00:00 Chris
Welcome to the line within us, a podcast, serving Christian men who are hungry to be the leaders. They are predestined to be. I’m your host, Chris Granger. And let’s jump in today. I have with me, Mr. Kyle Thompson, who is the host of undaunted life, a man’s podcasts. And guys, I’m gonna tell you what this is the podcast every week when it comes out, it’s the highlight of my day.

I jump into it. No matter if I’m running, if I’m, if I’m working out, if I’m driving, doesn’t matter, I’m going to listen to Cal. So Kyle, what’s up. How you doing today?

00:31 Kyle
I’m doing good. Hey, if that’s the highlight of your day, I feel bad for you that, that my voice in your ear holes is the highlight of your day. But I appreciate the compliment.

00:39 Chris
Absolutely brilliant. Absolutely. It’s really good stuff. So in the show notes, we’ll have the links for all you listeners go out there and check it out. I mean, it’s a really good content and follow them on social. You and today I want to talk to cow. He, he had a devotional w that was how to build a godly and manly foxhole.

And Kyle, I taught this just recently at our church. It was great. We get a lot out of it. I love the Proverbs 27, 17 as that iron sharpens iron. So one person sharpens another and, and I’m kind of titling this for, for the line within us. The lion’s den. It’s not a Fox. So the lion’s den for us. Cause we’re, you know, it’s a dangerous place for men that we need.

I’m just curious from your standpoint, what inspired you to, to really get to go there and create this devotional?

01:23 Kyle
Yeah. For anyone that’s listened to the podcast, reading the length of time, or even if you haven’t a good first episode would be episode 1 0 4, it’s called your foxhole. So the thing that’s interesting about this is sometimes I’ll do episodes.

Oh, my gosh, I’m going to put all my creative juices into this one episode and it’s going to be perfect. I’m such a genius. And then it kind of falls flat or no one really talks about it. And then I do other episodes that are like, you know, I put full effort into every episode. I don’t, I don’t mail it in ever, but there’s some episodes that I don’t think are really going to capture the attention of, of the populous, but that one did your foxhole.

And I kind of talked about, you know, having those guys cause a lot of men have 6:00 PM friends, but no. So until about 6:00 PM, they’ve got guys in their life that they can call to help them move something. Or if they’ve got a problem. But after that, those guys really aren’t available to them, but most guys don’t have that guy that they could call at three o’clock in the morning.

No, he’s going to answer the phone. He’s going to grab a shovel and his gun. Cause he’s assuming we’re burying a body that’s already dead or we’re killing them and burying him or something like that. I’m obviously being a little bit tongue in cheek. Guys. Don’t get too offended, but that’s the thing. It was always in the back of my mind, uh, to, to go into that and elucidate a little bit further.

And I did some, some kind of personal research with my podcast and I, I messaged probably about 40 people about Hey, in the last, you know, two years. So the show is there one episode or ask them like, Hey, what are five or six episodes that you just remember off the top of your head? Like, oh, I remember that episode.

You may not remember the number. Every single one of them said. All of it. And I was like, okay, that that’s not, that’s not like a hint, that’s a Bullhorn saying, Hey, you need to dive into this a little bit more. And so that’s why I did the, the devotional and, you know, I was working with YouVersion and that kind of worked out and kind of didn’t and in the middle of working with YouVersion on that, um, I was just like, okay, this is bigger than the YouVersion platform.

This is bigger. And this is not kind of toot your own horn thing, but it’s like, it doesn’t matter where it lives. Cause I was like trying to develop it because they reached out to me to do another devotional for their site. This is something that guys need guys don’t like to read. So that’s why I did it in audio format and just kind of put the notes up there for a lot of other people.

But again, there’s just this, this unbelievable urge for churches to do men’s program. And not actual men’s ministry, or if they’re going to dedicate to men’s ministry, it’s, let’s put guys in a circle and make them talk to each other, even though they don’t trust one another yet. Right. Which is that’s, that’s what women do.

And they can do that and they can sit around for months and just talk about their relationship. A men got to do something together to trust one another. So I wanted to kind of like tease that out a little bit further.

03:47 Chris
No doubt, no doubt. And I love the format because it’s seven sessions. Yeah, we did it over seven weeks. So from a man standpoint, you’re not committing to, you know, months of a Bible study or things like that. And, you know, if you can condense it down, but it really, it just jumps right in. And it captured the audience. My, my demographic for the group that I worked with, I think I had some guys in early twenties all the way up to mid to late fifties.

So, and it captured, everybody could relate to it, you know? So that, that was so I can, I can totally see why, you know, when you pulled them and they said Fox. Y you lean into that pretty hard. And you know, so I’m really excited to walk through. Maybe we can just give our listeners, we’ll walk through each session, just high level for them to understand, you know, what to expect when you jump into this.

Because I, again, I got a ton out of it. So that first session, you know, what makes a godly man, I remember the two truths you talked about and those, those, those 10 bullet points really stood out. But what made you want to start there with the, with the godly man concept?

04:46 Kyle
Well, because I can’t build anything off of a foundation of anything else. If I’m going to be talking about why men should be in actual biblical community with one another, we have to define what a godly man is. And because there really is not a, and a more effective way to jump off than that. And a lot of guys, well, They’re confused as to what a godly man is. And I talk about this on some of the later sessions and on the podcast as well.

We think a godly man is a man that never curses a man that never does wrong. A man that wears really, really pleaded pants to church and says, Hey, I’m praying for your brother, whether he is or not. And I’m not saying any of those things are bad outright. I’m just saying that’s not what a godly man is.

And so that’s why I spent time kind of going to scripture and saying like, here, here’s just a bunch of tidbits that I can throw into you. That, that make a lot of sense. That would be helpful for you to understand what a godly man is. And then we kind of go go further there, but there wasn’t any other place I could start really.

