How Should Christians Think about Manhood? A Conversation with Jake Hamilton

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I am joined today by Jake Hamilton. He is the author of Journey to Biblical Masculinity, 12 Paths Every Man Must Take. And he's also the founder and CEO of The Fight, which is a platform for men to own who they are and discover who they could be. And so we're going to have a conversation today about biblical masculinity, about what it means to be a man, and probably a few other things. So we'll see how it goes. I can imagine. Yeah. Welcome, Jake, man. Thanks for being here. Oh, yeah. I'm super excited to have the conversation. I love your background. I love what you're doing. And so I'm actually just excited for the conversation because I don't know what rabbit trails we're going to end up on, but I'm sure there will be plenty and they will be interesting. Well, man, why don't we start out? Tell people a little bit about your background just so they have a sense of who you are and where you're coming from and why you ended up on this path. Well, yeah, context. I mean, really, I ended up in the church when I was young, 19. We ended up planting a church on accident when we were 20. You know, there was like that whole emergent church thing that was happening. And we were in a Baptist church. I grew up like basically, you know, sort of Southern Baptist that was like on the fringe of Baptist. And we planted an emergent church because I was an artist. I started my first like art business out of my parents' garage doing graphic design and murals when I was 15. So my background is art and sort of like more like big art. I want to do stuff that like really, you know, is all consuming. I want people to walk into something and encounter something. And I've wanted to do that since I was young. And the emergent church, sort of church in a church model that was back, you know, makes me dated. But it was sort of my foundation of being able to put art into church, which I loved. So I put art into church and we had this insane time where it grew from like 60 college students to like 600 people within like a few months. And that kind of set my course into ministry, which I was not planning on doing. I actually interviewed with Disney when I was 17 to do backgrounds and work for them. And that's what I thought I was going to do is go to school to be an artist. And there was a different plan for me. I picked up a guitar and ended up in that field for a lot of years. But to fast forward, I was in ministry. We were in ministry for almost two decades, really like church planters, house of prayer, different. We've pretty much played every role in the church from youth to kids to all of it, you know, loading up, tearing down. We are a mobile church for five years. But really fast forward, by being in ministry, as some of you all may know, like being in ministry is all consuming. So that didn't work well for the first eight years of my marriage. So we had a few kids and I was not present and I was not engaged, but I was in a lot of ministry traveling the world at the time. I had recorded an album and sent me on the road. And so with that in mind, I basically was just thinking I was doing work for God. I mean, I believe I was, but it was definitely not giving my family the priority they deserved. And that kind of blew up in 2010, the short version. And then there was no addictions, no drugs, no drinking, no porn, no adultery. It was just I was a workaholic. And because my workaholism was tied to church, people applauded me for it and no one helped. And so I was stuck figuring this out on my own. And thank God for a couple of really wise people in my life who helped me. And that set me on a path to me and my wife to really speak about marriage, share about marriage, work with couples. When my kids turned to teenagers, I realized we were missing a very large component of this, which is how do you get boys to become men? And then how does that impact a marriage long term? And we had someone who told us in our lives during that time, they said, if you really want to save marriages, go get men. And I realized how important that was pretty quick raising teenagers. I was like, oh, this is all the formative stuff I'm watching men deal with in their marriage that they never learned to deal with when they were teenagers. And so that kind of set us on the path we're on now, hosting weekends for men, doing a platform. The fight is a platform for us to be able to engage with courses and community and all that stuff, as well as the book that's coming out with Baker Publishing. So all of that now is sort of focused on helping men really recognize where the holes are in their own life so they can begin to develop themselves, not just save their marriage or rescue their kids. Very cool. And so you have how many boys? I have two boys, one girl. My girl is the oldest. She's 20. And then I have an 18 year old and an almost 16 year old. OK. Yeah, I have I'm close to that and I would say our experience is fairly similar. I was a workaholic and we had very similar tensions. I was in ministry. I was an academic dean, but it was sort of an all encompassing job. And it took some time for people to, you know, get it through my thick skull that I needed to take a step back and really reorient my life because this wasn't the right way to continue living. And so I have I have a son who's just going to college, so he's 18. And then I have twin daughters who are 15. Congratulations. Yeah, that it's really cool. I think the mix is interesting because one of the questions I wanted to to talk through and this is something I've kind of I don't know whether I've struggled with, but it's definitely been part of my thought, you know, because I'm raising a son. Obviously, I'm a guy. And so, you know, conversations around manhood make sense to me. But then you have, you know, my wife is a professional. She's a chief pharmacy officer for a hospital system in our area. She works. She has a career. And my daughters are 15 and they're into sports and they do you know, they they do well in school. They have, you know, aspirations there. They're thinking about these things. How do you think about the distinction between what it means to be a man and what it means to develop sort of godly character as a woman? Because a lot of it almost has to be sort of centrally the same. Right. There's a lot of overlap. And so how do you think about