Finding Your True Identity

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Visit the marriage gift.com today and order your copy and give your marriage the greatest gift, powerful and meaningful prayer. Visit the marriage gift.com today. Hey, marriage after God, family. This is Aaron Smith with Marriage After God podcast. Welcome back to another episode. In this episode, I’m interviewing a man by the name of Kurt Storying. He is a fairly new believer. Him and his wife were saved about two years ago, and he has a story of God taking him on a journey from seeking out truth in his life, to finding the truth in Jesus Christ, starting a business to minister to dads and husbands, and then shutting that business down because God was calling him to something deeper, something more important, understanding who his identity really was, where he finds his true identity, which is in Christ Jesus. And we get to go on a journey with him hearing about how God was leading him along the way, how he was using his wife in the process. And it’s really encouraging. We talk about a lot of really awesome things. And for the men specifically, there’s a lot of really encouraging tidbits. So I pray that you enjoy my interview with Kurt Storing. Hey, I’m

Aaron. And I’m Jennifer.

And we’re the host of the Marriage After God podcast. Our desire is to help you cultivate a marriage that chases boldly after God’s will for your life together.

We want to invite you to subscribe to our show wherever you watch or listen.

We are so glad you’re here and we pray that our discussion truly blesses you and your marriage.

Welcome to the Marriage After God podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of the Marriage After God podcast. I’m here with Kurt storing this gentleman I found online on Instagram actually, and I found him a little too late and it’s something we will talk about later. But Kurt, welcome to the Me After God podcast.

Thanks, man. I really appreciate having me on, especially because like you said, it been a little bit of, it’s been a multi month journey to get here, so I’m excited for this to happen.

And actually your journey is what inspired me to reach out to you and want to have a conversation with you is because you’re going through a journey. Every marriage is going through a journey. We’re at someplace entrusting the Lord all the time. And so I thought I would make an interesting conversation to talk to, but why don’t we, I would imagine a lot of my listeners have no idea who you are. So why don’t you give as best as your ability, long, short, however you want to do it, who are you? Give us a little bit of your background. Maybe even tap into why you started that original ministry, dad, work on Instagram and then we’ll go from there.

Yeah, I will try to keep this as succinct as possible, but it does help with context. So I am a father of four, three boys and my youngest is a girl, praise God, amazing. 11 through one. I’ve been married for 12, just about 13 years, and it really sucked. At first it really sucked. We were very young. I think we were 22, 23 when we got married. Had a kid, Natalie was pregnant within two months or whatever of us getting married. And we both came from broken homes and just really for some reason had a conviction that we were not going to be the ones to break as well. We were going to be just a great family. We’re going to show ourselves what it looks like to not give up. And I dunno what gave us that confidence. There was nothing that we should have been confident about because our backgrounds should have pointed us to becoming statistics.

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Unfortunately, so many couples are who come from broken backgrounds, and I see now in retrospect having not even been a Christian at the time, that God somehow for some reason for his delight, kept us through all of this. And so we’re so thankful for that. But because it was so bad and because I’m so, I just have a longing to not be bad at things and I was seeing the damage and the hurt I was doing to my wife and my two sons, especially at the time, my older ones, I randomly happened to cross sort of self-help. And honestly,

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I was frustrated inside. I wasn’t feeling good about being a dad, being a husband, I was like, oh, this was way harder than anyone ever made it look because in my family we didn’t talk about stuff. So here I am struggling and at least I have a business and at least I can spend a lot of time on that and at least I can feel some value because I’m kind of sort of trying to make it work. And one of the guys I was following in my entrepreneurial journey started meditating. He said it was making him more productive. And so I was like, oh, I’d love to be more productive too. But there was something about the just sitting and noticing myself for a few minutes at a time that, I dunno, it did something to me. And so I didn’t yell at my kid as quickly the next day I was like, wait a sec, something’s happening here.

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So I ended up going slow down. Yes, it slowed me down big time and started to show me that I was very controlling. And essentially what it did is it just illuminated who I was more clearly. And I see that the fullness of that is obviously in Christianity, in prayer, in repentance, in just being open to what God’s doing. But it was a step on what I now see as my journey with God. And so anyway, story short, it sort of works for something and I just go all in. I start going for everything I can possibly find on being calm, communicating better, being just not a terrible husband and father anymore. Because honestly, it got to the point probably four years into being a dad that I just thought I was the worst part of my family’s life and I should just kill myself.

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So this is sort of the depths of my despair, and it was almost as if I skimmed along the edges of rock bottom for a long time. I was pretty miserable. And so again, I praise God that he sort of let me figure it out in that time. And I did get better, not great by any means at all. And even today, I still struggle like everyone else does. But I went from thinking I was the worst to actually having some connection. My wife and I had a pretty good marriage. I was feeling pretty confident. We had a third son and I was much more calm and I could really love him instead of controlling. And I thought, you know what? This is sweet. I’m awesome. I don’t need to do any of these things. I’m doing men’s group breathing, calmly reading books. I’m like, I’m just going to disconnect from it all. I figured it out and the massive, massive epitome of pride, I knew it. I figured it out. I’m the best.

