AI Website GeneratorI remember listening to Nate Larkin of Samson Society talking about recovery and if you are doing recovery work to be a better person then you’ve missed the point. His statement caused some concern for the attendees at the retreat that it was spoken at. It followed him into a podcast where he was asked to explain himself. It is not an easy statement to digest as it brings our performance firmly into view and questions our motivations in a way that wasn’t appreciated. The idea of not being better as a man is hard to comprehend. Why wouldn’t we want to be better men? How is being a better man missing the point of recovery? If I’m not trying to become a better man than what am I doing? There are a lot of questions that come up thinking about that statement, which I'm sure was exactly why Nate said it.
Though it was spoken a year or two ago now it has resonated with me and sat in the back of my mind. As a mentor has often said to me, the “what” is not nearly as important as the “why”. Why we do things tells us far more about the importance in our life than what we are actually doing. We can easily do our devotions, make time for prayer, and participate in our church and have it be quite useless for us if done for the wrong reasons. In some cases we would be better off not doing those very Godly things simply because we are doing them to make up for other perceived shortcomings. We aren’t doing them because we want to become more Christ-like and/or closer to God; we are doing them because we are trying to assuage shame or guilt. We are box ticking in an effort to tip the spiritual scales in our favour and are bringing us back to attempting to be better.
Being better is highly subjective and rather relative. In a safety-sensitive workplace the slogan is often “be safer”. Well what does that actually mean? In most cases it means absolutely nothing, implies nothing, and entails nothing. It’s simply a slogan designed to give the appearance of “being safer” in the workplace. Until there is a plan in place, an awareness piece, and some sort of deliberate action actually happening designed to make the workplace safer it remains a slogan, nothing more. So to is “being a better man”. What does that mean to you? How do you plan to “become better”? And if you enacted that plan how would you measure the results? Who creates the performance scale that you are measuring yourself against? Being better is just a code word for trying harder to be more like a Pharisee. I resemble(d) the Pharisees quite a bit, so focused on external processes and performance that I failed to realize how dark I was inside. My whitewashed tomb was exactly that, externally kept together, inside full of rotting bones. All in an attempt to be better while missing the whole becoming better.
If you can define what being better actually means to you as an individual, what it entails, and how you plan to take steps to achieve that, then it may actually have some significance and importance to you. Again, why we do something is so important compared to what we are actually doing. If being better is entirely about your performance as a man than I entirely agree with Nate. It boils down to just white-knuckling harder and striving for a more Godly-looking life. But that is entirely about self and appearance, and very little about actually making a change in your heart, your thinking, and how you do life without even getting to the fact that we are called to serve others. What if being better means becoming more and more dependant on God to sustain you in your daily life, to draw you closer to Him, and to provide the peace of mind that is such a rare commodity amongst men? Now we are talking a being better that I can agree with. We don’t entirely ditch the performance piece, but rather turn it into a sanctification and dependence piece. In that, I definitely do want to be better. Our performance does still matter and I don’t want to detract from that, without sobriety there is no recovery. Sobriety is a performance piece, but building on that performance into actual life change is recovery.
Back to being better and the tension within the statement Nate made. Being better is missing the point, even though “being better” is actually what we are doing. But without a plan to do so, awareness of the obstacles in our way, and a support network to aide in living the life you want to live, it remains a deceptive slogan that traps us in our performance all while convincing us that we are doing the right thing.
Much has been said lately over the matter of whether or not our current society is healthy. Much has also been said about diversity and racism in Western culture. The point of this article is not to address either of those concerns directly, but focus on how the individual shows up in society and where our health comes from.
Does a healthy man make for a healthy society? Or, is it a healthy society that produces a healthy man? As a Coach who generally works one on one my tendency would naturally fall towards the former, and I believe it to be true. I do think that a society does produce a certain kind of person based on societal norms, but the power to change those norms still resides within the individual. However, I’ll try not to get into circular logic here, mob mentality does have the ability to shift norms rapidly within an individual when the pressure to fit in overwhelms personal consciences.
Anyway, my point here will simply be this: a healthy man produces a healthy family, which aids to produce a healthy church, a healthy community, and those produce a healthy society. I am a proponent of individual responsibility no matter how the society behaves. It takes integrity to stick to ones morals and values and live them out as such. This is generally not easy and takes a few like-minded individuals to walk alongside in order to let those values play out.