Like, I couldn’t just start with the foxhole. Like here’s what the Fox hole is because I had to get you there. I had to kind of lead you there, like, just imagine, um, I’m trying to think of something complicated, like, um, you know, a lot of guys out here listening to this might be powerlifters. Um, so imagine trying to do a, do a cleaning.

Right. That is a very complicated a multi-step lift that if you do something wrong, you could really, really hurt yourself. And so imagine coming in, and unfortunately there are gyms out there that do this and I don’t advocate it the first day they bring you in. It’s like we’re going to do clean and jerk.

So we’re going to do it to failure because we’re all wearing headbands and we should, or whatever, some dude on Twitter did it. So now I’m gonna do. But you should be teaching people very standard, basic things about this lift and build upon it and build upon it and build upon it. And then one day you could do that lift with a lot of weight on the bar and not feel like you’re going to blow your spine into pieces.

Right. And so it’s kind of the same thing with this. It’s the best place to start, because it was the most simple place to start. It had to be the foundation.

06:35 Chris
No doubt, no doubt. And those foundational qualities. I remember looking around when I was teaching it. And so many of the guys were just, they would writing.

And they were, and I, and I, at the end of it, I was like, guys, now, how many of those boxes do you check, you know, on a day in, day in and day out. I mean, that’s the resilience that you talk about, you know, pushing yourself every day. So that really opened up so much good conversation just to get them going. And again, I’m thinking from that foundation.

07:00 Kyle
Yeah. And for the most part, a lot of guys, they just need a little bit of a push, just a, just a slight push. And again, it’s, it’s kind of. If they’re not used to that group, they need something to attach themselves to as well. And so that’s, that’s the other thing that I think would be most important for guys to understand and recognize is that there’s not always going to be.

It’s not always going to make sense immediately, but part of the reason is because the people that are trying to talk to you and the people that are trying to help you through something are not doing a great job of priming you for what it is that you need to do. So again, I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but I am. I just tried to prime people in an inappropriate way so that they could connect with.

07:36 Chris
Loved loved it. Now, the second, second day I grabbed this, I went out and I got this one cow. So I got, I got the fearless book. All right, excellent. Pound it through it. It was a great book. So cow day two, you talked about what makes a manly man.

You know, we really talked about Adam Brown, fearless. What’s going on there. You brought in a lot from second Timothy and Paul, you know, to his letter there. So I’m just curious, you know, what made you go from what makes a godly man to what makes a manly man? Why did that train.

08:05 Kyle
Yeah. So obviously I’ve got being a godly man is the basis and the foundation for what you’re having to do and what you’re having to build upon.

We also need to talk about what makes a manly man, because there’s a lot of cultural, uh, manifestations of what a man is. There’s a lot of cultural suggestions and caricatures of what a man is, and that’s why we talked about our definition at undaunted life. And that a man is a male that cultivates spiritual, mental, and physical resilience on a daily basis.

And I hate that. I have to say a man as a male, but here we are in 2021 or 2022, whenever this comes out, that’s just the world we’re apparently living in. And in that devotion, I don’t want to, you know, kind of go into all the content, but you know, we, we get into detail about spiritual, mental, and physical, why those three things and kind of what all that means and the story of Adam Brown.

Like if, if you’re listening. Read the book fearless by Eric Blim. What exactly are you doing with your life? Like that is the most important book that I’ve ever read. It’s we have a book list on our website called the 100 books. Every modern Christian man should read list. That’s clearly on it, but that’s my number one book, right?

That, that is my favorite book of all time. Because it’s the ultimate story of resilience. It’s the ultimate story of redemption, a redemption through Christ and, uh, the ultimate story of sacrifice. As most people know, he died, you know, running towards the sound of danger with his brothers over in Afghanistan.

And so it, it’s a tough pill to swallow, even in light of what we’ve seen, even the summer with what happened in Afghanistan. But he’s a man that I feel like was very spiritually, mentally, and physically resilient. Uh, and he kind of had to be not just one quick story on that. He actually, um, broke all of his fingers almost off of one of his hands.

Cause they were riding and, um, in the middle of the desert and their Humvees, and there’s a lot of dust everywhere and they actually hit another American Humvee and his hand was out the window as the Humvee rolled over and crushed his hand. One of my buddies was actually the corpsman on the ground that day.

And he would like help basically glue his hands back together in the field. And so he had to learn how to shoot with his off hand, which is really difficult for anyone that’s shot with their offhand, with their non-dominant hand. But he also, during a training regimen, he took a simunition to his eye, right.

A simulated round to the eyeball and he lost the eyeball. So now he’s having. With his offhand and as off I, and he passes the world’s hardest sniper school and he made it through green team screening to become a member of seal team six or dev group. And I mean, just, just for a guy to be able to do those things, it’s absolutely incredible.

But then also you look at Timothy as he’s passing over, um, and kind of teaching. You know, Paul is kind of teaching Timothy kind of what he wants him to do and how he wants them to take over. And, you know, he’s really, Paul is in spiritual, mental and physical anguish during this time period, but he shows such tremendous resilience and it’s like, that’s, that’s what a mainly man is.

Right? And so some people think mainly men is, you know, drinking whiskey, you need beef jerky and, you know, driving four wheel drive trucks. And here’s the thing. I like all those. Right. Like, I’m very typically masculine in that. I really enjoy all those things, but at the same time, I don’t look at those things as reasons for why I’m a man.

Right. You know, it’s like, you know, someone’s like, Hey Kyle, why are you a man? Cause I do jujitsu. Cause I like eating steak from animals that I’ve killed. Like that’s fine, but it’s not real. And so culturally that’s what we all kind of slip into and step into quite a bit, but it’s just not real. So that’s why I really wanted to get into that part of it,

11:09 Chris
I loved that transition from the golly to the manly. So Kyle, we’ll take a quick break and then we’re gonna jump back into daily.

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So day three, you combined them, which I loved it. It was the crunch godly and manly, and it really made you think, and I loved how you tied Nehemiah in there and the story of, of, of what, what was accomplished there and in that Bible story. So was that just a natural way you’re thinking about, well, we’ve talked about godly. We talked about manly. Let’s let’s bring the worlds.

