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“Our deepest formation is often of the slowest variety.” —Kirsten Staton  Friends, what can God form in a life that gives him a decade? Ten years ago, alongside Rob Porter and Ryan Ruebsahm, we gave God our yes. Not to become more successful, but to become more wholehearted men. None of us knew where that consent would lead or what it would cost. In this episode, we look back on ten years of apprenticeship: the cost, the surprising kindness of God, and the particular ways he has taught us we are seen, loved, and led. Looking back, we can see the slow and steady work of God. Pressure has given way to peace. Self-reliance is becoming sonship. The need to arrange for comfort is being replaced by the lived experience of being comforted by God. As we reflected on what this decade has required and what it has produced, Rob reminded us of these words from Becoming a King: “The good soil is rich, teeming with moisture and nutrients. The good soil, Jesus suggested, stands for the portions of us that—by cultivating, tending, and maturing—“Hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop” (Luke 8:15). Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; character, a genuine wholeheartedness—and wholeheartedness produces inextinguishable hope (Rom. 5:3–4).” We have lived the suffering. We have had to persevere. We have experienced the death of old ways of living built on performance, control, self-sufficiency, and fear. Yet we have also discovered that none of it is wasted. In the hands of God, even the most painful ground can become good soil. It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“If you only think about Jesus, ‘believe’ Jesus and believe things about Jesus not much new is going to happen. It is the risk of ‘acting’ like Jesus that reconfigures your soul. We are converted by new circumstances much more than by new ideas. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of being… Reality is the greatest ally of God.” —Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man How might a deeper understanding of the sacred ascent of the first half of life and the sacred descent of the second half of life better help us locate ourselves wherever we find ourselves in our initiation? Why is it of such profound importance to understand the soul’s necessary maturing from hero to sage and from role to soul? Why does the maturing from doing and getting to being and becoming have everything to do with how we live today? So much of our world is organized around the question, What do you do? We learn early to measure a life by accomplishment, influence, productivity, and what we can build. But the deeper questions of initiation invite us somewhere else: Who am I? Who is God? What is the story in which I find myself? And who am I becoming? In the final episode of this series with Jay Heck, founder of Being Sons, we explore what it might mean to carry those questions in deeper ways that nourish the maturing of the second half of life. And what if the invitation of the second half of life isn't to leverage everything we've gained for greater influence, but to de-center? To become more obscure. To loosen our need to be needed. To give our strength in service of the next generation and the generation behind them. Perhaps the great opportunity before us is not simply to finish well, but to become the sage we ourselves have longed for. To become more attuned to our propensity to form more sophisticated expressions of ego and conveniently avoid the many deaths which are intended to seed our ongoing resurrection. Wherever you find yourself on the journey, I hope this conversation gives you language for your own becoming and awakens fresh curiosity about the sacred work God has entrusted to you in this particular season. It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“Mystery…is not what is left over after we have done our best to reason things out. It is inherent in the very nature of God and his works.” —Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire Friends, what if the impossible places in our lives are actually an invitation? An invitation to relinquish control. To loosen our grip on outcomes. To risk more on God. To discover the portion that is ours to carry and entrust the rest to the Father. The subtle temptation is to build a life that ultimately hinges on our own strength. The impossible invites us somewhere different. When we step into the impossible, something in us can finally begin to rest because we know the impossible will require God. In this conversation with Jay Heck (Being Sons), we explore what the impossible has looked like in our lives, particularly in the sacred terrain of fatherhood. Perhaps this is part of our initiation into mature adulthood: becoming men and women whose strength is increasingly in service of love. Who can bless rather than control. Who can remain present to mystery without demanding certainty. Who are learning to trust that God is at work in the slow, hidden places we can neither manage nor understand. Where in your life have you settled for hard because impossible requires too much surrender? What might become available if you entrusted the outcome to God and simply received the portion that is yours? We invite you to join us as we risk stepping out of the hard and into the impossible together. It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“He who loves has his Beloved always in his mind; that time to him is well spent that is spent in contemplating Him, and the time to him is wasted in which He is out of his sight. He counts as profitable only those hours in which he contemplates the only thing that to him has any reality. All else is for him emptiness and nothingness.  