the distinction between the two? Well, for me, there is a Carl Jung quote I love on this, and he talks about the fact that the soul of a man is a woman and the soul of a woman is a man. And I like the what I like about it is that on the exterior, there are things that are going to make me masculine, like in terms of my strength and my energy, physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, developmentally, all of those things. Like this, I am clearly a man and we're trying to throw all that away in culture. But that is a real distinction of the feminine and of the masculine. But the problem is that I actually have to engage not through sensitivity training, you know, I have to actually engage with that part of me that is actually deeply emotional, but doesn't display the same way the feminine does. And so when we encourage men to be more feminine, we're actually losing a part of that beautiful distinction that makes them a man, makes them powerful, makes them strong. And then we do a disservice to women when we ask them to be more masculine, to be more strong, to put in the hours, to take control of their lives in very specific and nuanced ways that robs them of that femininity. And I think for men, when we talk to me, there's plenty of books on this and studies on this, but I'm like, I want to get back to a place where we recognize what a man is, what he brings to culture, celebrate that. And then those men are strong enough to do that for the women in their lives, especially their daughters. Because so much of what it means to have a daughter, and again, my Jake Hamilton take on it, is the priority is, is that that little girl in your house is going to marry a man just like you. Not the way you talked, not the way you wish you were, but the way you loved mom is the man they will marry. And that's what makes this so important as a conversation. But that distinction of the internal and the external, I think is something that has to be explored a lot more, especially in faith and Christianity. It's not something we explore. And then what we end up doing is it manifests to me in really weird ways, like a lot of our worship music is hyper feminine, very romantic, very emotional. So for a woman to connect with

I've been in a gym rat since I was 14, but I said you probably wouldn't ever catch me in a Pilates class. It doesn't mean that I hate Pilates. It just means that there's not a chance in the world that I think, hey, you know what I should do? You know, I should go take a Pilates class. It's so foreign to my experience and just not in any way, shape, or form something that I'm interested in that I can't even envision doing it. So I'm not discounting it as a practice simply because I don't like it. I'm just saying it's probably never going to connect with me, you know, that sort of breath prayer is probably never going to be something that I connect. What I love about what you just brought up is that we have to get away from this idea that masculinity is a personality type. Masculinity is not a personality type because I like, dude, I'm an artist, okay? Like I am going to be the frou-frou emotional guy. I'm going to be the first crier. It's going to happen in the room. Like I'm going to be the dude who's like, I mean, I went to, my daughter is special needs, and she went to her friend's graduation today. Dude, I'm sitting there and I'm like, it is hard for me to hold it together, you know? I'm like, everybody else seems to be doing fine, but I'm that guy. But that's not masculinity. That's personality. That is a type of personality that I bring into the space. And I love that you brought up Pilates. My wife does like super ridiculously hot Pilates, like insanely hot, like to kill you. And I like, she's like, you should come. So like every once in a while, I'll show up and dog, like, I kid you not, like, it's like, it just beats me to death because it's 109 in there and I live in Redding. It's already 115 outside. So it's like, but my point is that I love that you brought that up because I think we get lost in the fact that, well, okay, manhood is a personality type. So if you're like this, you're a man. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. A man is something different than the personality that man carries based on his story, his experiences in life and his perspective on the world. Yeah. And we could say the same of women. I think that's just one of those, as I've looked at leader or at manhood literature, even in the Christian space, you kind of sit back and you're like, well, this doesn't exactly differentiate between men and women. And so what are we really talking about here? You know? And, and so I like what you're, what you're doing there is trying to distinguish this and really carving out a space for men to be men. There are, I think, inherent differences. Obviously we've talked about a few of them. and I think, you know, one of the stories my wife and I talk about an awful lot, we were walking in Chicago at like 11 at night, one night, we were just happened to be downtown. And she's like, you know, this is something I would never do on my own. And I, you know, she told me, she's like, I just wouldn't feel comfortable. It'd be, it'd be a little bit unsettling for me to be walking this late at night on my own out on the streets of Chicago. And I'm listening to her and I'm understanding what she's saying, but I have no context for it. I mean, I'm a, you know, 200 and something pound man. It's like, I'm not the easiest target on the street. And so generally I think that gives you a sense of invulnerability, if not just confidence, right? But the way we embody the world is different. And so the way we express our embodiment in the world is going to be different. And I think that's a real key component of this conversation. So I appreciate that perspective. Yeah. And I think it's embodiment and responsibility. There are like, I can't grow a baby. So there's a different set of responsibilities that comes with the person who has to grow a baby inside of them for nine months. That's a, that's a, I will never, I will never know that. I will never know the beauty and the pain and the sorrow and the, the connection that my wife has with our kids. I won't, I won't ever have that. It's different, not better, just totally different. The same way that you're like, well, I've never, you know, I'm a big dude walking down the street. I've never felt that before. I never felt