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 1843

Friends, 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 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