Let your soul melt into Mine, immerse yourself in Me, lose yourself in Me. Think how often I have told you to hope for the day when you will lean forever on My breast. And since I allow it, I tell you now to begin to live this life, in silence, lay your head upon My breast, and so accomplish your pilgrimage.” –Charles de Foucauld What would it look like to engage both our cognition and our imagination when we encounter the Gospels? Not just reading the stories, but entering into them. Feeling the dust beneath our feet, hearing the people gathered around Jesus, watching the questions being asked, and experiencing the Kingdom reality breaking into ordinary lives. Perhaps these two ways of approaching Scripture were never meant to be separated. In this second part of our conversation with Cara Murphy, we turn toward the Gospels not only as texts to read and sources of knowledge about Jesus and his Kingdom announcement, but as an invitation to encounter him in the present—to behold him more fully and, in the process, become more like the One we behold. Our apprenticeship to Jesus is not knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The aim is union, participation, and transformation. And above all, the aim is Love: to receive Love, respond in Love, and move into ever-deeper union with the One who is Love. How do we become people who increasingly internalize the words, life, heart, and Kingdom of Jesus so that they shape and shift every facet of our perceiving, experiencing, and acting? The invitation is not to find the perfect plan or manufacture an outcome. It is to make ourselves available to Jesus and trust that he will form us as we immerse ourselves in his Way and his Words, over and over again. What fascinates you in the life of Jesus? And how might you follow that bright curiosity a little further? May we become lifelong students of Jesus, holding his Liveliness and Goodness before our minds with increasing fullness and clarity, trusting that as we behold him, we are being formed more and more into his likeness. It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“The key then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible… First, we teach his beauty, truth, and power while he lived among us as one human being among others. The content of the Gospels should be explained and brought to life in such a way that the Gospels become a permanent presence and possession of the mind of the disciple.” —Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy Friends, we return to a simple question: Who and what is most shaping our becoming? These are the evocative questions Professor Cara Murphy invites us to consider as we allow our hearts to be nourished ever more deeply through the four Gospels of the New Testament. If we become what we behold, then there is no greater invitation than to keep Jesus before us—not merely as an idea to understand or a theology to master, but as the living Christ whose life continually forms our own. In this conversation with Cara, we wonder together about the Gospels—not simply as books we read, but as the place where we learn to live with Jesus. We explore the distinct beauty of each Gospel writer, the way Jesus leans toward people with unhurried attention, and why returning to His life again and again is the steady work of apprenticeship. What might change if the Gospels became less of a destination we occasionally visit and more of a home in which we daily dwell? How might our relationships, our suffering, our pace, and even our imaginations be reshaped as we keep Jesus before the eyes of our hearts? And what if, all along, we discovered that as we turn our gaze toward Him, He has already been lovingly turning His gaze toward us? We are in this together. It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”  —Colossians 3:12-14 Friends, every meaningful journey invites us to pause before moving forward. Over the past twelve episodes of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we have explored the foundations upon which we hope to build our lives—our common faith, life in God's Kingdom, apprenticeship to Jesus, whole-person formation, koinonia, a rule of life, and the values that continue to shape our becoming. These have never been ideas to master, but realities to inhabit. In this final episode, we bring the series in for a landing. Together, we reflect on the posture that allows these foundations to become a way of life: humility. Not humility as self-diminishment, but as a grounded way of being before God, ourselves, and one another. It is strength harnessed and vulnerability unfurled—the willingness to remain teachable as Christ continues to form us. Our hope is that this conversation serves less as a conclusion than as a new beginning. As you listen, we invite you to pause, give thanks for the ground God has established beneath your feet, and receive His invitation into the next faithful step of your apprenticeship. It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“The economy of the kingdom of God is quite simple. Every new step in the kingdom costs us everything we have gained to date. Every time we cross a new threshold, it costs us everything we now have. Every new step may cost us all the reputation and security we have accumulated up to that point. It costs us our life. A disciple is always ready to take the next step. If there is anything that characterizes Christian maturity, it is the