like somebody's going to attack me. You know, they'd have to go pretty far out of their way to do so. And I'm pretty intimidating, you know? So I love that. There's that distinction of even responsibility for like, no, I actually have to carry myself as a man in that way so that you feel that way and that you feel protected when you are with me. So how do you, how do you go about framing this for men? You know, obviously I read through your book, the journey to biblical masculinity. You've got 12 paths that every man should take. One of those is connecting with femininity, which I thought was really interesting. But you kind of, and I'm not asking you to walk through all 12 chapters, but kind of give a starting point for as, as a man comes to you and says, I really want to reconnect to being a Christian man. What is that? Where do you start them? The starting point is, is just like we said in the description, it is own your story. You have the beginning point of this is recognizing that the way you see the world is not how you see, is not how everyone sees the world, that you see the world as you are. You see the relationship as you are. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed with inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty. More families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. 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If I don't explore those, I end up in cycles of shame and guilt and depression and apathy and anger. I end up in addiction because what I'm trying to do is numb that stuff out because I don't know, I'm doing it. I think it's just a part of quote unquote, who I am. And we're helping men go back and not in some, just there's like the therapeutic mumbo jumbo portion of that, which is like, sure, go back and there's all this inner child stuff. Great. Whatever. I'm neither here nor there. What I'm talking about is God gave you a unique story on planet earth. You were born at the right time in the right season of all of human history to bring him the most glory with the family, the place, the parents, the people around you that you were born into. He didn't make a mistake with you just as much as he didn't make a mistake with where he placed you in the continuum of all of human history. That says a lot right there. And so I want to help men reconnect at the very beginning with what I actually experienced so that I can begin to own it. And what did I lose along the way so that I can rediscover who I was meant to be the whole time. And when you're talking about that loss, my understanding of that Craig, just again, from my gleanings from the whole book, not just kind of the first step, but that loss could be a loss of our own doing. In other words, you know, these are things that we have distorted our desires and followed after our sin and those kinds of things that there's that piece. But then there's this sort of other side of it, that that loss of maybe being told that who we are is less than what we should be in ways that isn't, that there really isn't true. Uh, that, that there's a sense in which who we are is sufficient, not, uh, complete in any way, but we're contributors. We have a distinct contribution to make. And when that distinct contribution is relegated to the, the unnecessary, that is a diminishing of who we are. Is that a James? Absolutely dude. That is a great definition of it. I mean, we're getting, you can kind of get into the weeds from there if you wanted to, to talk about what is a mother wound, what's a father wound, all those pieces. But the way that we describe it as a term coined by a guy named Robert Bly. And he talks about it as the long bag we drag behind us. So when you're born, uh, Alice, Alice Miller, she talks about that. We're born with 360

So you're because what we're doing when we're young is we're testing out connection. What gets me the connection and affirmation that I'm looking for and need for survival? And when I go, hey, I'm funny, and they go, that's not funny. You take funny, and you put it into what Robert Bly calls the long bag we drag behind us. And so we take that part of ourselves and no longer are we 360 degrees. We get a little sliver missing and a little sliver missing and a little sliver missing. You're not good looking. You're fat. You're slow. Oh, you are the funny one. Oh, look at it, guys. He's funny. Look at it. Look how funny he is. So it works in both directions. So we throw away smart because we'd rather be funny because that got us the attention, the affirmation and affection we're looking for. But the parts that don't get thrown into the long bag we drag behind us, and this is why I think men in their middle age get so tired and depressed and frustrated because they're carrying this bag of hundreds of parts of themselves, and they wake up every morning to a life that externally probably looks very satisfying to anyone looking in, going, you've got it. You've got this. You've got that. Your life looks amazing. And he's going, then why the hell am I so tired? Why am I so worn out? Why am I so frustrated or anxious? And our answer is usually connected to that question you asked, which is there's a ton of you that you're not engaging with, but it doesn't go anywhere. You're still carrying it now as a burden instead of your identity, who you were always meant to be. And those parts of you, they don't have to get all affirmed, but they do have to be rediscovered and engaged with. I don't know whether you're familiar with Edwin Friedman's book, Failure of Nerve. Have you ever read that? I've heard of it, but I haven't read it. It's interesting when you talk about carrying the bag behind you, and it's one of those things I agree. You kind of pick your poison, right? Whichever metaphors you want to pick, they're all basically saying the same thing. But what I find interesting about what you just said in relation to Edwin Friedman is Friedman talks about this self-differentiated concept where I understand where I end and where other people begin. And to the extent that we can develop that and maintain it, we then get to be ourselves, not pick up anyone else's anxieties, not pick up anyone else's perceptions, not pick up anybody else. And not in a bad way, like we never accept critique or what have you, but in the very real sense that not everyone's opinion means something to us. Right, right. And so we can hear those things and take them in and really process them and say, does