If we let society dictate what our morals and virtues are, as we see currently to a certain extent, the popular movement sways all sorts of individuals and corporations. We have never seen such a predominance of corporate virtue signalling as we do now, so how does the individual live within those climates while not letting go of what they hold to be true and worth living for.
Again, my belief on why individual responsibility is so important in order to live a life of integrity is because I believe that if we continue with whatever societal narrative is popular in the given moment, we, I, will always feel like we are standing on shifting sand instead granite. Cultural norms shift so quickly these days that it falls to the individual to hold fast to what is important in their life and how they want to live that out.
Coaching is a means to being able to be supported in doing such, learning what values are important in our lives and why, finding ways to support those values in our daily lives, and incorporating them into how we show up with our families. Because, after-all, a healthy man produces a healthy family, produces a healthy church, etc. I do not think if we try to reform society we will end up with healthy men, it starts with us.
I write this not as a father, but as a son looking to my father. I also write this as a son looking to my Father. My earthly father and my heavenly Father have had profound impact on my life, and continue to do so. The impact now as an adult comes much more from my heavenly Father than my earthly. There is a shifting in the Christian walk, especially from a recovery sense, as we understand the impact our earthly fathers have had on us, and start embracing the impact our Heavenly Father has and will continue to.
The family’s that we grow up in shape our lives and how we handle life. Which makes logical sense, we spend most of our childhood in and around our families of origin so they would have profound impact on how we see life. At some point a shift needs to take place though, as the young boy matures into a young man, and into adulthood. Dependence shifts to independence and the influence on our lives changes.
More often than not, how we see our heavenly Father is through the same lens we see our earthly father until something splits the two apart. There are a number of reasons why that split might happen, but happen it must. There are a number of attributes, that no matter how amazing your earthly father was, that are inappropriate to ascribe to our heavenly Father. An exercise around the attributes we ascribe to each provides the necessary information to make the change. What attributes do we ascribe to our earthly father, and are we aware of us transferring them onto God? It’s not an easy thing to do, but once done honestly provides a platform to grow into our heavenly Father’s love in a way that allows our relationship to grow immensely.
This is key to embracing our identity in Christ. It’s tough to dwell on the promises of God, when we think that God is a workaholic, rage-aholic, abusive, or perhaps just generally uninterested in us. In other words, if our earthly fathers have fallen short of the mark, and they all will, it’s counterproductive to our own sense of self if we continue to let how we see them, be the same way we see God. It’s really hard to approach God, asking for mercy and grace or help in a time of need, when we don’t really believe He cares about as anyway. Or, perhaps we think He loves us, but is too busy taking care of everything else in the world to want to spend some time with us.
How heart breaking that must be for Him, to see us look at Him in a way that makes Him unapproachable or not dependable or uninterested in His creation.
Speaking the very word, shame, is enough to evoke shame in many of us. People who understand the word and the affect on our lives will experience shame just listening or hearing about shame, the word itself bringing up feelings of it. So, before I dive any further into this, since it comes up in me as well, I need to take a moment and put shame outside of me, stick it in the corner for a bit so I can write clearly.
Brené Brown talks about embarrassment, humiliation, and shame as three distinct things needing their own definition. Embarrassment being that feeling of discomfort that doesn’t last long, we know that we are not alone in experiencing it or whatever caused the feeling. Humiliation being very similar to shame except that we don’t believe we deserve the humiliation we are experiencing where in shame we do believe we deserve it. Shame, of course, being that feeling that not only may we have done something bad or wrong, that we ourselves, are bad or wrong.
I was thinking this over today and some experiences in my life where I have experienced one or all three of those feelings during the same event. While trying to work though a scenario in my head I thought about how confidence plays a factor between humiliation and shame. There are certainly things I’ve done in my life that depending on whom I’m around when thinking about the event either brings embarrassment or shame. The difference between those two feelings is how confident in myself I feel around the different people.
One group will bring up embarrassment and some humiliation, while the same event in front of others goes straight to shame. When I’m humiliated it’s because I don’t feel that I deserve it, in shame I do.
