couple of years ago. Yep. Because we need to, we have to. That's the foundation. Yeah.
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We've used the phrase more commonly and frequently like, the truest thing about you is that you are a son. Right? And like, try to continually like soak in that reality of like, this is the truest thing about you. is not your mistakes or your performance. It does not fill in whatever other descriptors you want to put in that the truest thing about you is that you are a son. Absolutely. And I think for me to your original question, as I was awakening to this reality that you've just named,
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about our belovedness, about how that's seminal and foundational to everything else. When I was doing youth ministry while I was in seminary, was, youth ministry is a, boy, it is a fantastic ministry that's fraught with fraught because it puts you at ground zero in family systems and you get to know some of the glory and the guts, if you will, of, you know, the underbelly of families and how they work. And that's true for all of us. But when I was interacting with
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parents, invariably over 10 years of youth ministry in that church, I probably had 100 calls from parents over the years that were like, I'm concerned about my son, I'm concerned about my daughter. 98 of the 100 were women, were moms. I only spoke with two dads. that's not to say there's anything wrong with mothers who care about the spiritual wholeness of their kids. But what I'm saying is I found that the fathers that I would interact with were constantly being taken out, ultimately by a sense of shame.
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that they didn't know what to do or they weren't living out of the freedom of their belovedness as adopted sons because of different parts of their stories along the way. Right. And so a lot of times that was contempt for themselves. And in the, know, in some other cases it was contempt towards their kids. Either way, I think that's where the spiritual battle is. It's around that definition of who am I. And again, I think it's the power of the spirit in community.
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particularly along this idea of sonship that gets freed up as we bring these questions, as we bring these parts of our stories, as we bring these challenges and these, I call it like a fun house of mirrors where we get a distorted image back of who we are in the community with other men who are on this restorative journey together. We can partner with the spirit to get the reality of our belovedness as adopted sons installed. So I want to continue on that vein and ask both of you guys like,
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I'd love to just hear, again, not this is a formula and I think it's really well said, Greg, from you earlier, like the reality of there is a cooperation with the spirit of what the spirit is doing, right? And it is not this food straps, self-improvement checklist endeavor at all. And yet there's a participation from us, a cooperation and intentionality to consent, I think, to some of that process. When the two of you guys think about the move towards a greater embodying, a greater reception of your sonship,
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what practical things have been helpful. And I say that really, again, wanting to put the big like this game or like, this is not a formula, but from a specific standpoint, as you look over months and years in the long game, like what has been pivotal there for each of you? Yeah, I have a couple of things that come to mind right away for me. One is good, good therapy. And by that, mean seeing a trained therapist who can actually help me back into my story so I can grow an awareness of
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how I experience things and how I interpreted those experiences so that I can open those up for God's kindness to be the key interpretive reality of those stories. I think the other for me, if I'm honest, in terms of spiritual practices is to take on some of the more contemplative streams of our Christian faith because those for me have created a capacity to slow down
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to be quiet, to listen, and to, if you will, soak up or soak in the reality of what it is to be an adopted son. Said differently, it doesn't take my mind out of the equation, but I don't try to think my way to this conviction. I kind of open myself to it through these contemplative practices. So those two things have been really helpful for me. I agree 100 % with what you said, Greg. So I'll go a different direction.
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I those things have been helpful for me. think some other things that have been helpful is probably, I mean, there's a dozen books I've read that have been helpful. know, Fathered by God is one that comes to mind. Yeah, there's several books. I could look at my bookshelf, but we'll do that right now. I think another thing is being in the company of other men who are also on this journey, on this path, trying to embrace their sonship and therefore able to call each other's sonship out and forth. Huge.
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huge. can't overstate that. And then maybe the third thing I'd mention, and this is a little different, is kind of practicing playing, like intentionally. And that's, you know, not necessarily sonship, but it is sonship in the, you know, being able to bless my younger self and younger parts by practicing playing. And so maybe that is me drawing. Maybe that is me
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going fishing, maybe that's me just playing with my kids or being goofy or whatever. There's something about that that helps me embrace the idea of being a son at ease, at rest, at play, and the son of a loving, generous, kind father who is at ease and has space and, you know, sees me as son and enjoys it. I guess what I want to say is that might be one of the holiest things.