this make sense to me? Does it square for Christians? Does it square with God's word? Do I feel the Spirit's conviction that this is something I need to change? Or is what I'm feeling a disquieted soul because someone doesn't like me? Right, right. And that's huge because what happens is, that's why we talk about stories so much because a lot of this is based on Dan Allender's work. He does a lot of what he calls narrative trauma therapy. So a lot of this may be familiar to someone who's read his work, his book, To Be Told, things of that nature. We reference it a lot in our work and in my book, I reference it a ton. But really what we're doing is, I'm trying to recognize the parts of me that I've tossed away in order to get that approval that simply I'm not trying to perform for my love anymore. I'm not, I'm actually living in confidence because this is one of the phrases we use a lot is self-discovery leads to self-confidence. Because if I don't know where I came from, I don't know where I'm going. And if I don't know what I've experienced, then I don't know who I am. And who I am is deeply connected to how I was connected to my mom and dad. The mom is the first love that tells you you are, that is the first form of unconditional love we're supposed to experience in our lives. So when a son burns down the house, it's like, you know, the mom's in the front yard, like, but he was being so cute. He was starting a campfire and he set up a tent and he was adorable. And he's so amazing. That's a mom. That's unconditional love. He's so cute. He was amazing. I had to let him do it. But a dad, on the other hand, is the first love that chooses us. So he doesn't have to. But when he does, we feel chosen and it carries through our life. So if we didn't have a mom who gave us that unconditional affirmation despite our performance, or we never had a dad that actually chose us for who we are, regardless of how we performed, we end up growing these skews that we have to go back and then trim off a little bit at a time to start to reconnect with the roots of who we were meant to be and where those distortions came from. So the interesting thing about what I, what I hear you saying, I, you talk a little bit about in the book, uh, the call to adventure, right? This call to adventure. There's a part of me that wants to connect these concepts, like really strongly. So as we get to know ourselves, as we get in touch with this story that, that we've been given, as we recognize our distinctive contribution, all these things that you've been talking about, there's this interesting call to adventure that I think gives us a curiosity, not only about the world and about what we could accomplish within it, but about others because we, as we develop a deep sense of who we are, we almost develop a deeper sense that people other than us are not us. Right. And so talk a little bit about how you think about that adventure. Is that, does that factor in? Am I, am I overreading that or? No, I think you're a hundred percent right. And I think what's so hard is we only think about adventure in future tense. So we're only thinking about the forward adventure of what might be instead of the reverse adventure of finding God where he's always been. And that is a huge piece of a man's adventure is going back and going, I want to rediscover the pieces that I might've missed. Go on the exploration of my own soul and my own story to find where God's been hiding all along. Because there are narratives that I've made up that are propelling me into a future. I do not want. And in order to get a hold of that fantasy version of my life, I'm going to get rid of or distort or numb some things that are actually really valuable to me unless I go into the adventure of jumping. I mean, that's all, you know, Joseph Campbell stuff, right? Like I jump off the edge of the cliff, go on the hero's journey. And now I'm in, I love that he talks about. I'm in the underworld. I'm in the darkness and not like evil dark. I'm in the place where my eyes are of no use to me. What I saw, it has to be reinterpreted by my soul and my spirit so that I can get new lenses for the place that I really want to go. When I get back into my marriage, when I get back with my kids, I want to be able to go new places and take them places I've never been. And if I'm going to do that, I have to go back on that adventure. Like so many adventures, like, you know, old myth stories. We talk a ton about myth. So many times like in myth, you have to go back to the places you already were to lay hold of the things you missed when you were too immature to grab it the first time. You know, the entire book, Parzival, the entire book that's coming out that I wrote is based around the story of Parzival and the quest for the grail. And when he goes to the grail castle the first time and he's sitting before the Christ image, the grail king, the fisher king, he's sitting before him. He doesn't have any ability to ask the questions that matter. It takes him going on a life journey to discover how frail and broken and fragile and mysterious and tension filled life is to return back to that castle and ask a question that changes everything about his lineage. So that raises another issue. This is something that seems to come up an awful lot. And I think it's just sort of in the ether at this point. But it's also deeply biblical. And I think we've just sort of missed it or minimized it or whatever we might say. But suffering, and I don't mean sort of necessarily the persecution or anything like that. But let's just say the sort of friction that comes from living life in a broken world, right? You know, at its minimum, it's like chafing, right? And at its maximum, it's death. Right. And so there is something about orienting oneself to suffering in its refining sense as opposed to orienting one to suffering in its destructive sense, maybe, or in its punishment sense. That seems really necessary, right? But it seems really necessary to embrace the adventure, right? You know you're going out and it's going to be problematic, but at the end of the day, you're going to be better for it. Oh, dude. Like, I always ask people this whenever I'm like, you know, whenever I'm preaching, I'm always like, okay, how many of you learned the most in the hardest times of your life? It's like, well, yeah, duh. Like, how many of you learned the most in the easiest times of your life? Everyone's like, no one, right?

