Become Good Soil

Friends,We’re excited to launch, for the first time, a physical resource for A Soul’s Review: A Guided Year-End Practice for Reflection, Renewal, and New Beginnings.For nearly a decade, the practice of A Soul’s Review has offered us a way to step out of the pace and demands of ordinary life and enter a sanctuary in time—a space to remember, reflect, and attend to the story we are living with God. It is an invitation to look back with honesty and gratitude, to notice where we have been and what has been forming within us, and to listen again for where God may be leading us in the season ahead.Join us in this episode as we reflect on the deep roots of the practice of remembering and reflection in the deliverance and restoration of the people of Israel following the Exodus from Egypt, its further development within Christian monastic communities, and its eventual expression in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Across these traditions, we find a recurring invitation: to pause, to remember, to pay attention, and to allow the story of our lives to be gathered again into the larger story of God.The heart of this episode is an invitation to practice.We invite you to join us in engaging the annual practice of A Soul’s Review, and to consider who you might invite to share the experience with you. Perhaps it is your spouse, a few close friends, your family, a small group, or members of your redemptive community. Some practices deepen when they are shared: when we make room not only to remember our own lives, but to bear witness to one another’s stories, to name what has been lost and received, and to listen together for what may be emerging.Our hope is that A Soul’s Review might become more than a workbook you complete. We hope it can become a practice you inhabit—a recurring threshold at which you receive your life again as gift, reckon honestly with what has been, and turn with renewed openness toward what is to come.And perhaps, together, we can bring this practice of redemptive remembering into the lives of others, offering a sanctuary for reflection, nourishment, and renewal.Find out more about A Soul’s Review here.It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.For the Kingdom,Morgan & Cherie

“Life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forwards.”—Søren Kierkegaard 1843Friends, sometimes the people closest to us can see changes in us that we haven’t noticed ourselves.In our last episode with Rob and Ryan, we looked back on a choice we made ten years ago alongside dozens of like-hearted allies at a Become Good Soil Intensive: to commit to a decade of apprenticeship, allowing God to lead us and shape who we were becoming. We continue that conversation with some beautiful reflections from their wives—the real heroes of these stories—about the changes they’ve seen along the way.To help you consider what this could look like in your own life, we’ve included Would You Risk A Decade?—a short guide with four practical places to begin and resources to explore alongside a few friends.How we love our families, show up in our friendships, and handle hard days matters. Those are often the places where growth becomes visible.Over time, we’re learning to bring our questions and pain to God, even when the struggles continue, and to share the journey with friends who help us keep saying yes. The changes can be hard to see day to day, but looking back, we begin to recognize how much God has done.Wherever you are today, we hope this conversation encourages you to keep going, ask for help, and take the next step God is putting in front of you. You don’t have to see the whole path to begin.And a note for those wanting more. The Become Good Soil Intensive was recorded and curated into a free retreat resource available for any man to offer locally in his community. This resource is available to you as the Becoming a King Retreat. It’s a way to explore the invitation of a decade of apprenticeship together with other men. Visit BecomingAKingRetreat.com to host a retreat or find one being hosted.It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.For the Kingdom,Morgan & Cherie

“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 ManHow 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 FireFriends, 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 FoucauldWhat 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 ConspiracyFriends, 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 3:12-14Friends, 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 WimberFriends, 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 BirdsFriends, 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