This is speculation on my part here, but it seems so obvious right now that I’m curious how others would relate to what I’m speculating on. How I see myself in relation to others can easily dictate whether I feel humiliated or shamed. The goal then would be to strive towards being comfortable with who I am regardless of the circumstance and who is around.
With that being said, when shame is present, internalizing the feeling of embarrassment or humiliation, it needs to be brought into the light. Shame dies in the light. Sharing in a safe spot is critical to eroding the power shame has over us. Therapist, coach, mentor, Silas, close friend, or support group are all safe places to share.
Shame will thrive without those support pieces in place and being utilized
This is a word that society at large likes to use. But it’s only used in the sense that everyone else needs to exercise it. The individual never takes responsibility for anything that happens in their life. We have learned to live in and operate out of a mode that it is always someone else’s fault, especially the government’s. In our current timeframe it is amazing just how much we are now pleading with that same government to take care of us and we blindly follow whatever directive comes our way. But, that’s a rabbit trail I will attempt to not go down in these insights.
What I fear for myself, and for you the reader, is that we get used to the idea that there will always be someone else to take care of us, and if anything goes sidewise it is always their fault. My fear is that we are losing the ability to take responsibility for our own lives. Boundaries, accountability, meetings, and whatever other habit you want to instil in your life is still ultimately up to you. It’s great when an accountability partner calls you because they pick up something on your internet filter, or they hear something in your voice that says you aren’t telling the whole story, but the onus still comes back to the individual. Our personal accountability is only as strong as the level of responsibility we are willing to take for ourselves. Now, I'm not saying you can do this journey on your own because you can't, we desperately need good community if we want to grow our lives in integrity and authenticity.
Bear with me on this one, I’ll try and play it out in a way that makes sense of my own story. No matter how I was raised, or the things that happened to me in my life that led to a recovery journey, I still have to walk that journey out and take ownership of the things I’ve done. There may be a hundred contributing factors that led to the choices I made, I am still the one who made those choices. Where harms have occurred because of those choices I have to take ownership. Imagine going to someone to own something you did to them, and your apology is along the lines of “I’m sorry I stole a loaf of bread from your bakery, it was because someone stole my bike twenty years ago.” How would the person who you stole the loaf from respond? Probably a long the lines of “I don’t care why you stole the loaf of bread, you still stole the loaf of bread from me and you owe me such and such.”
The point I’m making here, and probably not that well, is that we, me really, are responsible for our actions. No matter the contributing factors and end results, we need to own our crap. And this is really hard. It’s painful to examine my life and see the damage I’ve caused by my selfish actions. It’s even more painful to go and take ownership of those harms and admit wrongdoing and accept repercussions. And yet, it is freeing to admit my mistakes, to learn and accept that I can make mistakes and own them, and live in a sense of freedom that avoiding any responsibility always denies.
It started for me reading a simple nightly devotion that talked about blame. No matter how much was done to me, if I live in a life of blame I will always be stuck in that life.
Blame never heals self.
What is it that motivates us to make change in our lives? Often we start projects ambitiously believing in whatever it is we are embarking upon. Then, as we realize that maybe this is going to take longer than we expect, or involve far more problem solving than anticipated, our interest states to wane and we abandon yet another
“life change” project.
This is unfortunately far too familiar a situation for me. Something piques my curiosity and I charge headlong into a new interest. Sometimes my interest stays strong for a while, sometimes it quickly disappears and I wonder why I was so charged up about this new idea or project. If I take the time to understand what first got me interested in the project I can figure out what was really going on for me. Second, if I take the time to understand what change I was really trying to make in my life and what was really driving it, I begin to understand why my interest lasted as long or as short as it did.
I’ve learned, and had it beat into my thick head by caring friends, that motivation really is everything. Why I do the things I do, and to what purpose, really is the difference between sticking with something or letting it go.
Take my time in the mountains for example. In the past it was something to do, something I could say that I’ve done. So really it was about trying to craft an image or identity based on the things I could say that I’ve done. Box ticking is a strong character defect for me. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with creating a task list and then checking the items off. Where it leads me down a prideful path is when I crave ticking the box to say I’ve done something, instead of actually focusing on what I’m doing, being present in the moment, and why I’m doing what I’m doing.