With no character and Romans 5 makes it very, very simple for us. It says more than this, like I love that he's like Paul puts it that way. He says more than this, more than, you know, he literally like lists out grace and faith and all these things. And he's like, but more than that, we rejoice in our sufferings because we know that it produces perseverance and perseverance must finish its work so that we can be mature and complete, like, or no, so, so, so sorry. That's that is, now we're in James 1. Sorry. I went to James 1, I married them both, but, but they're essentially the same concept. But what I was trying to get to with Romans 5 was the fact that it produces character. So it's got, we have to get into the suffering so that we can be formed by the perseverance so that perseverance can turn into character and character does and character turns into hope and hope does not disappoint us. And if we want to be messengers of hope on the world, to the world, then the pathway of the messengers of hope, men being messengers of hope in the world, individuals being messengers of hope in the world, we have to go down the road of suffering, learning what long suffering actually is, not just patience, you know, we translated it to feel a little nicer in 1 Corinthians. We don't want long suffering, we want patience. No, I want a long suffer so that I learn how to persevere through that which is hard so that I'm tempered into something useful on the planet. And in a culture that lacks integrity and character, this is the reason we are trying to be more and more comfortable and comfort is not the pathway to incarnational realities, to transformational realities. There's no version of that that actually allows us to become who we were meant to be on planet earth, image bearers of Christ, messengers of hope. All of those things are laid out in the pathway of suffering, which you will experience if you're going to go on any adventure worth having any adventure. I find it interesting because this is something I talk a lot a bit about this with some of my female colleagues and even my wife, right? I'm oriented to this, like I'm vibing on everything you're saying. You know, when I hit the weight room and my my pecs are sore the next day, I'm like, I have done something like this is good. I've I just cultivated growth in my life, right? My wife particularly doesn't necessarily feel that way. She doesn't. She isn't wild on being sore after a workout. And and whenever I talk about this with some of my female colleagues, they're they're kind of like, yeah, that's a very distinctive James thing to say, right? Like I have a, there's a sense in which I really do believe not quite 100%, but like the no pain, no gain sort of strategy, right? That there's, there's a sense in which, and so I guess I'm wondering, is this perspective on suffering? Do you see that as particularly male, predominantly male, right? Because there is a durability to men, uh, perhaps that almost requires us to be broken more severely than women, that there's a sense of vulnerability within women. And I'm not talking just about, you know, physical musculature or whatever, but even, you know, you noted earlier, you'll never be able to carry a baby for nine months. There's a vulnerability to that, that I don't know that we're accounting for. So I'm just interested to hear your perspective on whether, obviously, I think those biblical passages apply to everybody because we think about the way they're expressed within the lives of men and women. It feels very like it could be very different. Oh, absolutely. I think one of the most, one of the most beautiful parts about pain is pain is going to be pain for all of us, right? So how it's expressed in a man is completely different than how it's expressed in a woman. I'm never going to have to carry a baby or push a baby out of my body. I cannot imagine the type of pain that is endured in a person to have to be able to do that. I also don't know very many women working on oil rigs or on fishing boats. I mean, there's the thing is the lack of sleep, the endurance for the body, even biologically, the size of a man's heart and the way he sweats is actually formed biologically by God to work longer hours and be able to work harder than a woman, carry in his physical body with his muscles strength, carrying things. Like, even if you go watch some of the videos right now about women in the military, all of those things, I think there should be opportunity. But these generals are saying the same thing. There's not a version of this where I'd put a woman on the front line. I can't do it because there's not a woman who can carry a full grown man with his pack off the battlefield in the midst of something that I need to happen right now. It's not a better or worse. It is a reality of biological wiring and responsibility from God. Here's the caveat though. This is what I find interesting. I know a bunch of really hard dudes who go and lift weights, who believe in these things. But the moment their wife says something they don't like, they can't take that hit. So it doesn't translate to emotion. So wife stops having sex with you for two weeks and they're like, this marriage is in shambles. Everything's going to hell. And I'm like, bro, you can go out there and work out for four hours, but you can't have a 40 minute conversation with your wife. That's a problem. Like, that's an issue. And then she says something that you don't like and it hurts you so deeply that you're going to like whine and cry like a baby about it. Where where's the dude who was in the gym? Where's the guy who was on the field? Where where'd that dude go? And that is where the rubber meets the road. Because where a woman has that ability for most of them in maturity, they have the ability to sort of take those hits, use wisdom, process emotion, recognize where it's coming from, all those things. Men usually cover up all that stuff by being able to go do those things. So they utilize their strength where it can be demonstrated and seen, but they have no idea. Very few men have the idea of how to do that same strength when it comes to internal structures so that I am unmoved and unshakable, not just physically, but emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually as well. And you, you cover a lot in one of the chapters in your book, the discovering, uh, I think it's true strength by embracing failure. You know, you, you talk a lot about this because it, it, there is a sense. I can remember how hard it was. Um, and, and my wife has always told me my superpower is learning, right? Like I'm a, I'm a quick learner. And so, um, regardless of anything else, you, you know, she's never shy about telling me what she thinks. And so there was one point where I was, we married very similar, just FYI. It's a good time. I remember driving home and I'm complaining about work and I'm telling her all this stuff that's going on. And, uh, she listens