Become Good Soil

“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