So, with that in mind, I’ve come to learn that my time in the mountains seeking healthy recreation is about recharging, spending time away from the busyness of connected life and city life. I meet God in the mountains because I take the time to actually want to meet Him and be open to Him. Creation has a powerful way of doing that to me. Even though the city still is Creation, it’s man-made buildings and roads pale in comparison to a voice spoken created wilderness. So, motivation is everything yet again. Do I go to the mountains to say that I’ve been to the mountains, or do I go there to meet my Maker and be renewed to face the day when I come home?
Motivation is everything.
Recently I saw this quote on someone’s profile: “Trust no one. The devil was an angel at one time”
Initially I thought, what a weird thing to say. The more I thought about it, I started envisioning talking to a group of people about that statement. It soon became apparent that the statement was an incredible definition on how to become isolated. As a believer, it’s my inherent belief that we will all let someone done at some point in time, probably more often than we/I would like to admit.
Trust is a difficult thing. Often you hear the line, “trust, but verify”, which is only a partial trust. Trust no one, means putting up a wall, pushing people away, and attempting to live a life dependant on no one. There is a security in that; there is insulation from disappointment, but ultimately it will only lead to further feelings of alone, and isolation.
It’s been said that often an alcoholic drinks themselves to death alone in their basement. It happens because that’s the only place they feel safe enough to not be triggered, not get angry, not feel emotion, or feel like they don’t belong, the list goes on. But beneath the hiding from life, isolation is sitting and waiting and the only available resource to help with that feeling is the drink.
Trust involves risk. I will be let down by trusting others. I will let myself down even more, if I don’t trust anyone or myself. I will let others down who trust in me. It’s in that trust though that we can also experience joy, connectedness, and contentment. Trust is built through conflict resolved, through disappointments acknowledged, community is built.
The devil may have been an angel once, but he’s been angry, unhappy, and hell-bent ever since.
I didn’t realize that I needed to find a safe place to call home until I realized I’d found a safe place to call home. It wasn’t in the place that you’d expect and it wasn’t in the way that I ever thought it would be. The first couple of church small groups I attended weren’t those places, but I didn’t know what I needed yet when I attended them. Like far too many small groups, they sputtered out before they got going. The danger of a church small group and sharing vulnerably is that by doing so you may just become next week’s prayer request church-wide. It should never be this way, but often we don’t see it coming or believe that it’s happening. After all, isn’t praying for our fellow believers encouraged? To build one another up in love by praying for them?
There is some cynicism there, which I know is a choice. It’s easy for me to be cynical about the church, so I constantly remind myself that Jesus loved the church, and that we, the church, are His bride. Therefore, my cynicism needs to be checked. The community that I found within the broader community was a place for men to share openly and honestly without fear of judgement. It’s a strange place for men to be. It’s a place where we admit we aren’t worldly men anymore. But that takes time. We, I, walk in attempting to prove that we don’t need to be there, that we are just gathering some information, and we keep the mask on pretending to be someone we aren’t.
Once I stopped pretending I had it all together, it was freeing to admit that I didn’t. Realistically, and this took far more time than I’d like to admit, I’ve hardly ever had it all together, I just carried on with the illusion that I did. It was in admitting my powerlessness and a disaster of a life, that I starting feeling at home. I found acceptance. I found affirmation. Those two things continue to underpin most of my life. When I’m feeling full of both, life is pretty awesome, thank you Lord! When those aren’t, God where are you, what are you doing to me?
Words I’ve heard repeated many times in that room I call my church now, is that we may not often hear from God directly, but we sure hear His voice often through the mouths of our fellow men, friends on a common path. .
2020 was the year the world discovered fear. It’s been a while since we have been this scared and faced the reality that our lives are far more fragile than we would like to believe. We faced government restrictions and lock-downs, border closures, and business failures. We couldn’t see friends, even family if they didn’t live in the same house. We had to face the constant barrage of news media inflicting as much fear on us as they could. How many times did we hear “at least x many people have died”? It was almost as if the media couldn’t contain their perverse sense of joy over how many people were dying. Infinite news stories ahead! I often wondered what they would report about when the pandemic was no longer a pandemic, but then knew that there is always something that can be inflated to instil fear and the reminder that we are not in control.