to my little mini rant for like 20 minutes or however long I went on. Right. And she just turns to me and I said, what do you think? She just turns to me and goes, you're delusional. I'm like, what? You know, but you know, I mean, she really helped shake me out of a, an ingrained story that I had in my head that wasn't the right story. That was completely leading me down the wrong path. That was disempowering me from doing anything about anything. And she just said, you're delusional. You know, the story that you're telling yourself in your head, isn't the reality. It's too closed off. You need to think broadly about this. And, and, you know, so in those moments where we're speaking about my competency at work, I can handle those things, right? That was, that was about a competency at work. But when we start getting into other areas, like, uh, you know, hey, you're not meeting my needs as a husband or something like that. It is much harder to take. It takes me time. Like I've, and I mean, we've been married for 25 years now. It's still, I have to take a step away and really let my emotions sort of calm down and process in order to do that. Yes. It's crazy how different those two contexts are. Right. But it's because they're underdeveloped muscles. That's all it is. We have men have to start to look at it as if you walk into the gym and you never work out your legs, which some dudes do, they look off balance, right? Something about it doesn't, this whole package doesn't fit. You're like, you worked out the top half, but you've avoided the bottom half. What the heck's going on here? But that's the way it is with our soul. So we never develop those muscles. So the moment that that part of our, of our story and our soul and our, and who, and someone we love deeply, when we have to bear that weight, it crushes us because we, that's, that is why this work is so important because we can help men work on that consistently in little chunks, just like you do if you're working out with the gym. You're not going to roll up if you've never worked out and be like, yeah, I'm going to deadlift 500 pounds today. It's going to be amazing. You're just going to eat, you're, it's going to ruin everything for

ation on a regular basis where we know we're going to get triggered. We know that it's not going to feel great. And we allow it because we prepared ourselves. We're going to the gym. Like if I'm going to the gym, not prepared to work out, something's wrong. I'm going into this conversation to learn something about myself so that I could be stronger in the ways that are going to be most useful to the people I say I love the most. Yeah, very good. Let me, one of the things that I want to make sure we talk about during our conversation is this idea of finding a wise elder. And so as I was reading that chapter, here's what I was thinking. I went to seminary, so I was a seminary student. Finding a wise elder in seminary is, you know, as easy as just throwing a rock, right? You can, you can hit a wise elder somewhere. Your faculty members are usually very willing to meet with you. There are usually older seminary students, especially I went when I was in my twenties. There were almost always older seminary students who had been in ministry and around and were absolutely willing to talk with you. It was easy, you know, just easy to find. Yeah. I'm in my forties now, mid forties. I don't know where to find this anymore. It's very difficult. Like, you know, to identify someone who's really been through the ringer and, and would be not just older than me, but who's really had that experience and set of experiences where they can come and talk to me and say, yeah, I know where you're at with your kids. Here's where I went, or I know where you're at with your wife. Here's where I went. It feels like there's a generational gap, at least in my experience where we just have this, I don't know whether it's the culture has changed so much or technology's come into play or whatever, but it feels like we're all sort of in this mess where we're going, oh no, we've essentially lost all our elders. We've lost our elders. Yeah, we live, this culture lives in an elder deficit for sure. And the problem again, this is just Jay Campbellton's opinion. I'm not, you know, this is not an, it's not like I'm an expert on all this stuff, but from, from my experience wandering through these woods is there's an old story. I'll put it this way. There's a, there's an old story called The Handless Maiden. And the Handless Maiden ends up leaving the Prince and the Prince goes back to find his bride. And he's wandering through the wilderness for seven years and he's crying. And the only two clean streaks down his face are where he's been weeping for seven years. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. 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And he says, I claim you as my own. Anything that wants to get to you now has to go through me. That claiming is the part of elderhood we're missing. So we have a lot of old people, but not a lot of wise elders. And there is a massive difference. Just because you're old, and I'll say it this because you're talking about seminary. It's like, even though you're old and have a degree, doesn't mean you're an elder. You need to own your experience in such a way that when you see a man in need, your job is to claim them, take on their story as your own and make sure they get to the will through the wilderness and back to their bride. That is like, that is something we're missing because we live in an age that hates old. We hate old. We hate anything old, anything older than a week, throw it away. Any clothes that don't last a month, toss them in the garbage. If this is an old, this is an old iPhone, get rid of it. I need the new one. But now it goes all the way. Do you understand that on the planet, let's just talk about Western culture in the U.S. we have more senior citizen homes. Maybe you've noticed this in your own city. More senior citizen homes, apartments, villages than any time in all of our history. That means in culture, we have more people that are senior citizens than ever before. And here's what's crazy about the statistic I'm telling you is we are trying to remove them from culture and put them on the sidelines so we don't have to look at them. We don't want to deal with them. We don't want to, we do not want to deal with the fact that I am going to get old, that my body is going to fail me. I am going to suffer and I'm going to have to do it publicly. No, I'm not doing that. Give me the drugs. Give me the treatments. What do I need? Give me the whatever it is to make me look, feel. I don't care if it gives me cancer. As long as like for now, it gives me what I need. I'm in. And we have got to go to war with a culture who hates growing old. And this is the key. They are afraid of death. They are afraid of death and irrelevancy because irrelevancy is a type of death. Giving