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Begin Again is for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Host Winston Faircloth — spiritual director, daily poet, and fellow traveler — brings honest conversation, personal story, and original poetry to the journey of remembering, releasing, and returning to who God created you to be. Visit www.myreuniontour.com for more resources.
Welcome to begin again. If you're new here, this is the recognized movement of my reunion tour, a faith based journey for people in the second half of life who since the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Last conversation, I told you the story behind the vow I've been circling all season, where it came from, what it cost me to finally see it, and a second quieter layer underneath it. A distrust of my own inner knowing that I've carried in silence for a very long time. If you've not yet heard that episode, you don't need it to follow this one, but I'd invite you to go back to it when you can because everything to today builds on what got named there.
Winston Faircloth:Today, we're not going back to where the bowel came from. We're going to look directly at what it built and what it cost because it did both. And this movement asks us to be honest about both at the same time. So I'd like to begin with the poem. This poem is called Center.
Winston Faircloth:It's from day five ninety eight. Sometimes we go from one extreme to another. All or nothing thinking dominates our days. We find ourselves far away from the dreamland of our youth, wondering how we got here with a burning desire to return. Perhaps life is just a series of small decisions and turns.
Winston Faircloth:Our desire to know the future leaves us spinning and confused. Yet within all of us is an unmet restlessness, which will not be quenched with our hands and acts. Only through our slowing will a still small voice be heard, an invitation so enduring, a reunion awaits to call us home. Like a pendulum returning from one side to the other, We may stray, we may seek, but we will always return to center. Like a pendulum, eventually, we all return to center, not because we've arrived somewhere new, but because something in us is always finding its way back to what was true before we built anything to protect it.
Winston Faircloth:For most of this movement, I've been talking to you about a vow. Today, I wanna introduce you, really introduce you to the part of me that carried that vow out into the world and never once put it down. In the tradition Richard Rohr writes from, there's a name for this part of us. He calls it the loyal soldier. You've already met him this season.
Winston Faircloth:He showed up at episode one long before I had language for him. I named him again as a coping mechanism in episode six and the vow that deployed him. Today, we get to meet him directly. Before I tell you what this vow cost me, I wanna do something I didn't always do well in the early years of this inner journey, this inner work. I wanna honor the soldier because here's what's true, and I don't want to rush past it.
Winston Faircloth:This vow of self sufficiency built real things. It wasn't a delusion. It wasn't a lie I told myself. For over thirty, forty years, it produced a career that went up into the right. It produced what I've called the golden touch, the ability to walk into the room with a problem and walk out with a plan.
Winston Faircloth:It produced reliability. People could count on me. I delivered. Yet the loyal soldier is the part of us who fought and won battles of the first half of life, and mine won a lot of battles. He kept promises.
Winston Faircloth:He provided. He built things that mattered, whether it was teams, ventures, and a track record I'm not embarrassed by. Perhaps you've been carrying your own version of this. If some part of you has been standing guard for years doing exactly what you trained it to do, I want you to hear this before you hear anything else. That part of you is not a billing of villain of this story.
Winston Faircloth:It never was. It was doing what it believed with everything in it needed to to be done to keep you safe. Or is clear about this, and I'd like to be equally clear. The invitation is not to conquer the loyal soldier. It's not to shame, renounce, or pretend it wasn't necessary.
Winston Faircloth:He was necessary. Some of you are alive today literally or in every way that matters because part of you stood at that post and did not move. So before we go one sentence further, I want to say it plainly. Thank you. Thank you.
Winston Faircloth:Thank you. Because whatever your loyal soldier built and whatever form he took, thank you. That gratitude is not the end of the conversation. It is the only honest place to begin it. Here's what standing guard for fifty years cost even when the guard is doing exactly what he was trained to do.
Winston Faircloth:He doesn't just keep danger out. He keeps almost everything out. I wanna tell you about a version of my life that never quite got to happen. It's not dramatic. It's not tragedy, just quieter than the one I lived.
Winston Faircloth:There's a version of me who let people close before he had anything proven to them, who didn't need to be needed in order to feel safe in a room, who could sit in silence with someone he loved without having the need to fix, produce, or perform his way out of it. There's a version of me whose inner knowing, the same knowing I overrode when I was young, the same knowing I told you about last episode, got to stay online, got to be trusted early and often instead of silenced and then slowly, carefully relearned decades later. I'm not describing regret. I wanna be careful here because it'd be easy to turn this into grief for a life I didn't get to live, and that's not quite it. What I'm describing is more like a room in a house that never got used, not because the house burned down, but because the door stayed locked for so long, I forgot it was there.
Winston Faircloth:The vow of self sufficiency didn't just protect me from being hurt again. It protected me from being fully known because being fully known requires exactly what thou was built to prevent, letting someone see you before they've earned it, trusting an inner voice you've already decided couldn't be trusted, Being present in a body you'd spent decades treating as something to manage versus somewhere to live. That's the cost. It's not a catastrophe. It's just absence.
Winston Faircloth:Quiet, cumulative absence of a version of me who might have shown up sooner if the door had opened earlier. I said something back in episode two that I wanna bring up here because I think it's the theological center of everything we've been building towards so far this season. A vow made in fear, even one that produces good things is still a prison, and I believe that's true. And yet I wanna add something to that today. That prison was also a shelter.
