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Manhood often feels like navigating through uncharted territory, but you don't have to walk alone. Join us as we guide a conversation about how to live intentionally so that we can join God in reclaiming the masculine restorative presence he designed us to live out. Laugh, cry, and wonder with us as we explore the ins and outs of manhood together.
Jesse French
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Restorative Man podcast. My name is Jesse French and really excited today for the conversation that I get to have with Doug McKelvey. And for those of you that recognize that name instantly, you're in for a treat and you're excited. And if you don't, you're equally in for a treat. We are excited to have Doug join us here today. so Doug, first of all, thanks for taking some time out of your day and being willing to join us here for a little chat.
Doug McKelvey
Yeah. Well, I appreciate the invitation, Jesse. Yeah.
Jesse French
Yeah.
Doug, just as a, as a starter, tell us where we find you here today that we're having this conversation and then kind of alongside that, give us a little introduction to who you are and yeah, give us a little snippet there.
Doug McKelvey
Sure. Well, I suppose the main reason that we're having this conversation is because of the work I've done over the last 10 years. In 2017, I published the first book in what I didn't know would be a series, but it has become a series with the fourth book just releasing last week. And the concept with the first book was what if we took everyday moments, experiences,
You know, emotions that we go through just various seasons of life and framed those in terms of prayers, even sometimes liturgically structured prayers. But with this idea that God is indeed present every moment, His spirit is here with His children, desiring to use.
every circumstance in our lives, to commune with us in every moment and to use every circumstance, even those that we experience initially as failure or frustration or sorrowful or painful, that those are still things that our loving heavenly father will use for our good and for his glory. That he will use those to shape us. He will work in and around and through us in redeeming
over time, all circumstances. And so that came about because I was working on a novel, a science fiction novel, and had just hit a point of a couple months of not being very disciplined, not getting much done. And I had one morning just thought I really need something that would reorient my heart and mind when I sit down to work so that I don't just.
start answering emails and then seeing what's interesting in the news. And then, you know, next thing I know, four hours have gone by it's lunchtime and I haven't gotten any writing done. So I thought I'm going to write a prayer that would maybe serve that purpose for me that I could pray when I sit down to work on this novel. And just for the poetic challenge of it, I thought, okay, I'll do it as a liturgical structure. I had been introduced years before to the
Book of Common Prayer and, you know, would occasionally delve into the copy of that I had purchased. And I just appreciated the concise and sometimes poetic distillation of scriptural truth that had been filtered through generations for hundreds of years of believers refining those statements and, you know, giving their affirmation that yes, this is indeed speaking truth.
So, you know, I just appreciated that kind of the use of a leader and the people responding and it being this community kind of thing. So I just thought, well, I'm going to write it that way, even though I'm just writing it for myself. I took a few hours and I wrote a liturgy for fiction writers. And I sent that to my friend, Andrew Peterson. He and I were going to be doing a session together at a conference and it was about storytelling.
So I thought maybe this would be a cool way to end the session. And so he read it and responded and said, yeah, I love this, but I wish I had a liturgy for beekeeping and a liturgy for gardening. And he listed something else that was a hobby of his. And it was when I got his response that just immediately the whole idea was there for the book. And I realized, yeah, there is something here that really could serve the church.
in multiple ways. And so I dove into the writing of it then it ended up being more about a year long writing process for volume one. But what I realized really quickly was that as I'm taking these different little bits of life, like a liturgy for the first hearth fire of the season, a liturgy for the changing of a diaper.
a liturgy for those who sleep in tents, you know, for people when they go camping or liturgy for home repairs, just on and on and on that what it was really becoming for me was a process of sorting through, okay, what can I say about this particular subject that is biblically defensible? You know, what things do I think that I, that like are my suppositions?
Or ideas I've just absorbed somewhere. So it was forcing me to parse through, you know, what are the scriptural and theological implications of various things. The other thing or part of the same process was I quickly realized, okay, this is an exercise in saying there are things that I hold to be true as a follower of Jesus, as someone who believes that scripture is the revelation.
that God has given his people. And one of those things that I believe in the abstract is true is that God is moving across history to tell his great story of redemption, that he is enacting that he is bringing his kingdom to bear. that there is a definite place that is leading to the new heavens and the new earth, the new creation, the redemption of all things, the wiping away of all tears.
you know, for the children of God and the marriage supper of the lamb, that that's where our lives are heading. Inevitably we are in this river that is flowing to that sea. Right? So if we believe that theoretically, abstractly, we make that truth claim. Yeah, I believe that's what's happening. Then that means this moment. I mean, this conversation that you and I are having right now sits on that timeline.