into the reality of your life and not the fantasy of it is a type of death. Recognizing your position and the place you have in your house and in your story, that's a type of death. To me, death is not an enemy. It's an ally. If Jesus actually conquered it, then when it shows up at my doorstep, it's a gateway, not an ending. It is the beginning of something brand new in my story that is going to hurt. It's going to be real hard, but I have to pay attention to it. And that's one of the main things we're doing with the fight is we basically say like behind the scenes, not something we're like, And by the way, guys, it's like, but really behind the scenes, I'm like, dude, we are raising up elders in training because the fight as a whole, we're not trying to do this for middle-aged men or young men at all. What I'm trying to do is raise up enough men who can be elders so that we can go after junior high boys. I want to raise up junior high boys that don't have to question when they transition from boyhood to manhood, what their initiation process was like. They never have to look for a group of wise elders because we have it. We have the elders you're looking for. And we do that with one another through serving, through caring, all those pieces, because an elder doesn't make their life about them. I'm not looking to make this about me anymore. We get to a place where we're like, no, my entire existence, I exist on this planet to give away what I have, what I have to strengthen someone else in order for them to go further than I ever thought possible. You know, it's interesting. I mean, we started this conversation talking about our shared workaholism. Right. And I think that that there's a sense in which developing these wise elders is highly inefficient. Yeah. Feels highly inefficient. It's easier just to let people sunset. Right. Go into retirement and leave us alone because we're faster. We're stronger. We're better. And I will say hitting mid 40s. I get it. Like I'm, you know, I don't move as well as I used to. You know, I'm much more careful about the activities that I engage in. I went and ran a Spartan race with some of my buddies who are 10 years younger than me. And we did the longer race. I think it was like nine miles one day. And then we were planning on doing the sprint the next mile or the next day. I mean, I got up the next morning. I'm like, guys, there's no chance I'm doing this again. I'm like, I'm going to die. Like my body just won't take it. But 10 years, 10 years makes a huge amount of difference. So they went and did it. And I was like, I'm just going to have to be comfortable with this and like live with that, this new frailty. But I think there is a sense in which we view it as so inefficient that it isn't productive. But the reality is that's a, that's a sort of a societal setup. Right. And that when we think about the longer term, having wise elders makes so much more sense if we're thinking beyond just the immediacy of what we're doing right at this moment. If we had these longer term, you know, wise elders, we'd be far better off in the long term than I think we

This is the reason we're doing this work, because we should have, we're missing. I don't have it. You don't have it. We may have a few people, you know, like you and I, Mike, because we've made this super practical as a part of our lives. So maybe there's a couple people I could get a hold of, but at the end of the day, where is the school of elderhood that we're walking men into so when they hit 50, 60, they have done the work for decades to fight for their marriage, to fight for their kids, to fight for their faith, to fight for their identity in such a way that it hasn't been all sunshine and roses, but they got, I share this story all the time. What is the one thing Jesus keeps after his resurrection, his scars? Like that is the wildest thing to me because it's a better testimony if when you're born again and you get resurrected, no scars. Look, it was like it didn't even happen, which is what we're mostly promoting. Come get saved and pretend it never happened. Jesus does the exact opposite. He goes, I resurrected, kept my scars. The only man-made thing in heaven is the scars on Jesus's body. And that reality should be our reality because what did he do as a man? What did he do with his scars? He destroyed doubt. I just wonder how many times we're dealing with doubt in culture. We're dealing with insecurity in culture, right? Because that's the internal manifestation of doubt is insecurity. So I wonder how much of our insecurity is simply because we don't know enough men who are willing to share their scars so that I can learn from them, lean into them and find out who I really am. Elders are the ones in culture who are willing to pay the price of vulnerability to show off their scars, to destroy insecurity and doubt in the men that they come across over their story. And I feel like that type of courage, that type of adventure, that type of legacy, that's what I'm living for. And I want to raise up my sons to buy into that narrative, you know, 30 years prior to me, you know, you're not living for you. I'm super sorry. You're not living for you. We are living for something so different. And when that hurts, just remember it probably hurts in them more. And it's okay to stumble and fumble through this, but we have to be willing to bear our scars so that people can see what's really happening and not just the fantasy of what we want to present to them. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, there's, there's a real deep sense in which I think the more vulnerable I am with my kids, the more vulnerable I am with other men in my Christian community and those kinds of things. And I think that's held true, even when I had really strong mentors in seminary and those kinds of things. Right. The impetus for them was to be vulnerable with me, but then for me to really gain anything from it, I had to be just as vulnerable with them. Like there had to be a laying bear of all the junk that is happening and all the hurts and all the mistakes and all of those kinds of things. So that there can be progress through it. If it's just hidden, you're never even going to think about walking down that path. Right. You have to open up the gates and let people walk through it. Yep. And that to me is the key. That to me is the key. That's, that's how I would define courage in a man's life. Like running onto a battlefield is, is a type of courage. Yeah. But another layer of courage is to be able to bear my soul and not lose my masculinity. Yeah. To be able to bear that part of who I am. We always, we, we joke about it like this, like, so, because we do really, we do story work in groups of 12 and it gets pretty deep and pretty emotional and aggressive. So it's, it's a, it's an aggressive weekend that we host, you know, it's not for the faint of heart, you know, it's a, we tell people, it's not a Bible study or