Control is a hallmark of the struggle in recovery. How do we let go of all the things we foolishly believe we are in control of? Conversely, what are the things we are clinging to believing that they will keep us secure or safe? I discovered what money meant in my life last year. Faced with the uncertainty of job loss I updated our household budget, started looking into refinancing our mortgage to lower our monthly payments, and worked out just what we would need to live on. With that number in mind I felt peace in the fact that I wasn’t going to lose my house or have to sell a vehicle to put food in my fridge. Meanwhile, during all this calculation, I talked a good talk about how God is sovereign and in control. Then I got my actual lay-off notice and panic ensued. Suddenly my trust in God appeared weak and shallow, I struggled with the loss and what the future held. It was an eye-opener.
2020 was the year my faith got bolstered and recentered on God. Now I had to trust He had us. It was easy to talk about how He would take care of us as long as I still had my finances in control. Then I lost control and discovered it wasn’t God my security was in, but my savings account.
Then, listening to a favourite podcast talking real-life spirituality, I realized that for those who call Christ Lord, nothing was or is ruined because of a pandemic.
Nothing is ruined for those who are in Christ Jesus!
No hopes or dreams or plans for the future were ruined by lock-down, restriction or facemasks. My faith got a boost in a way I never expected. It did however have to face a loss of control over my life. All of these things that I took for granted that I had control over, I didn’t. And that’s a good thing.
Control is an illusion. There are certainly things in our lives that we maintain some degree of control over, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s very little. 2020 was a reminder of why the 12-Step’s Step 1 is let go of control. “We admitted we were powerless over x, and our lives had become unmanageable.”
My thought process on this is to highlight that sometimes great ideas are pointless exercises. If you bear with me for a few minutes I hope you’ll understand what I mean. I’ll use the Bible as an example and relate it through denominations and my own Bible reading.
It doesn’t matter what denomination you belong to, or faith system you believe in, if the belief in said set of beliefs does little to change your day-to-day life. What I mean by that is that if you are a professing Christian on Sunday, but Monday resembles little of your Sunday behaviour, then it’s completely irrelevant as to what you claim to believe in. The Christian faith has been fractured into a ridiculous amount of denominations with the simplest of things dividing churches and people groups.
It matters little what denomination, doctrine, or belief system you subscribe to if it doesn’t actively shape how you do life. We, I, can claim all sorts of things that we believe in, but our actions will dictate whether or not that belief system is shaping our lives, or an exercise in doctrinal regurgitation. It really doesn’t matter what faith system you belong to if you aren’t actively reading, analyzing and practicing that what your belief system is based on.
For Christians, myself included, we often get hung up on a specific doctrine that we think is right, and the other guys are wrong. Or perhaps I just read my Bible because I like the streak my Bible app tells me I’m on. While the streak growing day by day is an indication of how many days I’ve opened the app, it doesn’t indicate whether or not I’ve actually taken in what I’ve read and put it into practice. Talking about the Bible is great, does it extend from there into shaping your life, or is the streak more valuable than what you have been reading?
I subscribed to the streak once and have to be wary of it still. It hit over 400 days in a row and was something that I was rather proud of. Then one day the streak ended, and I pretended I didn’t care. It was disappointing for the streak to end, but I wasn’t thinking about what I was reading, I was hung on up on the streak. I don’t care now even though another streak is growing. The difference this time is I’m learning, talking about what I’m learning, and trying my best to practice what I’m learning. The last time, the streak became what I was really proud of. Pride addiction rearing its ugly head. I really wanted to say I’d done something, be proud of ticking a box. I love box ticking, it can be useful at times, but in and of itself, it is something I find far to easy to subscribe to as a means to define myself instead of letting God define me.
Great idea, poor practice in reality.
Back to ideology and practicality. It’s fine and well to sit around and discuss various nuances of recovery, theology, or religion. If the conversation ends there and little else is done, then what has really been achieved? I want to live my life with integrity, the things I talk about matter to me because they are part of my life. This is hard, because I never used to have an opinion. I was scared to share one if something even came to mind. I’ve learned to have opinions, to realize that there are things I do actually care about.
I want to live that out.