12:44 Kyle
Yeah, I’m, I’m a narrative builder, uh, just kind of by, by nature. Like, I don’t have like any training in story writing or any of those types of things, but with the entire seven day series, I’m wanting to take you on a journey. Right. So we had to set the foundation with what is a godly man.

And then we have to say, what is a manly man? But then we have to bring those two things together. Because most men will probably be surprised by day three, that those two things can coalesce and become one. Right. I know for me, uh, I became a Christian in high school and the men I saw at my church, you know, first Baptist west in Lawton, Oklahoma, they weren’t the main.

That like, so if, if again, in my kind of small P brain at that time, these are just not men that would, I would have considered to be very, very, mainly all the mainly men route doing something else on Sunday mornings. They weren’t hanging out inside the church. And that’s the paradigm that a lot of people carry that if you want to be manly, that happens outside the church and the church has done men, no favors because the church is very favorable to a feminine men and to women and the modern church.

The way that the preaching is the way that the sermons are constructed, the overemphasis on the lamb of God. Post to focusing at all on the lion of Judah, uh, the music that is selected, uh, being very feminine and, you know, singing to this Neo DD that you can’t see, that is a male that you somehow need to embrace close to your bosom.

Like he’s your boyfriend, it’s just a problem for most men. And so for here, that’s what this lesson, I really wanted to kind of break through that and using the story of Nehemiah. So for your listeners, like reading the first four chapters in Nehemiah, This was a very godly and manly man. And I go into a lot of detail there, but again, man, for, for most guys, they don’t see that as even a possibility that they’re able to be godly mainly at the same time. And I want it to destroy that paradigm.

14:18 Chris
I loved it. I mean, cause it’s it. Cause it’s, you can be both, right. I, and that was the big thing. You know, that Jesus is not your boyfriend. I brought that up. I got a big chuckle out of the guys, but then we start talking a little bit about the worst. And what that looks like.

And, and, you know, and trying to, we were doing some diagnosis on why are there so many moms showing up at your kids and the dad’s not there. You know, a lot of it, it’s kind of, that’s the way the church services are set up the structure. It’s just not grabbing and pulling them. So I love how you went there.

Cause I mean, I think we need to be talking about that more and pulling out these examples. And I think that will, that will resonate with more men to, okay, this is what it’s about, but you know, also the churches have to embrace. Yeah.

14:59 Kyle
So I was actually on a debate show over in the UK here recently. And the guy that was on, on opposite me, I was supposed to be debating these two feminists and both of them dropped out of the debate, which, you know, Hey, I wouldn’t want to debate me either.

Especially whenever their points are wrong. Right. But at the same time, like this, this particular. It was very much so on the egalitarian side of things, there’s not really difference between men and women. Uh, you know, they should have the same roles inside the church, everything’s law. We don’t care about what the Bible says because it makes us feel icky and, you know, I’m very much so on the complimentarian side where, you know, I think that men and women are equal, we’ve just been given different roles.

So like two plus two can equal four, but so can three plus one, right? And so it’s like, we’re equal. We just do things differently. And so the point that I was making there is that men will go where their needs. And if they realize they’re not needed somewhere, they’re just going to go wherever they want to be.

And so if they show up at church every week and it’s clear that they’re not needed and perhaps not even like wanted in any way, shape or form, they’re not going to come anymore. Right. Right. And so these churches are lamenting, like why aren’t the men showing up? Is it that we don’t have enough chili cook-offs is that we don’t have enough, 7:00 AM, Saturday morning, prayer breakfast.

Is it that the pancakes are too cold? Like, no, that’s not the point. It’s that everything you’re doing as a church has repelling them and you don’t. Right. You don’t care because every time that we open up for volunteers, we get 100% of the volunteers we want and they’re 80% female. And you’re just like, well, we got all the volunteers we want, and you’re not thinking about what are the issues that we have this overwhelming abundance of women that want to do things inside the church.

And the men are nowhere to be. Right. The reason the men are nowhere to be found is because you’re repelling them is because they’ve realized you don’t need them, perhaps you don’t even want them there. So they’re going to go do something else. They’re going to go to the shooting range. They’re going to go to the driving range.

They’re going to go prepare for a fantasy football draft. They’re going to go and mow the lawn. They’re going to do something else on Sunday morning, Sunday nights, Wednesday, afternoons, evenings, whatever. And they’re not going to do anything with the church and it’s going to affect them. You know, overall understanding of who God is and the Godhead and you know who Jesus is.

And his totality is grace and truth lion and lamb, because you keep sending the message that you don’t want them there.

17:04 Chris
Right. And so critical. I mean, it’s, as I looked through our church with the youth, particularly the youth age, age, boys, they need to see golly. Strong godly manly man in there. So, I mean, who else they going to learn it from?

They’re not going to learn from the women that are leading the, you know, those, those groups. They need to be shoulder to shoulder with men who are embracing godliness and Manliness and can teach them. Right. So, I mean, to me, that’s.

17:28 Kyle
Well, here’s the other thing. And I think I may have said this earlier, either said it off air. We, we said it when we were talking, but a lot of men, a lot of churches is saying, all right, we’re going to get men together. We’re going to bring some speakers, some, you know, ex NFL football player that used to do cocaine off of hookers butts. And now he’s, he’s a saved man and he’s, everything’s great.

And, and now Jesus has got him and you should listen to him. And now let’s all break out into groups of five. Here’s your list of 12 questions that we’re going to go over over the next 30 minutes and let’s chat it up. It’s not a horrible way of doing things, but it’s not a great way of doing things because again, men don’t connect that way.

Men connect shoulder to shoulder before they connect eyeball to eyeball. Right. Okay. Women connect eyeball to eyeball from the beginning, there there’s a new John Eldridge book that he released with the son here recently. It’s, you know, it’s called a year with men and it goes into, you know, how you can do 365 days, you know, with the same men’s group and all that.