You had all the

Answers. Yeah, it worked. And I was the only guy I’ve ever seen who it worked. I was in a men’s group with a bunch of guys and everyone kept stumbling over the same hurdles. And here I am the only dad, the only married guy, and I had figured my life out. Hooray. And then so funny how God works. A week after that decision, Christ came across my desk, I’ll say three times in that week, and I was like, what is going on here? So long story short, I eventually become a Christian, hallelujah. And it was because of this struggle and everything I was learning, I ended up starting this business dad work, and it was just to help guys who were like me, struggle a little bit less, be a little bit better dad, and I was just sharing my story and then became a Christian during that particular business, which was hard to navigate. Like, oh, all these things. I don’t think they actually apply anymore because God, but what does that even mean? So did that for another couple years and then there was a huge transition point just over a year ago where God just put something in my heart that said stop. And so I will stop there because I think that’s probably a good context and just let you take this where you would like

It. Yeah, so I mean your story is amazing. I just love how God works because if we were to orchestrate our own stories or someone else’s story, we wouldn’t have done that. We wouldn’t have put these other things in your path. We wouldn’t have gone that way. But the Lord uses all of those things for his good, for our goodness, our good and his glory. How long have you guys been married now?

Almost 13 years.

13 years, amazing. And you said when we talked last, it was a few years ago, you guys got saved?

Yes. It was two and a half years ago

And you started the dad work business just prior to getting saved

About a year before that.

Amazing. So in this journey, so you’re married and you’re realizing, like you said, you’re skipping along rock bottom. And to be honest, I feel like that’s a lot of men’s stories that we’re just skipping along rock bottom, not recognizing all of the bumps, scrapes, bruises that are coming along the way and not even realizing that we’re on the bottom, we’re just kind of drifting, which is almost worse. I would imagine then just being just face down, rock bottom, having nothing left, you still had a life, you still had a career, you still had your family who loved you, and even though things were hard and weren’t perfect, you had a structure in your life, you had elements of your life that many people would be like, oh, he’s got stuff figured out. Even when you knew you didn’t, and that’s a hard place to be, but God didn’t stop there and it sounds like he got a hold of your heart.

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I want us to take a step back. So there was a transition from you had answers, things were working because sometimes as believers we can say, oh, people who don’t have God, they can’t make things work. They’re not going to have peace and joy and they’re not going to have goodness in their life. But that’s not true always. We can’t just equate Christianity to everything’s peachy, and if you don’t have Christ, you don’t have anything good because there’s a lot of people out there. You found answers to things that probably were pseudo Christian, they were pulled from concepts that the Bible talks about, but they were totally anti or sans Christ. It was like everything without God. But there was a transition there you said, from having these things that are working, these spiritual pseudo Christian things, meditation, self-discipline, all these things that God actually does for us also and desires from us. But what was the transition between, you said Christ came across your table at your desk three times one week. What was that? I want to know that those little moments,

And one of the things that I am very convinced of is that the reason that the sort of modern secular humanist experiment is so in vogue right now is because it actually is a parallel and perverted track from God’s truth. Amen. That’s so true. And the devil masquerades as an angel of light and well, what do we see, particularly me or I should say particularly my journey, the spaces I was in, it has nothing to do with me.

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I was in sort of a new age space and it was very much about finding the quote divine masculine in yourself. And if you just go back to the beginning and heal all your inner child wounds, all of these things, you could eventually find the perfect stainless you who lived inside of you and you could sort of ascend to the heights. Now there was always a talk of the light, there was always the talk about the lightness and the actual light and divinity, but it was always perverted because it would put you the individual as God. And they don’t say that necessarily, although some of them do. They don’t necessarily say that. But all of this stuff, all of the self-help without Christ is just self worship. And anything that’s not God that is worshiped, can’t handle being worshiped and will eventually crumble. And I certainly saw that in my life. And so I wanted to touch on that because I think for someone who’s new to Christianity like me, I can see both sides.

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And I think it’s sometimes helpful to remember that if you have been a Christian forever, maybe you haven’t seen these other areas where people are trying to find truth. And I just wanted to say that because man, people are maybe even well-intentioned looking elsewhere because the enemy has tricked them. It looks like light. But my wife, she had a great saying, which is all these new age practices were kind of vegan, cheese and chicken. They look the same, they’re trying to be the same, but they’re just not the same thing. That’s a good analogy. The reality is only in Christ. And I’m so grateful every moment that I bring it to mind, which should be every moment of my day that he pulled me out of that because a lot of people stay stuck. But the sort of specific story, which is so frustrating because I really don’t like social media and I am off it now 99% of the time, and I say, I don’t want to do that again.

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But you know what? I found Christ on Instagram, so I did an Instagram account. Crazy. Jesus. I know. It’s crazy. I had an Instagram account dad work, Kurt, and that’s where I was running my business mostly. I found most of my clients there. So I’m making posts and I’m meeting guys in the space, Hey, you’ve got a men’s group, I’ve got a men’s group. What’s working? How are you getting followers? And there was three guys and I wish I could remember the third one, but I know two of them for sure. And they started posting things in their stories about Jesus. They had also, one of them had recently become a Christian and one of them was months away from becoming a Christian like me. They were on a journey.