Winston Faircloth:Both of these things are true at the same time, and I think most of us only know how to hold one of them. We either fiercely defend a vow, insist it was all necessary, all good, nothing to look at too closely, or we let it crush us, turn the whole thing into evidence that we're broken, defective, or something to be ashamed of. Counting the cost is a different posture than either of those. It doesn't defend. It doesn't collapse.
Winston Faircloth:It simply tells the truth. This kept me safe, and this kept me small. This built real things, and this cost me real things, both at the same time without needing to resolve the tension into a simplified verdict. I think this is close to what scripture means when it talks about counting the cost before building a tower, not as a warning to avoid building, but as an invitation to build with our eyes open, to know exactly what a thing costs and to choose it or release it with full information instead of denial. The loyal soldier is not guilty, but he's not innocent either, not in the way that word usually means.
Winston Faircloth:The loyal soldier did what he knew how to do with what he had for as long as he could, and now the assignment is changing, not because he failed, but because the war he was trained for has ended and a different kind of life is asking to begin. There's no shame in that. That's just an honest accounting. And that honest accounting, strange as it sounds, is where relief emerges. I've been talking to you about my own loyal soldier, but I didn't record this episode just to tell you about mine.
Winston Faircloth:I built this episode because I suspect you may know one too. Let me describe a few. See if you recognize yourself in any of these. The guarded one. Some of you have a loyal soldier who protects through distance.
Winston Faircloth:You're the reliable one, the one people call when something's falling apart because you always show up, always deliver, always have it together, and that has made you the strongest presence in a lot of rooms. But here's a question I ask you to sit with. When was the last time you let someone else be the strong one? When was the last time you let yourself lean on someone else instead of always being the one who's leaned on? Your soldier made you dependable.
Winston Faircloth:He may have also made it nearly impossible for anyone to truly get to know the person underneath the dependability, the self contained one. Some of you have a loyal soldier who protects through control. You built a career, maybe a whole life around the one who figures it out. You delegate task. You're good at that.
Winston Faircloth:But if you're honest, you rarely delegate trust. You keep a hand on the wheel even after you've told everyone else you've let go of it. Your soldier has built real competence, real results, a track record you're not embarrassed by or shouldn't be. But he may have also made it nearly impossible to let someone else help actually reach you, to receive and not just give. The armored one.
Winston Faircloth:Some of you have a loyal soldier who protects through the body. Maybe it's weight. Maybe it's exhaustion or busyness or some other way of using your body or your absence of it to keep people at a manageable distance. I understand this one from the inside. I've lived it.
Winston Faircloth:Your soldier gives you a kind of safety, a reason not to be looked at too closely. But he may also have made presence itself nearly impossible. Actually being in the room undefended with someone who loves you, the achiever who arrived. Some of you have a loyal soldier who protects through accomplishment. You built what you said you'd built, the career, the recognition, the security.
Winston Faircloth:You arrived, and somewhere in the arriving, you noticed a hollowness you're not sure you're allowed to name because from the outside, everything looks fine. Your soldier gave you a resume, the forward motion, a sense of a life well spent. He also may have made it nearly impossible to rest without guilt following close behind to have a ordinary unproductive afternoon with the people you love for absolutely no reason at all. Four portraits. Perhaps you see yourself in one, in pieces of several, or in something none of them quite mean.
Winston Faircloth:That's fine. The point isn't categorizing these. The point is the question beneath all four. That question is, what has your loyal soldier been protecting you from, and what has the production cost you? What has your loyal soldier been protecting you from, and what has that protection cost you?
Winston Faircloth:So I would like to close with the poem. This one's called scene. It's from day six fifty three. A favorite game of hide and seek may be employed as adults seeking invisibility. We have our past skeletons that haunt and stir, pushing us to the shadows where shame invites us to hide.
Winston Faircloth:Yet if only we could see ourselves the way you see us, those haunts would vaporize. We would no longer run. We would no longer hide. Wounds healed can help others. We are beloved, cherished, known, especially seen.
Winston Faircloth:For nearly fifty years, part of me was very good at hiding behind competence, behind control, behind a body I used as a wall instead of a home, behind everything I built, every reason I stayed too busy to be found. What this poem tells me and what I wanna share with you is that the hiding was never gonna be the last word because you're already seen, beloved, cherished, known. Not once you've earned it by finally becoming brave enough to step out of the shadows, now already, while you're still standing at that door deciding whether to open it. So here's the question I want you to carry into the next week. What has the loyal soldier been standing in front of, and what might be on the other side of that door?
Winston Faircloth:What has your loyal soldier been standing in front of, and what might be on the other side of that door? Don't rush it. Sit with this for a few days. If today's conversation has stirred a desire in you to do this work, I'd love to walk that path with you. If you're ready to begin, visit myreuniontour.com or review the show notes for resources, including a link to schedule a conversation with me.
Winston Faircloth:Just a honest conversation about where you are and whether this is the right season for you to begin. And thanks for listening to the Begin Again podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, Audible, Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, anywhere you listen to search for the term begin again with Winston Faircloth on your favorite podcast streaming app. And if today's conversation reminded you of someone who's been quietly carrying the cost of a promise they made to themselves a long time ago, make sure to share this episode with them. I'm Winston Faircloth, and you're right where you're supposed to be.