It’s a great resource. But one of the points he made in there is that women can. And will base their entirety of their relationship on their relationship. And so they will get together to talk about their relationship, to talk about their friendship. And that is the center point for what they do. Men don’t typically like to connect that way.

And I take it back to kind of hunter gatherer cultures, you know, I’m, I’m Choctaw Indian. So I kind of have this in my blood, but you know, if you’re all sitting around, they’re not sitting around that morning at the campfire before the hunt, you know, talking to each other about how much they love each other and how much they appreciate one another.

And this is what we’re going to do today. I bet you, there was a lot of. Right. I bet you there’s a lot of stoicism. I bet there’s a lot of preparation. And then when they’re in the field for the hunt, even more so, less talking, maybe no talking at all, maybe it’s just motions. Maybe it’s just eye contact or something like that.

When do they connect? They’ve connected after they’ve taken down the beast right now, they can, you know, start re you know, ribbon one another. Now they can, you know, throw the part of the liver at the guy. Like, ah, look, you got blood all over your face. Like, then you can start kind of being. But it’s only after you’ve earned that circle.

It’s only after you’ve earned that ability to be together. I talked to this group in Tulsa, you know, years ago and I come up and do my thing, you know, I’m kind of a burn it down and walk away type of a speaker. But then after I was done speaking, they said, all right, guys, get in your groups. And I was like, some of these guys are here for the first time.

You just stick them in a group. They’re like, yeah, yeah. We just put them in a group and have jumped into discussion. How’s that working for you. And like, they’ve been doing it for a long time. And I, you know, I kind of have a critical eye for most things. That’s I guess a gift and a curse to it to a certain degree, but it’s like, whenever they, they kind of gave it back to me after the groups broke, I was like, guys, you got to earn those groups by the way, like just walking into a group and it’s like, oh, you’re in this group because you.

Like you’re alive. You have blood running through your veins and oxygen going through like, so you’re just going to be in this group now. It’s like, no, no, you need to earn that group. And again, that kind of comes back to the whole, the whole series as well.

20:05 Chris
Absolutely does so, so important. I love that. How you, how you tie into earning guys, want to feel like that, that they’ve actually accomplished something.

And then the church needs to find ways and really embrace and lean into that and, you know, get outside the box. You know, I feel like we’ve so much, so often my wife tells me all the time, don’t put God in a. So we need inside of our church. Let’s take him out and let’s let guys be guys. So when we got today for, in walks, Jesus and I loved it.

Cause, you know, cause you the question, just a question that, that, that you pose was Jesus, a manly man that just got everybody just sitting back. Really the way I prepped this as I taught my kids. So I will go through, I write my show notes, I put the slide deck together and then I would actually do it as a family devotional.

And if I have all, all girls, my question was like, who do you think of as a manly man? Like the rock or stone cold or all these different types of wrestlers and things like that. I’m like, Jesus, didn’t make. You know, so it was G and then they’re like, well, we didn’t think of it like that. So that led a great discussion and it just, it coupled right over into the Bible study, I live with a man. So, you know, what, what, what led you down to Jesus? A manly man, uh, rabbit trail there?

21:16 Kyle
Well, you can’t talk about what a godly man is, what a manly man is, and not end up was, was Jesus a manly man? You can’t not end up there. And that’s kind of, the other thing is the way that material. Describes Jesus talks about Jesus paints, Jesus to pics.

Jesus is not an inappropriate way. He’s always depicted as this, you know, fair-skinned light featured, you know, almost dirty blonde haired, white guy. It’s like he, he was a middle Eastern Jew. He was, he was a rough dude, right? I mean, his hands were probably calloused up and maybe even broken his fingers every now and then while he was working on his projects.

This was not this soft supple guy that was easily approachable and like, oh, he’s just so cute. And he’s, he’s carrying a lamb at all times and, you know, kissing people in their noses and telling all the women how great their hair looks. It’s like, that’s not the guy. And you think about how. We don’t want to follow a guy like that into battle.

Right. We want to follow Teddy Roosevelt. We would follow George Washington. We want to follow these guys like that. Those are the guys that we want to, you know, throw our lot in with those, with those types of people, but we would never describe Jesus that way. And so, but, but that’s the thing is, is I would, I would.

Challenge anyone listening to this the next time you’re in a coffee shop. Hopefully not Starbucks. They support planned parenthood, but you’re just in a random place. Maybe you’re in the black rifle, coffee, coffee place. Walk up to three guys and say, Hey, I’m doing a little experiment. I’m doing a little a thought experiment.

If I could just steal 30, 30 seconds of your time. If you can think of the manliest men that you know of, right? Whether, whether you know them personally or not, whether they actually existed or not, maybe it could even be someone from a, from a television show, maybe they’re alive or dead. Doesn’t matter.

Who are the manliest man? And the answers you’re going to get are going to be, you know, Jocko, Willink and Tim Kennedy. And you might get people from history like a Jack London, or you might, you might get, uh, I don’t know, you, you may get a George Washington or a Teddy Roosevelt. You’re gonna, you’re gonna get.

Caricatures, you’re going to get the clinics. Would Western characters are gonna get Rambo. You’re going to get those types of guys. I would almost guarantee you, you’re not going to have a single person, no matter where you are. Even if it’s a coffee shop at your church to say, Jesus, you’re not going to get that.

It’s not even in our paradigm to think of him as a manly man. And I think that is wickedly and wildly inappropriate because he is the most complete masculine man specimen. Possible. Right. But we don’t think of him in terms like that. And so that’s why on that particular one, I get into the fact that he’s grace and truth.

He’s lamb and lion, not 50 50 you one in the other he’s 100%, both how the modern church really doesn’t like to deal with that very much. We don’t really like the scriptures where Jesus seems angry, where he seems biting. We don’t really want to deal with those because it doesn’t make him seem very Christ-like.