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in the whole deal is what you just said. think play is absolutely what a beloved adopted son will do because there's no striving. It's just, there's no being self-conscious. So think that's a great, great example. Yeah, I agree. think that availability to delight feels really possible, right? In the sincere places of play, right? That we're available to that. And kind of your point too, Greg, of which like we are participating, but we're not like,
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generating it, right? Like there is, there is a receiving to that. Like you said, Cody, the goodness of God that is like, Hey, this is the space that is rich, you know, hilarious light, like good in whatever sense that is not of my manufacturing. That does feel like that counters the self-reliance and the performance and the independence that, feels really prevalent in how we live our days. The other thing that I would say around that, I'm glad you brought
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piece of play up Cody is, and this is probably a whole nother podcast episode or conversation that maybe we should have, but there's just fascinating research done by this guy named Jim Wilder around understanding our actual brains and how they function and how that intersects with identity and actually how that intersects with spiritual formation. And he just has this great quote that I think just connects to what you're talking about in terms of the play space that he says that
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Identity is a rather protected brain function. We don't easily allow any other mind to change who we are. Access to establish or change identity is limited to those who are attached to us. Thus our significant attachments, i.e. the people who love us, shape our character. And he says later to the underscore the importance of play, he says, actually fuels and strengthens attachment between people?
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is joy. And so when we're in places where joy is exchanged between us and another human between us and God, that actually strengthens attachment and attachment then is able to shape our identity. so totally what you said, Greg, but play is holy play actually is this very subversive, beautiful way that can shape our identity in the way that joy is exchanged in the way that that can actually help shift our understanding of who we are.
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Absolutely. And I'm really glad you brought up Jim Wilder. Absolutely love the work that he did with Dallas Willard and his wife Jane, and then the books he's written and renovated, kind one of the more recent ones. He actually has a, well, it could be considered a spreadsheet, but basically certain tasks that need to be accomplished at different phases from newborns all the way through. And I think it's also instructive for us here in terms of adopted sons, like
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learning how to recognize and communicate what we need, learning how to be interdependent rather than just, you know, independent. There are certain skills or tasks that you have to accomplish as you're developing that are there. And I see that also in, you know, things like Teresa of Avila has a book called The Interior Castle where she talks about different mansions, if you will, in this castle and the way that we relate to God in these different spaces. And as you grow in
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receiving your belovedness as an adopted child, your relationship with God shifts from being more active to more responsive and receptive, right? To being able to soak in these things. And so there are just a lot of good tools. You know, you can take this as far as you want to take it. And I think recognizing that we're in process and not judging where we are in the process is important too. That's good.
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Especially that the identification of needs, that's a fascinating point to make of children willingly and freely are able to say, need this. And yet, least for me, that ability to state that clearly and honestly feels much harder and so much harder. it's fascinating, right? That we have these 12 step programs that start with that, right? Like it doesn't matter what it is. I realize I'm
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You powerless over x y or z and my life is become unmanageable we don't put those kinds of things on our resumes. That's not the kind of thing we want to identify with and yet that seems to be the way. The gods inviting us into is to say yeah no i don't have this all figured out i can't do this all on my own and i'm actually really freed up the fact that it's not all up to me and that i could be with a group of brothers who are on their.
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own journey towards adopted sonship as well. We get to figure this out together. We get to do this together. We get to play along the way. We get to not take ourselves seriously, but take God seriously. Like these are things that all of this is what makes it easy for me to say yes to an invitation to restoration project, whether it's been participation in the past for the last 10 years or to come on staff is just, I believe that this is the way God works to bring the truth of who we are deeper into who we are and what we experience.