It is a part of that movement toward the redemption of all things toward the kingdom of God being manifest here toward his will being done on this earth as it is in heaven, which means, you know, perfectly. So what does that mean? Or, you know, we look at something like the changing of a diaper that just, you know, when you're on dad duty and you have an infant and
You know, you're changing the diaper for the third time in two hours. mean, you know, probably isn't a pleasant thing, but what scripture would tell us is that this is part of our being a living sacrifice. This is part of our act of worship. So how do we unpack that? How does this act of changing a diaper actually touch on the fulfillment of the kingdom of God that's coming to this world?
at some point down the road. So the writing of these prayers in these books became for me an exercise in unpacking, in looking at these different little bits of life and saying, okay, where does this sit on that timeline or where does this sit in that movement? How does this touch on eternity? This moment in time, this activity. So that's probably a longer answer than you needed, but that's kind of the
That's the reason why I'm here. and the fourth book in the series, which is subtitled rites of passage has just released. And that one is more than 150 prayers that are written for young people in that transition from childhood to adulthood. So, you know, roughly ages 16 or 17 to maybe 26, 27, somewhere in there and addressing a lot of the
issues and decisions and temptations and so forth that people face in that time of life. But what we ultimately discovered was that probably 60 % of the prayers anyway are applicable to all of us at whatever stage of life we're in.
Jesse French
Yeah. I'm excited to get to that here in just one second, but thank you for that, that background, Doug, on how this work came to be. think it's just such a wise invitation that you give to say, if we do believe that we find ourselves in this restorative work of God, that that means the particularity of our moments matter. And so I think it's such a good and needed invitation to say, look on the macro, massive theological
you know, level of God's restorative work that has implications to the micro of, you know, sleeping in a tent or changing the diaper. and so I think that I'm really grateful for your willingness and your ability to pair both of those things and to say, look, they are connected. think it is needed. And I think probably is some of the reason that that work has resonated so much. can remember when I, read the first volume and came across it, it felt like this, I like,
goldmine discovery of just, man, like the words and the thoughtfulness in which those liturgies were crafted and the connection to the everyday, just, felt like a new language of awareness and a new language of, invitation into the Holy that was, yeah, so needed. I do want to ask Doug, like, what was your origins story with liturgies, with the liturgical practice? Did you grow up, you know, was that, was that a central part of your practice growing up? Like how did the crafting of liturgy or the participation in liturgy?
How has that taken root in your life?
Doug McKelvey
I did not grow up in a tradition that would be considered liturgical, quite the opposite, much more emphasis on spontaneity as a ⁓ hallmark of something being genuine, probably. So it was a long path through which I came to an appreciation of liturgies as being something that can transmit truth that can give us.
the words to pray, to join our heart to in the same way we might to ⁓ a worship or a praise song or a hymn that's sung in our church, right? That it's not that we're spontaneously making up words and yet we have no problem making those words our own. You know, at least on a, on a good Sunday morning anyway, when we're in a place emotionally where our heart might be engaged there and our
And our thoughts that, we appreciate the time and effort and prayer and wrestling that someone who had worked to hone this craft of putting words together and articulating ideas in a poetic and memorable and beautiful way. And, you know, I think it's exactly the same with prayers that have been written throughout the history of the church by different people. And I would say.