My thought process on this is to highlight that sometimes great ideas are pointless exercises. If you bear with me for a few minutes I hope you’ll understand what I mean. I’ll use the Bible as an example and relate it through denominations and my own Bible reading.
It doesn’t matter what denomination you belong to, or faith system you believe in, if the belief in said set of beliefs does little to change your day-to-day life. What I mean by that is that if you are a professing Christian on Sunday, but Monday resembles little of your Sunday behaviour, then it’s completely irrelevant as to what you claim to believe in. The Christian faith has been fractured into a ridiculous amount of denominations with the simplest of things dividing churches and people groups.
It matters little what denomination, doctrine, or belief system you subscribe to if it doesn’t actively shape how you do life. We, I, can claim all sorts of things that we believe in, but our actions will dictate whether or not that belief system is shaping our lives, or an exercise in doctrinal regurgitation. It really doesn’t matter what faith system you belong to if you aren’t actively reading, analysing and practicing that what your belief system is based on.
For Christians, myself included, we often get hung up on a specific doctrine that we think is right, and the other guys are wrong. Or perhaps I just read my Bible because I like the streak my Bible app tells me I’m on. While the streak growing day by day is an indication of how many days I’ve opened the app, it doesn’t indicate whether or not I’ve actually taken in what I’ve read and put it into practice. Talking about the Bible is great, does it extend from there into shaping your life, or is the streak more valuable than what you have been reading?
I subscribed to the streak once and have to be wary of it still. It hit over 400 days in a row and was something that I was proud of. Then one day the streak ended, and I pretended I didn’t care. It was disappointing for the streak to end, I wasn’t thinking about what I was reading. I don’t care now even though another streak is growing. The difference this time is I’m learning, talking about what I’m learning, and trying my best to practice what I’m learning. The last time, the streak became what I was really proud of. Pride addiction rearing its ugly head. I really wanted to say I’d done something, be proud of ticking a box. I love box ticking, it can be useful at times, but in and of itself, it is something I find far to easy to subscribe to as a means to define myself instead of letting God define me. Great idea, poor practice in reality.
Back to ideology and practicality. It’s fine and well to sit around and discuss various nuances of recovery, theology, or religion. If the conversation ends there and little else is done, then what has really been achieved? I want to live my life with integrity, the things I talk about matter to me because they are part of my life. This is hard, because I never used to have an opinion. I was scared to share one if something even came to mind. I’ve learned to have opinions, to realize that there are things I actually care about. I want to live that out.
Pain. We are all familiar with the word and what it means. Some of us are more familiar with pain than others, but we all have a central bond that can be made by speaking the word. Where some of us bond is in the sharing of that pain in an honest, and vulnerable manner. Probably what would have bonded us before, if we could admit it, is that we have all attempted in various, maladaptive methods to cope with pain instead of dealing with it. But what bonds us after we realize that pain is a part of our lives no matter how much we dislike it, is in the sharing of that pain.
I hate pain.
I don’t like it, wish I could avoid it, am tired of dealing with it. The horrific blessing that my Heavenly Father has provided me with is learning how to live in authentic community. Popular buzzwords lately I know, but meaningful to me so I’ll use them. Why do I find such joy in sharing with a trusted brother how I’m failing in life, or struggling to deal with pain? Why does this feel so counterintuitive yet incredibly helpful? Why does admitting my weakness make me feel stronger? Walking and talking out my story with trusted friends is far different to how I used to deal with pain and I still feel the urge to go it alone sometimes. Overcoming those tendencies to stay withdrawn is also painful.
Pain it is then. I immediately feel like that’s a depressive though, but it’s not. It can be, but it’s also the recognition that I do not want my life to be dictated by running from pain. It’s why integrity has become so important to me. Most men when you ask them how they want to live their lives, integrity comes up at some point. It’s a desirable trait, but unfortunately a trait that is learned, through much practice and observation. We do not suddenly know how to live in integrity the day after deciding we want to live in integrity. Much to my chagrin, this is not a box that can be instantly ticked. If we are desiring it, integrity that is, it probably wasn’t something in our lives before, and likely wasn’t modeled for us in a healthy manner either. So we need to find people who live it out, who are comfortable to talk about pain and weakness in a healthy way, people who live in truth.
Iron sharpens iron. Healing through pain brings growth.
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