accountability group. This is, we call it the work, you know? And so we jump into this work and what's, we always tell men is like, whenever they cry, men want to tend to, to push like this. Every man does almost all men do this. They pull in like this and we always just grab the chin and go, men cry with their heads up. Like we're not going to hide it. We're going to own it. We're going to, if we're going to bear tears, we're going to own those tears the same way. We don't any other battle we're going to walk into. Keep your chin up and own it. And when we own it, take responsibility for it. Not only am I transformed, but like you're saying, everyone around me that is a witness to this is now transformed as well. Really fantastic stuff, man. I, I, the book was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. I haven't looked into the fight quite as much. I got on the website this, this morning and looked at some of the things you were doing. The courses look great. I think, you know, aside from the online courses, you obviously have in-person stuff that you're doing, correct? Yes. And so we host fight weekends and we have another one in coming up this year. So yeah, definitely check that stuff out. And what's the website? Give the website for people who are listening. Yeah, it's thisisthefight.com. Thisisthefight.com. You can find everything. You can find the book. You can find the courses. You can find the events. All of that stuff is on thisisthefight.com. And we'll link to that in the show notes and everything like that. But yeah, I've really, I, I appreciate the book. This was a breath of fresh air for me. These are things that I've thought through a number of different times. Just how do you distinguish, you know a lot of times I think the impression has been that because I lift and have tattoos, I'm manly. And it's like, well, but anybody can lift and have tattoos. It doesn't, it doesn't seem, it seems so artificial to sort of frame it like that. And so what is this? And I really appreciated the way you approached this in your book. I appreciate the way you've talked about it today. And so I just recommend folks go out and check out this ministry, check out Jake Hambleton stuff, check out The Fight and consider doing the course or going to the in-person part. This is fantastic stuff. Hey, before we go, I have one question that I ask all my guests. And so I'm kind of interested in your answer. What topic do you think that Christians should be thinking about today to help them be more faithful disciples of Jesus Christ? Sex. Okay. I'm going to make, I mean, we live in an over-sexed and under-loved culture. And so if we don't understand, it's the reason that culture right now is getting to define sexuality because we never did. So now we're coming. So we're playing catch-up to a world that doesn't want to hear our message anymore. And if we would actually embrace our sexuality, talk about it, not just on how to temper it, but actually talk about the, the sexuality of a man, the sexuality of the, of a woman, and actually be able to embrace that part of who we are, not as a side note, but one of the very first things, I mean, that we were commanded that after our description of male and female being naked and unashamed, then it was be fruitful and multiply. So, so much of that, that beginning narrative is based around sex and sexuality. And, and I'm saying that most people want to turn that into a conversation about sex and marriage. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about sex and sexuality from a biological, spiritual, psychological sense so that we can have a deeper understanding of what it means to be male and female so that we can be the voice into culture on what that looks like and how that defines the success or failure of a culture long-term. I think that's fascinating. And when you, you know, when you reference that early creation narrative, I think one of the fascinating pieces that's almost always lost in English translations is the connection between a lack of vulnerability, like a true transparency and openness because there is no shame between the human couple prior to the fall. But then when you get into Genesis 3, 1 through 7, what most translations almost have to miss, that word translated crafty, if you're familiar with this, you know, the, the serpent was the craftiest animal that was ever created is arun. And naked is arami. And so you have this sort of interesting inclusio of how sin ultimately affects our sexuality. It's core to what happens when, and it's a, it's a distancing effect. Yeah. It's a separating effect. It creates a shame and I don't know, vulnerability is not the right word, but a shame and a separation that wasn't there prior to the fall, which is sort of a fantastic way. Yeah. Yeah. It's like those, I always look at that verse because I've heard that before and I always think of it like the opposing magnets. Like, so now when you put them on the wrong side, they can't touch. But when it's done right and you flip them backwards, there's, it, they naturally come together. It just, it just works. And I think so much of the world is saying, I want it to feel that way. I want to feel okay. With my body, with my, my, the way that I think, the things that go through my head, I don't want to have more. I have enough

Because of boredom in men. And I qualify boredom as lack of purpose. And when I don't have purpose in my relationships or in my life, it is the easiest way to fake feeling fully alive in my sexuality, which is like the core part of feeling alive as a man, as a woman in the fullness of who we are, the vulnerable, it feels vulnerable, but it's a false vulnerability. So it's like, our whole point is to connect with that again, allows us to just bypass all this stuff that we end up falling into that we don't want in our lives anyway. So that's the long answer to that question, but I'm like, dude, if we went back to that and we targeted that, dude, we'd save ourselves a world of hurt and our kids a world of hurt. Yeah, it'd solve a lot of problems. Yeah. Man, I really appreciate you being on the show. Folks, we'll have the book and The Fight linked in the show notes. So check it out. Jake, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I really appreciate the time. All right, everybody, we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Praying Christian Women, the podcast that brings Christian women together to talk about the deep questions about prayer that we're all thinking, but sometimes afraid to ask. Hi, I'm Jamie Hampton, and my podcast partner, Alana Terry, and I would absolutely love for you to join us as we discuss what it means to be a woman of prayer in the 21st century. This podcast will be your go-to for biblical encouragement, inspiration, and practical tips to equip you with the tools you need to live out a more passionate, powerful prayer life. Tune in now at lifeaudio.com or your favorite podcasting app.