Advertise on podcast: Notes on Wisdom W/John Walt

This summer, a friend told me that I needed to meet a guy named Dan Colacurcio. They felt like God wanted us to connect. So Dan and I sat down for coffee, and he shared his story with me. The whole time, I was captivated by his journey and all God has done in his life. So I asked him to sit down and record an interview with me.  Dan got into the adult nightclub business when he was 18 years old and then spent the next 11 years running nightclubs and other adult businesses in cities around the country and in Canada. He was a young man who had everything he thought he wanted. Then he met God and the real adventure began. After telling his story, Dan also shares some of the wisdom he's learned along the journey.  I hope you enjoy and are touched by his story.  JohnWalt.com

Play, performance, identity, and finding freedom in God. I am really excited to share with you a special conversation Heather and I got to have with our friend Jake Locker. In this interview, Jake shares his journey from a sports-filled childhood to college football, the NFL, and eventually a deeper understanding of identity. What starts out as a story about his love of sports and football becomes a much bigger reflection on how performance can steal joy, how shame can isolate us, and how God restores what we thought was lost. In this episode, Jake shares how sports first felt like pure play, a place he could be fully himself, then shifted into pressure and expectation. What I found most impactful was how Jake talks about God freeing him from performance and helping him recover his ability to play and live from Identity. We also get to discuss marriage, parenting, repentance, and the difference between trying to prove worth and living from freedom. I hope this conversation blesses you as much as it did us.  JohnWalt.com

As I write today, I am surrounded by the beauty of nature on every side. No houses in sight, just mountains and water. The essay I have been working on in my head the last few weeks is about expansive versus restrictive language. Today I find myself sitting in the midst of a perfect example of this topic. Pictures can’t do justice to what I am seeing all around me. I keep trying to capture it, but when I compare the pictures I am taking to the beauty around me, they aren’t even close. I could try to describe it to you with the best words I can find, but that wouldn’t work either. What I am experiencing right now can not really be fully captured in a container like words and pictures. If I were to try, then all I would be able to do is help you begin to imagine it for yourself. My words and pictures wouldn’t really contain the beauty of nature; they would simply be a starting point for your imagination. If I saw you later and started showing you pictures and telling you about the beauty of this wild place. What I told you would be true and accurate, but it would be very incomplete. You would have to come here and experience it yourself in order to really understand what I am saying. So the words I would use would only be words that help point you in the right direction. The gap between the words I used and the reality of what you would experience if you came here yourself is immense. Most of the language that we use and the way that we use it in modern culture is restrictive. We have a very hard time thinking and communicating in expansive ways. JohnWalt.com

Encountering God in prison In this interview, I sit down with Brian Smith for a vulnerable conversation about a tragedy, prison, forgiveness, and transformation. Several months ago, I had the privilege of meeting Bryan through a mutual friend. Each time we've been able to talk, I've been deeply impacted by his story and the journey he has been on. In this episode, our discussion centers on how God met Brian in his darkest moment and how that experience of God’s love changed everything. I trust you will be impacted by his story as much I have been.  JohnWalt.com

Tracy Goss says in her book, The Last Word on Power, that we are meaning-making machines. We ascribe meaning to everything, and it is all driven by our past experiences. What has happened in the past helps us interpret the present and try to predict the future. The problem is that most of the meaning we ascribe to things isn’t real or accurate. As Larry Mills says, “Most of what we think just isn’t so.”  I have been going through a process of letting go of the meaning that I have ascribed to things in my life. Some of that meaning has shown up as judgment, “I would never want to do that.” But most of it is just incorrect stories that have shaped my thinking and actions. Many of these stories I let die years ago, but there are still others that I have been discovering recently. I am calling these stories we tell ourselves Egoic Narratives because they are stories that we believe because they help us define our sense of self.  JohnWalt.com

One of my mentors, Larry Mills, says, “There's never enough of anything that almost works.”  When John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, was asked “How much is enough?” He said, "Just a little bit more.” What is it that leads a man who has everything he could ever want to want a little bit more? Clearly, more money wouldn't have enabled him to buy anything that he couldn't buy. More power wouldn't allow him to influence anything he couldn't already influence. He was already as famous as he could be. So what did Rockefeller have to gain by pursuing more? I think in order to understand the answer to that question, we have to recognize that what he was chasing wasn't really, money, fame or power. I think what he was chasing was himself and a deep unconscious desire for wholeness. If he had felt at peace, would he have still wanted more? If he had felt like he had enough and was enough, would he have lived differently?  It's easy to use someone like Rockefeller as an example, but what he represents in an extreme way is the same thing we all deal with in life. We believe that more of something is going to satisfy the lack that we feel in our hearts and minds.  JohnWalt.com

Sometimes we all feel disconnected from God. It’s easy to try and ignore that feeling and just press on to the next thing that demands our attention. Often, days can turn into weeks, months, or even years, and we start to realize we no longer feel the connection to God we long for. This prayer is about being honest with ourselves and God as we ask Him to find us, guide us, and walk with us. JohnWalt.com

It is impossible to overestimate the role that ego has played in shaping human history and the world. Think of all the wars and conflicts, from tribal feuds to world wars, so many of them have been sparked and fueled by human ego. Think of the economic challenges in nations around the world throughout history that have been caused and prolonged by ego. Consider all the businesses that have used and abused people in order to serve the ego of their leaders.  I think the simplest way to think of ego is that it is, “our broken sense of self.” We want to feel like we are extra special, unique, and better than other people. So we compare ourselves, craft narratives about our identity, and live into them. All of humanity’s issues seem to be perpetrated by this simple problem. We don’t know who we are, so out of our insecurity, we try to convince ourselves and others that we are something we aren’t. If my story is that I am better than other people at something, then I will always feel that I have to prove myself. It is in this proving, this jostling for position, that the world's biggest problems have grown. All of it is the simple result of each person protecting themselves and their egoic narratives at the cost of others.  JohnWalt.com