You know, we can start with the Lord's prayer when his followers asked him teach us to pray and he gave them this beautiful prayer that is so deep. You know, it's like the contents are spring loaded. have no idea as you enter into that, the implications of each of those, you know, little lines of what he's given us. so I think we have that model starting with Jesus himself and
you know, continuing through the early history of the church and the early Celtic Christians after Patrick, you know, evangelized the druidic pagan culture on the Emerald Isle. They adopted this practice of writing prayers for everyday moments, you know, a prayer for the milking of the cows, for the covering of the coals in the hearth fire at night and so forth. So I didn't realize that when I wrote the first book, but
came across collections of those Celtic prayers at some point and realized, okay, this is not a new thing. All we're doing is reintroducing to the church today, a practice that had a richness to it that serve people well in the body of Christ in previous times and places. and I'm sure that some of the very liturgical traditions like the Eastern Orthodox tradition would probably, you know,
Might even take a little offense at that and say, no, we never lost it. We've, yeah, that's continued for thousands of years with us. But, so I did not come from that kind of tradition, but over the years, starting when I was in college, I really came to begin to appreciate the book of common prayer in particular, just because it was so much more trustworthy.
Jesse French
It's continued on.
Doug McKelvey
And scripturally rooted than a lot of what I was exposed to growing up and to the circles that I was in college. And a lot of those things had just left me with confusion where at a certain point the ideas that I had kind of constructed in my head along the way growing up, theologically just became unworkable. just saw, this is clearly not right.
And there are so many opposing things being taught to me from the various pulpits around me that I just kind of have to shut it out because I know a lot of it's wrong. I don't know what's right. I don't know how to evaluate it. I just didn't have a real biblical framework. But during that time I encountered the book of common prayer. And so that was just a little thread of a lifeline of, okay, there are somewhere there are people doing this a little differently. Yeah.
Jesse French
Yeah.
Doug McKelvey
So that's where my appreciation for and openness to those more formal liturgical kind of prayers and services began. was many years, decades before I found myself in a church that did organize their services around, you know, a more ancient and rooted.
kind of liturgical practice like that, where some of the prayers that we're praying are ones that are from hundreds of years ago, you know, that for generations believers have prayed worldwide. But yeah, so the incident that I recounted earlier about the writing the liturgy for fiction writers really was the beginning entry point for me into this practice of what would it look like to write prayers that many of them are liturgically structured.
And at that point I would say, as I went through the year of writing those prayers, I could see, well, a lot of things made sense in hindsight of the path that brought me to that point. There had been a lot of what felt like meandering, a lot of what felt like dead ends and failures as I practiced different vocations for a certain period of time. And then, you know, for different reasons that went away such as
In the early nineties, I started doing songwriting in Nashville. And that was my primary vocation for more than a decade. And it seemed like, okay, this is the path I'm going to be able to provide for my family. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to steadily build up my catalog and the value of that. And then someday that'll be the retirement for my wife and I, can sell those copyrights. And, know, it seemed like a viable path. It was on an upward trajectory.
But then the MP3 thing hit Napster. People started, stopped, you know, it didn't take long before 90 % of music people were acquiring. They weren't paying for. And my income came exclusively from the royalties, you know, on the sales of, of CDs. Well, that was the bulk of it. There was a little bit that came from radio play or whatever, but that.
You know, that was just a smaller percentage of what I was making. within two years, my income from songwriting royalties had dropped to 25 % of what it had been. And I was still getting, you know, the same number of cuts. It just was people weren't paying for the music they listened to anymore. And so, you know, that just was a dead end. was like, I have.
three young kids at that point. I don't think the recording industry is going to get ahead of this. So I'm going to have to change. I'm going to have to make a move and figure out something else to do vocationally. I did that. there were, so there were several steps of doing different things that none of them, I mean, all of them seemed promising, you know, up to a certain point and then just evaporated, leaving me confused. And so I found myself in a place as I was approaching
50 years old, which I was driving for Uber and Lyft late at night in Nashville, you know, driving drunk people around. And I was doing setup and janitorial work for my church, just trying not to go into debt faster on a home equity line. Right. wasn't, I wasn't making enough to cover everything I needed to cover two kids in college, two kids getting married, you know, it was just a,
a crazy time, but I was trying to hustle for work to do what I could, but it was a dark valley for me for about five years there. Because to reach that point in life, having felt like, okay, I had the skill to do these various things. And yet for different reasons, none of these paths paid off in the ways that I, you know, anticipated by my definitions of success.
And so I had to ask myself the question, well, okay, what if this is what the rest of my life looks like? If I'm just hustling to try to pay the electric bill every month and the mortgage and are God's promises any less true? Has he somehow failed me? Is there something he owes me that he hasn't come through on? And you know, when I asked it that way, the obvious answer was no. I mean, my eternity is still secure.