willingness to become a beginner again for Jesus Christ. It is the willingness to put our hand in his hand and say, "I'm scared to death, but I'll go with you. You're the Pearl of great price." —John Wimber Friends, what if Christian maturity looks different than we imagine? We often think maturity means arriving. Becoming more certain, or more capable. More established. More secure. Yet the way of Jesus seems to reveal something altogether different. Again and again, the Kingdom invites us to become beginners. Every new threshold asks us to release what we have accumulated in order to receive what God is offering next. Every invitation into deeper life requires fresh trust. Fresh surrender. Fresh dependence upon the Spirit of God. Perhaps this is why humility has so often been misunderstood. Humility is not weakness, self-deprecation, or thinking less of ourselves. Rather, it is strength harnessed and vulnerability unfurled—the willingness to entrust ourselves again and again to the love and leadership of God. In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we pause to reflect on the journey we've shared together over the past several months. Review is one of the great gifts of apprenticeship. It allows us to notice where the Spirit has been at work, to celebrate the ground already gained, and to recognize the next frontier inviting our wholehearted consent. We invite you to resist the temptation to measure progress by certainty or accomplishment. Instead, perhaps ask a simpler question: Where is Jesus inviting me to become a beginner again? For it is often there—in the place of open hands, surrendered strength, and courageous vulnerability—that the Kingdom becomes most available and the life of Christ most fully formed within us. It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“A wholehearted life begins with values. They are the ‘why’ behind what we practice… while rules address behavior, values get to the heart of the matter.” —Melissa Helser, Cageless Birds Friends, what values are quietly shaping your life? And why does it matter? Not simply the values you would claim or aspire to, but the values revealed by your attention, your habits, your relationships, your pace, your choices, and your responses to the circumstances of everyday life. Realized or not, values are always at work. They influence what we pursue, what we avoid, what we celebrate, what we tolerate, and ultimately who we are becoming. They shape the culture of our homes, our friendships, our communities, and our apprenticeship to Jesus. In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we continue our exploration of the core values that have emerged over decades of personal and communal formation. These are not values we have mastered. Rather, they are values that continue to challenge us, expose us, encourage us, and call us deeper into the life of the Kingdom. The invitation of the Gospel is not merely to adopt new ideas, but to become a certain kind of person. And that becoming takes place through the ordinary circumstances of our lives, the relationships we steward, the habits we cultivate, and the small acts of faithfulness we offer by day and by decade. As you listen, we invite you to become curious. What values are forming you? Where might the Spirit be inviting you into deeper agreement with the life of Christ? Enter in with us as we consider the unhurried, relational and satisfying work of participating with God in His Kingdom rooting deep within. It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“Values are the goods we prize and pursue—the things we regard as genuinely worth having, becoming, and giving ourselves to.” —Dallas Willard We must take the time to ask ourselves: How do the values we profess align with the values of God’s Kingdom? Core values quietly shape our lives. They influence what captures our attention, how we spend our time, what we celebrate, what we resist, and who we are becoming. They form the culture of our homes, our communities, and our organizations long before they ever appear on a website or in a mission statement. Values are aspirational. They do not simply describe who we are today; they help orient us toward who we long to become. Some of our values are explicit. Many are not. Whether we recognize them or not, we are all being formed—every day—by the values our culture rewards, the stories we believe, and the practices we repeat. The invitation is not to shame ourselves for this reality, but to become more awake to it. In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we invite you into a conversation that has been unfolding in our own lives for more than two decades. Together, we’ll explore the core values that have gradually emerged as guides for the work of Become Good Soil—and, more importantly, for our own apprenticeship to Jesus. Living our values is deeply personal. No two lives will embody them in exactly the same way. Sometimes it is surprisingly difficult to trace a straight line between what we do and the values quietly shaping those choices. Unearthing and reorienting those hidden values asks us to slow down, pay attention, and become curious about the formation already taking place within us. Over the years, we’ve come to recognize roughly a dozen values that we hope increasingly inform everything we do at Become Good Soil. We certainly haven’t mastered them. In many ways, these values continue to expose us, invite us, and call us further up and further in. While each deserves an episode—or perhaps a lifetime of reflection—we are grateful for the opportunity to begin the conversation. What follows is a two-part introduction to the core values we hope will continue to shape our lives, our work, and, perhaps, offer a companion for your own journey and the life of your community. It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