Right. You know? Cause he was being mean and judgmental of people. I’m talking about I’m clearing the temple. Uh, and you know, since I’ve, uh, released that series, I’ve done a little bit more research. There’s actually a school of thought. That’s fairly substantial that Jesus didn’t just clear the temple once he cleared it twice.

And so this is a guy that made a whip, came back and cleared people out of the temple. Violence and righteous anger to, to clear the temple out because they were violating the dictates of his God, of his father. Um, and so that’s one of those things that for a lot of men, the, you should really get into that.

Like some people are like, if I only had to do one day of the devotional, which one would I do? It’s like, well, I didn’t build it that way. But day number four, you know, is Jesus. And mainly man, because that’s where I challenge a lot of the paradigms that people have that unfortunately have been created by the modern.

24:38 Chris
Yes, absolutely. And I mean, I love what you said. You know, this is a guy that basically Jesus walked in, he yelled and screamed and woke up a dead guy. You know, that’s a, that’s a manly man, right? I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s not some meek little character there. So I loved how those first four days really walked through kind of framing up who, you know, who we need to be like the model.

It shows us the perfect model and then you transition to the Fox. So, so let’s take a quick break and then we’ll jump into day five and that the rest of the foxhole series.

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Day five, what does the Fox hole and the whole deficit. You know, so at this point, I guess you’re trying to transition for me when I was teaching it. That was the transition point to get the guys thinking a little bit more about themselves and the people around them, you know, that you’ve built a good foundation on what to look for, you know, and to some of those, those qualities.

Now you kind of start laying that, that, that really, that deeper, deeper roots of the foxhole concept concepts.

26:38 Kyle
Yeah, foxhole doesn’t really make sense unless you have the first four days. So what makes a godly man? What makes a manly man? Can you be both godly and manly? Was Jesus a manly man? If I start with foxhole, we never get there.

Right? I don’t really feel like you would need to keep going. So the first four are kind of like, you know, can be standalone, but they really dovetail into what you could consider. Part two, which is days four, five, and six or five, six and seven of the devotional. But for us, our definition of a foxhole is a foxhole is a group of men.

Constantly push each other to cultivate spiritual, mental and physical resilience daily. So it goes back to our definition of a man. A man is a male that cultivates spiritual, mental, and physical resilience daily. So it’s having those men around you that are constantly pushing you to do that and doing that themselves.

And I go in there into that episode. And again, Get into too many of the specifics. Cause I want your guys to kind of experience it for themselves. But I talk about what a foxhole is. Not, you know, some people think, oh, you know my fraternity guys for back in college that I see once every couple of years, that’s my foxhole or, oh, the guys from work that, you know, we only ever talk about work things.

That’s my foxhole or, oh, you know, one of my cousins that I really, really enjoy that I haven’t seen in five years, those people are not consequential to your. And so I think I talked about in there about how the four men that were at my side when I got married, I don’t have great relationships with those guys today.

And it’s not because, you know, we had a falling out, we got in a fight or, you know, something like that. We just grew apart. You know, one guy lives somewhere else. I don’t even know how many kids he has. One guy I may see once a year, one guy see two or three times a year. And one guy’s kind of still in my life and in a relational standpoint, but.

Those people are not consequential to my life anymore. It doesn’t mean I don’t have love for them. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t drop what I was doing to go and help them or their families. But at the same time, you need men in your life that are consequential to you. But I talk about the kind of the 3:00 AM friend versus a 6:00 PM.

Fran. You know, that concept. I talk about the I’m on my way. Friend, you know, I haven’t talked about a story about whenever my six week old son was doing emergency surgery. We had to rush him to the ER in the middle of the night. And a guy from my foxhole called me and said, I’m on my way to your house.

I’m going to take care of the dogs. Will you just let me know how to get in? I’ll figure it out. Right. Th this is a guy that didn’t say, Hey brother, I’m praying for you, man. That really stinks. If, if there’s anything I can do, let me know. Cause guess what guys, when someone’s in the middle of a dire situation, but a potential life and death situation, and then you ask them, is there anything I can do for you?

You’ve just added something to their to-do list. Oh, I gotta think of something for Johnny to do right over here. Let me, let me stop what I’m doing. Let me stop praying that my son won’t die. Right. My first born. So that I can make you feel better by saying, oh yeah. Can you go get my mail? Sorry. I’m not interested in that.

Like that doesn’t help me. It’s the I’m on my way, friend. I’m going to do the thinking and I’m going to go make it happen. Right. All I need from you brothers, let me know how to get in the house because I’ll break a damn window and I’ll replace it before, before you get back home. But I’d rather not do that.

So you can you tell me where the extra key lives? Um, but, but that’s kind of the thing for most guys is they don’t have that. They don’t even have a paradigm for that because. They lost their best friends. When they got out of the military, they lost our best friends after their last game, their senior year playing football.

Like they, they just don’t have that friend group anymore. Like the guys that used to get together in the dorm room to play video games every Thursday night, whatever that is. And now they’re 35 years old, 45 years old, and they don’t have a group of guys around them and they’re lamenting it. It’s like part of that’s a you problem brother, right?

It’s like, you’re not developing these people around you to where you can have those types of relationships. That’s why I think those last three parts of that devotional are so important is because I’m giving the guys not only the definitions of how they can do these things, but you know, more specifics as to how they pull it off.

30:09 Chris
No doubt. I mean, perfect dovetail into to the sixth session, you know, do men need a Fox hole? And you know, Kyle, you know, Hey man, wild at heart, I went out and I got that one too. So, I mean, you, you gave some good resources there and I read that, that passage out of John Eldridge. Cause you actually read that into devotional, uh, and.

It was such impactful. And it got me thinking I wanted to do the same thing for, for those guys. And, and I’ll be honest. I had read the book and that part never jumped out to me until I went through your devotional. So, you know, hats off to you there. And I w I guess your point about men never need to be alone.