“Most of what we think just isn’t so.” - Larry Mills  There are many things in our culture that are accepted as immovable “realities” that are actually just collectively accepted ideas. More than just being ideas, they are wrong or, at the very least, untrue. We take most of these completely for granted and never think twice about them. That is because we are taught in a million different, often subtle ways that these things are true. I call these culturally accepted false realities Egoic Structures. Most of these false realities our society takes for granted only exist because of human ego. When I use the word “Ego” I am referring to both our over inflated sense of self and our sense of individual identity that comes from how we see ourselves in comparison to others. In this note I will walk you though some examples of ego structures, the role they play in our lives and why it matters that we recognize them.  JohnWalt.com

In this episode, I have the privilege of interviewing Scott Friesen, the Co-Founder and CEO of Verdant Frontiers. He is a serial entrepreneur who successfully built and exited three companies in the U.S. before taking on the biggest challenge of his career.  Scott started Verdant Frontiers in 2013 after visiting Ethiopia and seeing that family poverty and unemployment forced some parents to give their children to orphanages. He realized that building profitable businesses in places with real natural resources could create work, dignity, and long-term change. Scott became convinced that the real problem in many rural African communities was the lack of businesses that could create steady jobs. In the interview, he says the goal was to build businesses that could connect local labor and local resources to the global economy. This eventually led to companies in agriculture, real estate, and technology. The part of this interview that impacted me the most was how Scott talks about feeling and receiving God’s love for him and how that changed everything. The background noise that said he wasn’t enough, the insecurities, and the search for identity through success all stopped when he felt God’s love. Scott has a powerful story. I hope you get as much out of this conversation as I did.  Check out Verdant Frontiers at: verdantfrontiers.com

What is on the other side of ego death? I believe it is radical humility. So what is radical humility, and what makes it different from normal humility? There are lots of people our culture would call humble who have not gone through an ego death. There is a level of social humility that has become the norm. When someone is successful but doesn’t brag a lot or draw too much attention to themselves, we call them humble. The issue is that much of the time, these people are not truly humble; they are socially humble. Their behavior aligns with a culturally expected level of humility. I have met many people who are called humble by friends and colleagues, but when you spend time with them, it becomes clear they have quite a big ego hidden under layers of social humility. When you offend these people or let them down, they won’t often be mean to you, but they will write you off or begin to ignore you. I have been written off a number of times, and I am sure you have, too. It really doesn’t feel good; it's like someone has decided that you are no longer worthy of their time. That is, unfortunately, a sign of a significant hidden ego. I want to be clear, I am not saying any of this to bash egotistical people, I am communicating this to draw attention and awareness to the reality that what we call humility is more a social posture than it is a reflection of a true heart condition.  JohnWalt.com

A concept that I have run into many times in surprisingly different works of wisdom is the idea that there are first things and second things. In its simplest form, it means that some things must happen first and are of greater importance than other things. C.S. Lewis is the only person I have read who uses the phrase “first things and second things,” but similar concepts are present in many different writings and wisdom traditions. This kind of thinking seems to have originated in Greek Philosophy, but in many ways, it is all over the Old Testament. Aristotle said in Nicomachean Ethics that some ends are subordinate to others. We see the concept show up again in Augustine’s writing on rightly ordered love. He said that a good life requires loving things in the right order, with God as the highest good, and that moral disorder comes from loving lesser goods more than greater ones. Bonhoeffer talks about this again in a different way in his writing on the ultimate and the penultimate. Over and over again, we see great thinkers and spiritual leaders bringing us back to this idea that there are some things that are of a higher importance or order than other things. Even though their perspective differed, the recognition that there is an important order of things shows up in both Western and Eastern thought traditions. You might be saying right now, of course, some things are first, and others are second, but just because we recognize the validity of the concept does not mean it properly shapes how we think and live.  JohnWalt.com

Western Christian Culture has forgotten hard but essential truths that were once foundational to the Gospel. We teach on these topics sometimes and read about them in biblical commentary, but we have often culturally forgotten to practice them. If we remove these truths from the teachings of Jesus, then it is no longer what He taught. JohnWalt.com

There is only one way the world will experience restoration.  We love Justice because we were made for it. We empathize with others because God gave us a heart. Our love of Justice and our ability to empathize with other people drive us to want to be the solution to the problems in the world around us. Our highest calling in life is to participate with God and his restoration work, so it's very good that we desire to help others and alleviate suffering. But we have a fundamental misunderstanding of God's restoration work. JohnWalt.com

Several months ago, my nine-year-old son told me, “we should make a hat that says crush ego on it, because that's what your book is about.” I was shocked. He’s nine years old, he hasn't even read the book, and yet he somehow got to the heart of the message. Ever since then, we started using this phrase as a family, and kicked around the idea of making hats and t-shirts. This has become a sort of tagline for the work our family is doing. At the heart of the message of all the world’s wisdom traditions is the understanding that the journey of every person is to overcome themself. That's what initiation was all about, helping a young man understand that his life was not about himself. That's what religion is all about, trying to help mankind transcend himself and escape the prison of his own self-obsession. JohnWalt.com