"This is the most difficult and at the same time the most important thing to embrace in the Christian life: that we become willing participants (with God), not only in what God does but in the way He does it." —Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places Friends, we continue to be gripped by these two questions. How are our daily activities shaping us into the people we are becoming? And, what changes might aim our becoming more closely toward the Person and Way of Jesus?  In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series we invite you to reflect with us on these questions and the ancient idea of a rule of life. Our hope—as we revisit the rule of life—is to facilitate a gentle check in regarding how we are arranging our days. Developing a rule of life does not mean picking up a heavy yoke or toeing the line for a critical voice. Rather, “rule” in this case is related to a ruler or guide. Just as it’s helpful to use a ruler to steady our hand when drawing a line, so a rule of life helps guide our lives in the direction we yearn to live.  As has often been observed, a rule of life is like a trellis supporting a growing vine. The trellis supports the vine as it grows and bears fruit, shaping its form and making possible its generativity. As a vine without a trellis becomes tangled, turned in on itself, and unfruitful, so can our hearts and lives, habits and relationships, desires and impulses devolve without the structure of a supportive rule of life.  With characteristic understatement, Jesus reminds us that each day of life brings plenty of predictable challenges (Matthew 6:34). What would it be like to receive from our God and the wisdom of His people a “trellis” of habits and practices that over time will form the resilience, endurance, faithfulness, joy, and love of Jesus? What would it be like to have a Kingdom-trellis upon which to rest our souls as we trust the Spirit to form in us by day and decade the character of Jesus and allow us to persevere through whatever challenge we may face on the Way? Check in with us as we explore a rule of life together. It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“The Hebrew way to understand salvation is not to read a theological treatise but to sit around a campfire with family and friends, listening to a story. It is the very nature of storytelling to include us, the hearers, in the story… For salvation is not the spiritual diagnosis of souls, one here, one there. It is the story of a people. A community with a past, with ancestors, with common experience.” —Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we invite you to pause and personally explore how koinonia—the heartbeat of the redemptive community modeled in the New Testament—might provide a clue for how we live counterculturally in a world deeply formed by hyper-individualism. In the film Defiance, we see a heroic picture of redemptive community. The Bielski brothers gather fleeing refugees in the forests of modern-day Belarus to escape the persecution of World War II. There in the woods, with only the essentials, a redemptive community is formed as they struggle to survive. When they host a wedding, it becomes a beautiful reminder that joy and sorrow coexist. (Links to the Defiance Trailer and Wedding Scene here.) Throughout the New Testament, we see redemptive fellowship being recovered and nurtured by a remnant of people whose hearts are being captured and apprenticed by the Living God. We catch a glimpse of this in Acts chapter 2. Koinonia is defined as fellowship, association, community, participation, and sharing in one another’s lives. The first picture we have of koinonia exists within the Trinity itself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect fellowship. But more than simply observing that fellowship, we are invited into koinonia—first and foremost with God. And from this place of intimate communion with God, the gospel invites us to love others. Paul helps us explore this idea through the imagery of the body in 1 Corinthians 12:25–26: “The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.” To be in fellowship with others in our fallen age is inherently risky. It involves cycles of rupture and repair. How do we pursue, engage in, respond to, repair, and flourish within a redemptive community? Where might God be inviting you to reconsider your participation in koinonia? Join us as we explore this profound idea of koinonia together. It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“We cannot become spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.” —Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Friends, how do we learn from Jesus to live the life of the Kingdom in every corner of our existence and every dimension of our personhood? How do we learn not only to see reality as Jesus sees it, but also to feel in our bodies, engage in our relationships, regulate our nervous systems, and make meaning of our everyday lives as He would? How do we join the Spirit—and His community of apprentices—in having our whole person transformed into the likeness of Jesus, expressed uniquely through our distinct personhood, relationships and stage of development? How do we include in our whole person formation our vision of self, God, and others, our communal connections, our relationship with time and our place