You know, we’re not built to be alone. We’re built, we’re built to be with other men. So, you know, just curious, you know, first of all, great job on making that tie there and the impact that it has on.

30:56 Kyle
Well, the thing is, is I think I made the point in that one. I can’t remember which, which exact day it was. I’m pretty sure it was day six, but it’s like, should we have a foxhole? Yes. Why? Because Jesus had one. Right? Right. So I talk about the apostles that he called and how he called them and how it was, you know, specific that he did that and how he kind of created that because some people are trying to build a foxhole.

They’re like, okay, we’re going to build a foxhole and let just anybody. It’s like, I don’t know that it’s necessarily a good thing, which I get into to detail that on the devotional as well. But if you’re in a foxhole, you’re not in isolation because you’re doing life with people, right. People you’re accountable to people and not in the accountability group since, but literally, like, I think I may have even said the example in there.

Sorry, I keep saying that, but I did this, I wrote this content about a year and a half ago. Um, if I were to say something off-color to my wife, like, let’s say I’m out to dinner and it’s three or four of my foxhole guys and their spouses, and we’re all having dinner or something like that. And I’m kind of a sarcastic guy.

I like to kind of rip a little bit and every now and then I’d do that to my wife. She’s not one of the guys, it can hurt her feelings. You know, everybody is probably been there, but let’s say I say something kind of unnecessarily biding to one of my, uh, to my spouse and I’m in front of some of my foxhole guys.

I would fully expect. That one of my foxhole guys would probably on the way out to the car, something like that, you know, kind of easily pulled me aside, snatch me up by my shirt and say, brother, you hurt your wife. You wounded her. When you said what you did at the dinner table. I don’t think you did it maliciously.

I think you did it to try and be funny. It’s not funny. And you’re not going to talk to her that way, especially not in front of me. You need to take care of that on the ride home. I love you. See you later have a good night. That’s different, right? That’s putting some chips in the center of the table and most guys just go along to get along.

They don’t want to challenge anybody. I don’t want to judge and Hey to each their own. And my daddy told me once. No, no, no, no. In those moments, when you see one of your brothers screwing up, it is incumbent upon you to try and fix that. And so many guys are scared of, of making their friends mad or, you know, offending them or feeling like they’re being judged or something like that.

And the thing is, is in most of these situations, the worst case scenario is that you get punched. Right. That is the worst case scenario. Right? And it’s like, if you never been punched in the mouth, you should try it. It’s not that bad. Like it it’s, it gets a little addicting at times as well. And so it’s just one of those things for most guys is I’m trying to get them out of their own heads where the, the be all end, all their relationship is, you know, 17 year old, just signed to play for their favorite college football team and what their favorite IPA is this month.

But that’s not something that’s going to lead to those deep level relationships, because guess what? At three o’clock in the morning when your world is falling apart, it does not matter what a high school kid has done or the school he chose to go play cornerback for. That’s not going to come into the account.

So you really need to set up a life with guys around you that are connecting with you on a much deeper level.

33:38 Chris
No doubt. And I mean, that, that was such an impactful conversation. Just talking about those attributes and what’s important, the challenging each other. And then that led us to the day seven, you know, building and maintaining.

And I’ll tell you what Kyle. Well, we talked, well, we went through this. There was a lot of looking at the ground because I think the guys were looking at some of the attributes, you call it out and they, they got to thinking, cause my challenge to them was th the way you challenged in your division. Do you see these attributes in yourself?

Right. You know, you have to be a godly man first, before you can go out and a manly man, before you can go out and start building these foxholes. So this was a challenging lesson, you know, when we really walked through some of those, those parts. And did you, did you design it to be that way to really get to the thought’s going to get to, to get people looking at themselves and the people around them?

34:28 Kyle
Yeah. The thing about it is this is men aren’t crappy today because they’ve been challenged to. Right, right. It’s because I haven’t been challenged at all. Right. You know, we’ve we built these, these insulated lives where we’re never being told we’re wrong. We’re never being told we’re a failure, uh, where w where we’re doing things wrong, but we’re not letting anybody in behind the curtain to kind of see what could possibly go wrong.

That’s the lives that we’re living in. So I’m glad there was a little bit of Naval gazing in that room. Right. Because if you look at my list of, of things that a foxhole guy is or characteristics and all that, and you’re like, man, I check all the boxes, dude. Sign up to be the next Christ because you’re crushing it brother.

Like you’re, you’re absolutely. I mean, you don’t need me, like, why are you listening to this devotional? Why are you listening to this podcast? You don’t need any of this. You got it all figured out brother, but again, you’re never going to be that. That’s got all the boxes checked at all times, right. You’re constantly going to ebb and flow.

And I talk about spiritual, mental, and physical resilience. There are a lot of guys that crush it at one of those categories. Right? You got Jim bro guy, right. That can run a marathon and dead lift 600 pounds. Like he he’s gym bro guy, but he hasn’t read a book since. Right. And so it’s like, bro, your brain’s falling apart, but your, your picture do look nice.

Then you got the other guy that’s like a bookworm, but you know, if they had to sprint, like to the end of the neighborhood to save the life of a child that child’s gone and probably then, but we’re all gonna have a heart attack on the way. Right. And cease to exist. And for a lot of. Th the moment they feel like they don’t measure up.

It’s like, oh, they want to take their ball and go home. And I’m like, no, no, no. I’m calling you to something better than that. And the reason why I’m calling you something better to that is because God created you to be something better than that. This is easy. This isn’t like your Sunday school answer guys.

It’s like, oh, if you’re having trouble in this area and you can’t fix it, let another guy get under the bar and help you carry the weight for a little bit, until you can get back on your feet until you can figure. How you can take care of a certain, uh, that certain aspect of your life. And that’s why I kind of broke it down, like as tangibly and granularly, as I could, you know, you need to identify foxhole guide, you need to refine your foxhole and then you need to maintain it.

