Become Good Soil

“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, 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