within all of creation? As we continue diving into our Become Good Soil Foundations Series, join us for this podcast episode dedicated to exploring whole person formation into the likeness and way of Jesus. It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“For many former Smokejumpers, smokejumping is not closely tied with their (current) way of life, but is more something that was necessary for them to pass through and not around, and, once unmistakably done, does not have to be done again. The “it” is within, and is the need to settle some things with the universe and ourselves before taking on the “business of the world.” This “it” is the something special within that demands we do something special, and “it” could be within a lot of us.” —Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire Friends, how are we to understand the story of our lives as it unfolds across the years? What meaning do we give to our failures and our faithfulness, our losses and our triumphs, the long disappointments and the surprising gifts we never would have chosen—yet somehow needed? And how do we recognize true growth, not only in our own maturing, but in our apprenticeship to Jesus and the life of His Kingdom? Dietrich Bonhoeffer once suggested that the cost of not following Jesus is, in the end, far greater—even in this life alone—than the cost of walking with Him. For discipleship is not merely a matter of belief, but of learning to live in intimate fellowship with Christ, slowly being formed into the kind of people He Himself would be, if He were to live our lives in our place. In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we explore apprenticeship and initiation as two essential lenses for making sense of this question: how our small, particular stories are caught up into something far larger—the redemptive and unfolding story of God. It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“It is a world of magic and mystery of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, and where a great struggle often makes it hard to be sure who belongs to which side, because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good who live happily ever after and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, become known by their true name. That is the fairytale of the gospel.” —Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: the Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy, and Fairy Tale Friends, What happens in you when you hear the word desire? Is there a kind of quickening—something like curiosity? Or a hesitation… a guardedness? Maybe a quiet opening that feels like hope. Or a heaviness in your chest that carries sadness. Or even a flash of cynicism. What have you come to believe about desire… in your life with the Triune God, in His Kingdom, in your apprenticeship to Jesus? And what if the recovery—the honoring and stewarding of desire in its purest form—is actually central to your restoration as an image-bearer of God? In this next episode of the Become Good Soil Foundations Series, we explore the recovery of longing and desire. Because at the heart of the Christian story is an arresting claim: that desire, in its essence, is not something to fear—but something given by God, meant to lead us to Him and into His Kingdom. It was the awakening of desire—those fleeting, radiant moments—that first beckoned C. S. Lewis. He described this awakening as joy. And that joy stirred something in him, calling him to search for more. And the same is true for us. Our longing is not a liability. It is part of the way back to joy. Everything we love—every glimpse of beauty, goodness, and delight—is from God, is for God, and ultimately finds its home in Him. The story of the kingdom is a story of desire being gathered up and restored—a great homecoming. Let’s press forward together. It's all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Morgan & Cherie

“To be sure, the kingdom has been here as long as we humans have been here, and longer. But it has been made available to us through simple confidence in Jesus, the Anointed, only from the time he became a public figure. It is a kingdom that, in the person of Jesus, welcomes us just as we are, just where we are, and makes it possible for us to translate our “ordinary” life into an eternal one.” —Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy How would you answer this question: What is the gospel that Jesus preached? When I (Cherie) first encountered this question, I was both arrested and bewildered. I had some sense of what I thought the “gospel” might be, but I could not, for the life of me, articulate what it was that Jesus himself preached. I was new in my adult faith in Jesus and spent most of my devotional time reading the Psalms, the Gospel of John, and Paul’s letters. This question launched me on a treasure hunt that changed my life—and continues to propel me today. It led me first deep into Matthew’s account of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus, then into Mark’s and Luke’s, and back again to John. Over the past twenty years, I have returned again and again to these profound and sweeping accounts of the earthly ministry of the Anointed One. What was the gospel that Jesus preached? And what does an apprenticeship look like when it seeks not only to have faith in Jesus, but to practice living the faith of Jesus? Let’s remember it together. Join us for this episode of the Become Good Soil podcast. Indeed, the Kingdom of God is at hand. It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come. For the Kingdom, Cherie and Morgan