This is going to require work. Again, we live in this society where Americans were like the biggest consumers I believe of, of self-help content and kind of this new agey believe in yourself. You can do it content and all that. The problem is, is that’s not real life, right? The problem is, is you keep reading the next book and you’re just as jacked up as you were after you read the last book.

Right? But there you’re going to keep spending 24 99 on the next book by the next guy that’s is going to definitely help you. It’s going to help you definitely figure things out. And we don’t just get to work. Right. A lot of guys theorize about what it would be like if they got in shape, you know, they get ready to get.

Right. You know, they’re 50 pounds overweight. They haven’t worked out in a long time and you know that they’re tired of buying new pants. They want to kind of maybe fit back into some of those old pants. And they’re going to read blogs about running. They’re going to read, you know, studies about the best time of year to run and the best types of shoes.

And they’re going to go to red coyote or whatever store. And they’re going to, you know, run on a treadmill for 30 seconds while they take video their feet to see if they need to get super nading shoes or protonating shoes. And they do all this research and you know what? They never do. They never. They never just run.

They never just put on shoes of any kind and hit the payment and run. And that’s what most guys do in relationships. They’re like, oh, I don’t have any friends. I guess we’ll go back to looking at porn and jerking off or, oh, I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any guys around me. Oh, I guess I’ll go do something else.

They focus on other things that they can control where they feel like they’re the master of their domain. And then they lament how they’ve ended up where they are in. Right. And I can’t stand it. The physical thing is the easiest one to see. Cause if somebody is not cultivating physical resilience, you can see that, right.

There’s very few bad bodied people. Right. You know, for every Daniel Cormier, Tyson, fury, these dad bod guys that are absolute BAS, there’s a hundred guys that are just fat and lazy. Right. They eat too much and move too little. And so that’s the easy one to look at and I’m kind of getting off on a tangent there, but the whole thing kind of bringing it back to the whole foxhole concept.

It requires. Right. And I’m not going to tell you anything right now that you haven’t heard before, but I’m going to say it in my own voice. Anything that’s worth accomplishing is going to be difficult, right? Like any book that’s going to give you that tangible knowledge that could shift the paradigm of your life.

It’s going to be difficult to get through. You might have to reread a page. Right. Anything that’s physically worth accomplishing, whether it’s winning a jujitsu tournament or competing, you know, finishing a 50 K or, or doing a triathlon or something like that, it’s going to suck. It’s going to require resilience.

The ability to bounce back, bounce back, and also spiritually God may allow Satan because Satan doesn’t have power. He has, he has the amount of power God allows him to have. God may allow Satan, which is weird for people to even hear it that way too, to challenge. In certain ways so that he can bring you through it and make you better because he’s got another task for you down the road that you’re not ready for brother.

That’s why I tell people that you always have to be ready and the one big pushback. And I’ll kind of throw it back to you because now it’s like turning into my own podcast here, but the big pushback I have, like guys, if they pushed back on the knee of this, they pushed back on the physical stuff.

They’re like, so you’re saying, if you don’t have a six pack, you can’t be a good Christian. And they think they’re making a great point. I’m like, that’s not the point I’m making, but can you imagine. If God had something for you to do for him and his kingdom that required physicality. And he had to wait for you to go and train, think about Nehemiah, right?

He didn’t say, Hey guys, we need to rebuild the walls of the city and the gates and everything like that. But before that, we’re going to do a 90 day. We’re going to do P90X. We’re going to get ready and we’re going to, you know, we’re going to take our soft hands and make them calloused, and we’re going to prepare, and we’re going to do this.

Or in here, we’re going to do a three week course on how to hold a shovel in your right hand and a sword in your. That’s not what happened. It was, we’re getting to work and we’re starting to Dawn hope you’re ready. So that’s why I tell guys all the time. Like, and again, God may not. I just think about, like, I think about all these ridiculous scenarios.

It’s like, if someone called me right now and said, I broke my leg. I’m supposed to run a 5k for charity in the morning. Can you please come and do it? Well, I can do that because I’m prepared to do that. Hey, I’ll step in for your brother. And what if somebody at the finish line doesn’t know Christ and they’re dying and I’m up, I’m helping them over to the table to get water and a banana.

And then we strike up a conversation and we talk about. Their childhood and how they didn’t think they could ever believe in a God. And we have that conversation. Let’s say that person ends up accepting Christ, or let’s say, I just put a rock in their shoe, a figurative rock in their shoe about Christ and about God and about, you know, how a world can be created by an omniscient, you know, observer and creator of all things.

And down the road, they accept Christ. Okay. I couldn’t say to that person on the initial phone call, man, I haven’t ran in about six months brother. Like I don’t really think I can do it. Right. Think of the opportunities you miss, just because you weren’t ready,

41:03 Chris
but that’s right. We have to be ready and I’ll tell you what, it’s going through. This. This was a convicting devotional. It showed areas in my life that I need to work on. And I think that’s the purpose. That’s why you built this. You’re trying to identify, like I said, none of us are Christ, but we got areas to work on. Mental and spiritual resilience. I mean, there’s areas that we really need to dive into.

And I tell you one thing, Kyle, that, that going through it, this was, this was a hard one to grapple on. Where do I prioritize time for, you know, the physical thing you got it? I mean, I, I definitely put that in every day. You know, I did a 5k this morning. I just, you just, you just, you just run. So, I mean, you hit the payment, uh, you know, spiritually finding, I feel like that’s where most guys.

You know, kind of get lax and, you know, I’ll read my Bible tomorrow and tomorrow always turns it to the next day and the next day and the next day and all because the world puts so many things in front of us. And from a schedule standpoint, I mean, you have small kids or a small one. I think you have one on the way I have three daughters and they’re getting to that point where they’re playing sports and, and they’re doing all these different things.