There's nothing going on here that in any way threatens that. I'm still his child. You know, he is still somehow working in me and through me as I yield my heart to him. So, you know, let me not become bitter and, and demand that, you didn't do what I wanted you to in the way, you know, so you've failed me. It's like, no, there's something in my heart.
that needs to, so I had to kind of come to a place of making peace with that. But then the next question was, okay, so if that's the case, then what does stewardship of the gifts that God has given me to steward mean? What does that look like? I mean, I had spent a lot of years chasing ideas that I thought would be commercially successful and they hadn't worked out. So then the question became, well, what do I do like with the stories?
that I'm passionate about writing that I feel like I've maybe been uniquely gifted to write. You know, am I willing to put the time, the discipline into doing those even though I can't control whether they're ever published, whether they ever sell anything if they are published, you know, am I willing just to look at the community around me that I'm a part of and say, okay, I have been placed in these communities. What can I create that would serve them?
Whether it expands beyond that to other people or not, you know, I can probably create things that would serve the people around me. And so that was the season that I was in when I began writing the prayers for every moment, wholly, because there was a community I was a part of that had meant much to me that had been very encouraging to me as a writer. And I was.
Pretty sure once I had the idea for these prayers that they would be meaningful to that community. I didn't know if it would go beyond that, but I knew, you know, I was 98 % sure that those people would get it and would be like, yeah, we'll, we'll use these. now to finally get back around to answering your question. As I went through the process of writing the prayers for volume one,
And the form began to coalesce and take shape of, this is going to be the stylistically what these are. I realized, if I had not spent 12 years learning the craft of being a song lyricist. Right. And if I had not spent the years learning to do screenwriting, where when you write a script, you have to say maximum amount in a
space, you have to create that kind of spring loaded image. So you can't use a paragraph to describe a scene, you know, the physical setting that someone walks into. you have one sentence at best to suggest everything that then the set designer and the director is going to expand in their mind into the vision that you had in your head. Right? So it's, it's this compression of meaning.
that then expands for the reader. So learning. So I realized if I had not gone down those paths and spent the time learning those crafts that ultimately felt to me like failures, then I would not have been able to write these prayers in this way. And so, I mean, I think I don't expect in this life for everything to make sense. Right. I've lived long enough to know that I can trust.
my creator, that there will come a time when any questions that need to be answered eternally will be answered. And I suspect that for most of those, they're the wrong category of questions. And it will just be the presence of Jesus himself. The immediate presence of Jesus is going to be the answer to the questions we didn't even know were the ones we were asking.
In this life, all of the confusing perplexing things that cause a sorrow, grief, vexation. I used to think that, you know, pretty quickly, all of those were going to make sense that God was going to, well, this happens so that you would meet some person and witness to them. that, you know, so I was always looking for those kinds of connections and never finding them. Things would never work out the way I expected, but there are those moments of grace of.
come to find out where God does even in this life, sometimes let us get a glimpse of something like that. I feel like in my own history and with the writing of the Every Moment Holy books, that as I was in the middle of that process that I was, you know, my eyes were opened a bit to see that, I couldn't have picked the career path that would prepare me to do what might be, you know, my most significant life work in terms of.
You know, the service that it provides to other people, but there actually is a path there. And those different way points were important. and there w there was also the importance of the work that needed to happen in my heart to, those five years of just feeling like I've failed, nothing's worked out. What's the point. And, know, I think that made me poor in spirit and I don't think I could have written a lot of these prayers.
Like a liturgy for those fearing failure or a liturgy for nights and days of doubt, those kinds of things. If I wasn't actually in those seasons at the time.
Jesse French
Absolutely. And I think that's hearing that part of the story is that's so helpful and just makes the context that much more, I think helpful and makes sense because I think there's that, that resonance of your words are there's a sincerity and honesty to them that is easily recognizable. And so to hear that they were born out of a time period where of challenge and some struggle. I would say,
you know, the, the engagement of some of the mundane, right? Of like, Hey, here I am, you know, I'm an Uber right now. And that only lends to the, I think, to the credibility of, those words, in addition to what you're saying around the, you know, the, practical skills of songwriting and screenwriting. Man, Doug, thanks for, for sharing that, that background. That's, yeah, it makes sense.