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That's good. And I love that you're even just talking about how we're all on a process. Like none of us have it figured out yet. Nope. You know, I think our tendencies, you know, maybe to feel shame that we haven't gotten as far as we think we're supposed to have gotten in this process. And you know what? We are where we are. You don't have to feel bad about it. Just keep, keep moving forward. Right. Yeah. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it feels like how we view that.
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work in that process reveals some of how we be ourself, right? Like the son has the sense of like, Hey, I'm not the driver of this. My father is like, again, I get to participate, but I'm not the one who is on the hook for this. so I can join, but I don't have to generate it. I think one of the things that I recognized when I was doing youth ministry, right? When you do youth ministry, you're working with youth, go figure, but mostly teenagers, right? And either
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adolescence, you could talk about how long that lasts and when it starts and when it ends and whether it's expanding and how is it expanded. But one thing I noticed when you work with people who are in an adolescent phase of development is it's very easy for adolescents to experience correction or greater awareness as indictment rather than invitation.
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So an example would be, you know, I'm teaching my oldest son how to drive for the first time. And we come up to our first signal light and he's still going 50 miles an hour, about 50 yards out or whatever. And it's one of those slam on the brakes and everybody's just flying back in their seats. And I say to my son, son, and he looks at me goes, you don't think I'm a good driver. I'm like, no, no, no, it's not that I don't think you're a good driver, although you're only going to get better from here. That's true.
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But next time we come to a light, right, like, let's come in more at a slow pace and more of an even anyway. And that you see this all the time. You see this all the time. And I think that happens for ourselves to we do it's hard for us sometimes to imagine the father is kind and patient. And we can be really self indicting or you know, when because when there's things that we see about ourselves in the mirror or through another brother that we don't like.
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It's easy for that to turn quickly to indictment. Another person that talks about this a lot is Curt Thompson, right? He's the Christian psychiatrist who wrote the Anatomy of the Soul and the Soul of Shame and all these really good books about how that spiritual, psychological dynamic happens. so for me, I find middle school and high school kids delightful because they're usually pretty raw and honest about what they're feeling. And they're battling. It's talk about a season where you're battling for identity.
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Yeah, I feel like as adults we get to this space where we're not as honest about where we're at and what's going on. We're hiding it more. Like we're all basically like old middle schoolers. inside, but we're just like, hide it. We learn to hide it. I think probably the invitation here is we don't have to hide it. Part of like moving towards Sonship is like being vulnerable, being with others in where we're at.
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along this journey. Let's be honest though, too, though, that's sonship going back full circle to the earliest part of our conversation when this family adopted their son. They delighted in their son. They celebrated their son. They just poured goodness and kindness towards their son. And he hadn't done anything to credential himself to them. He actually came with special needs and some other things that, you know, anyway.
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I think that's the other thing that we don't think about and that RP I think does a really good job of is naming the goodness, the God given, innate goodness in one another and calling that out. Sometimes that's the most uncomfortable thing. The most difficult thing is for other men to look and say, this is where I see goodness in you that God has put there. Right. And we've kind of doubled down on hiding.
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We think we need accountability, which would we really need is just somebody naming the goodness that's there that we're still blind to. Preach. Yeah. Cause I think in those over time, at least for me, I've been able to borrow their belief, right? To be able to say like, okay, they believe so deeply in my sonship more than me most times. And yet there has been an ability to lean on that, to borrow that.
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slowly enough to be able to like then wonder, can I receive that? Can I believe that myself that that could be true? Yeah, that's so good. Thank you guys for this conversation. This feels personally relevant and Greg, just appreciate your presence, your knowledge that is so much more than just like head knowledge and book knowledge. Like it really, I received that as connected and lived. so thanks for joining our conversation and inviting us into some deeper.
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awareness our own sonship. Absolutely my privilege. And now as the representative oldest man on staff, I feel privileged just to be invited into the conversation. Well, man, we and Cody, we need to get like a some sort of sweet heavyweight belt or trophy or medal or some sort of some sort of cane or wheelchair, whatever. Some fake teeth. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the time today.
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Have a good one. Thanks.