What’s your great. But it gets your calendar so busy. And I think Satan, a lot of times he uses the tool of, of busy-ness to pull us away from what’s important from a spiritual, mental, and physical resilience, because we’re doing all these good things for our family, but are we really, you know, making sure we’re staying sharp as. ’cause we, we have to lead our families, man. Nobody else is going to do it for,

42:28 Kyle
well, let me actually a cop in there as well, like here. So guys you’ve heard the fearless book wild at heart. So I’m going to add another book to it. It’s a book called family shepherds. so it’s a book that he wrote back in 2011, but he’s basically talking about a lot of things that you just brought up to where it’s just like, most men are spiritual thermometers, not thermostats.

Like, I don’t think he actually says it in that way, but it’s like, most guys are just like, Getting the temperature of the room to see how much they can fit into the crazy schedules that they’ve allowed for themselves. And they’re not dictating terms to their situation, they’re allowing their situation to rule them.

And so if you’re called to be the spiritual leader of your household, and yet you don’t have the stones to say, you know what, we’re not signing up for fall baseball this year. Why? Because we’ve got. In back-to-back-to-back things for the entire year. And we’ve been missing out on church and apologizing your kids, kids.

I have not been leading this family in, in a spiritual way. I prioritize things that were outside the church that were outside of Christ. And we’re going to reset as the Thompson’s we’re going to reset as the Jones is we’re going to resize the whoever’s. We’re going to hit a reset button and think of.

The, the life lesson that you just taught your kids there. Cause you know what, they’re not going to remember that fall baseball season. Right, right. They’re later in life, you know, considering for your daughters, the type of man that they want to marry, they’re like, what’s going to make their hearts go pitter patter.

Now what’s going to make them flutter into the next room. Is it, you know, their 25 year old man boy boyfriend. That’s like, yeah. Back when I was 16, I played fall baseball and it was so good. And I hit so many home runs and like, oh my God, I’m so awesome. Or is it going to be the guy that. Man, my dad, when I was 16 years old, I really wanted to play fall baseball.

Cause I wanted to, you know, prepare to get to college and, you know, be a baseball player. And I wanted to get those extra reps and those extra at-bats, but man, he hit the reset button on our family so that we could realign spiritually. And that has changed my life for forever. I’ll never forget that again.

I just pulled that, that example out of my butt, but yeah. Most guys don’t have what it takes to do that they’re not equipped. And with undaunted life, our entire mission is equipping them to push back darkness. That’s part of the darkness. Your schedule is darkness. When you look at it and you see all these different colors and no gaps and no space.

And you’re like, man, I have no idea why I feel exhausted all the time. It’s like I do. You don’t even have to pay me to sit on my couch for me to tell you, it’s, you’re doing too many things and you’re not prioritizing the things that, you know, matter. But. God’s kind of the constant, God will always be there.

God will be there whenever we lose our job or when there’s a tornado or when one of our family members is sick. But for the most part, we just put them on the shelf and when we need them, we pull them off the shelf, blow the dust off of them and say, rub his lamp. Like he’s a genie. Hey, can you give me this great stuff? Cause Joel Olsteen said

45:01 Chris
that’s right. That’s right. It’s unreal. And I mean, I’ll tell you what such an impactful message dear Kyle. We’ll definitely put that link in the show notes for listeners. Check out that other book as well. You know, taking a position like that. Uh, that, that was a, that’s a challenge right there.

You just convicted me right there. And maybe I need to look at the challenge when we finished our next season. We’re in the middle of basketball right now. Maybe it’s time to pump the brakes a little bit, and that it takes a manly spiritual leader to be able to do. You know, but it could be the right move that, that you guys that are listening need to make.

So, Kyle, this has been phenomenal. I can’t tell you enough, you know, this how to build a Galilean manly foxhole, unbelievable content. How can people find you? Where do you want them to go to learn more about undaunted life supports you? Things like that, because we definitely want to do that at the line with.

45:47 Kyle
Yeah, and I know you have all the stuff in the show notes, but guys, our website is just www.undaunted.life. And anywhere you listen to podcasts, whether it’s apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere, you can find an undaunted life, a man’s podcast. But the, the big thing for us and kind of what we do is we’ve given away since 2017, we’ve given.

Hundreds of hours worth of podcast content, hundreds of hours worth of devotional content, I guess. So, you know, all told and all put together and we don’t sell anything other than t-shirts, which we make like five or six bucks off a t-shirt, you know, and every time shipping goes up, we make less money.

That’s not why we, we we’d sell t-shirts, but the only way we’re able to sustain what we’re doing is through donations. And so we have a lot of guys that have hopped in on either one-time basis or even a monthly basis to say, you know, they, they looked at their budgets. They’re like, 50 bucks at the cigar shop.

Last month, man, I spent a hundred bucks taking clients out to dinner. I took, you know, I spent this much money on that, but they want to help equipment around the globe to push back darkness. And that’s one way to do it. I mean, this year, our podcast has exploded in listenership, but also we’ve doubled the amount of podcasts we’re putting out.

We put out another devotional, we’re going to be putting out more. The only way we’re able to pull that off is if guys support us. And so we would encourage guys on our website, it’s undaunted law.life, backslash donate. Uh, we’re not going to be shy about it. Like you guys, if you want us to keep putting out content, you know, it’s kind of a put up or shut up, put your money where your mouth is saying, and if you never give us a dime, that’s okay, too.

We want to keep filling your brains with stuff. That’s going to equip you to be able to push back darkness because that’s why we’re here.

47:10 Chris
That’s it? That’s it. So for the line within us listeners out there, ghosts. Listen to it. And then I’m gonna challenge you, you know, make some donations, support, support car.

What they’re doing are daunted life. It’s unbelievable. It’s changed my life. I’ll tell you it’s been a blessing ever since I got connected and started following Cal. So, you know, check out those show notes. We’ll have those links. There’s cow. Thank you again, my brother. Anything that you want to add before we wrap up?

47:34 Kyle
It’s great. Thanks for inviting me on.

47:35 Chris
Yes, sir. You have a great day.

47:36 Kyle
You too.

47:40 Chris
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