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They were just at this precipice of their journey and they were sharing about Christ in a way that for me at that time was strangely different than anything I’d ever seen. It was appealing to me because they showed Christ as masculine and nowadays, do I care about that sort of thing? Amazing. I’m not sure, but it was really important at the time, and that’s a longer story that I’m sort of passing over, but at the time I was like, I had always just seen Jesus with the rosy cheeks and Jesus as my boyfriend and all that cringe stuff personally that I think it’s cringe, not a lot of reverence I would say in the Christianity that I saw growing up.

Yeah, I agree with that actually.

And there’s a lot of stuff that I’m sort of continually surprised about as I hear people who have been in it longer than I’m like, oh, really? That’s how people do it? So anyway, I saw these people post about it on Instagram and I just started asking questions. I was like, why did this come up three times? And it was like a veil was removed from my eyes and where I went, I have looked for truth literally everywhere, like deep meditation, illicit substances, breath work, men’s group, all of this stuff, Eastern religions, Taoism, Buddhism, all this stuff. And never did I once think to look in Christianity. I just had been in what most people would call the Christian West, like, oh, this is what it’s about. This sucks. Obviously Christianity’s wrong, but it was a perversion of the thing itself that I think so many of us miss. It’s like, well, why would we want this when we’re in the Christian West? Well, for me, I don’t think this is very Christian. This might be the post-Christian West that we might have been built upon, but I think we sort of long missed

That at some point, maybe it was closer at some point,

And I think that that probably gave rise to so much of what we enjoy today and we take for granted today. But anyway, I was asking these questions of these guys who had been posting and sort of challenging them on it. Well, what about this? What about this? But because this veil had just felt like it had been taken off my eyes, I just kept finding answers and I spent six months trying to disprove it. I was so embarrassed that I would possibly ever consider myself a Christian. I used to think, Hey, that’s only for people who are scared of death and I’ve conquered that. I’ve thought about that. I’ve meditated on that. I’ve done all that. I don’t care about that. And so my judgment was against myself and I was like, if I become a Christian, I’m going to think I’m weak and praise God, he got rid of that and I was white not clear at the end.

And you realized you were weak.

And I realized that I was weaker than I ever could have imagined. And that only Christ can I stand. It is. Yeah, it’s incredible. So anyway, I was white knuckling at the end and he came in and blew down the door and that was the end of it.

That’s amazing. I love that. And you know what? Actually my wife and I use social media. It’s a means to an end for us. It’s how we start our ministry. We totally understand that feeling of there’s so much evil, so much bad, these tools and these resources get used in such wicked ways. And then there’s light in it also. And God’s like, well, I’m going to use these things for my glory also. And it’s amazing how in your story, you’re not just looking for truth and you didn’t realize you were looking in all the wrong places, but God came to you and revealed these things to you. And like you said, that veil being lifted, the word of truth, the Bible, the words that God gave us through the Holy Spirit do that very thing they bring to life in us, something that was dead before.

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And they allow us to hear the truth for the first time when that truth is spoken, it’s like we’re walking in darkness and that candle gets lit and all of a sudden the whole room is visible just like with one little bit of light. I was just talking to someone else about this in another episode, how you could be in complete darkness and you only need this much light when your eyes settle and you have this one little glowing LED light on some little device in your room, and it’s like the whole room’s lit up. And that’s what God does is he uses his people that have come to know him to be little lights in this world, sometimes big lights, but not that it’s our glory, it’s his. He’s shining his light in this world and that light opened your eyes. You saw it for that first time.

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And I love that there’s a lot of couples that listen to our podcast that are probably in, like you said, they’ve been maybe Christians a long time, but they don’t realize how many idols that they’ve had in their life. You were chasing these things and looking to worship things that were not God. You wouldn’t have called it that. And many people, I wouldn’t say I worship social media, but if you look at the fruit of how you use it, you could be like, oh, that is a form of worship. I’m giving hours to it. Money, sex, drugs, alcohol work, hobbies, you name it, people are grasping onto something because they feel empty, they feel unsatisfied, they feel distant. And the enemy has convinced us to find fulfillment and satisfaction in other things. And our flesh wants that. And Christ is like, I’m everything you need.

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My word is everything you need. I’ve given you all things that pertain to life and godliness. And it’s encouraging to hear that while you are in that pursuit of these other things, God came and he’s shown his light in your life and he got your attention and you didn’t just see it and be like, okay, that’s another way you saw it and you’re like, whoa, that is the way. And you said yes to it. So now tell me, that was two-ish. Years ago. You had this ministry and your Instagram page, if people go check it out, it’s what, 65,000 followers by many people standards these days, they’d be like, wow, you’re pretty successful on social media and you had a business and you were growing it in a podcast and you get saved and then God takes you on a different journey. We talked about this.

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Remember the story we mentioned about the, Jesus tells his disciples to get in the boat and he says, you go across and I’m going to go pray. And he tells ’em to go to a city. And then this is the famous story of I’m walking on the water. He gets in the boat. It’s amazing. Peter gets out and walks in the water. It’s wonderful story. It’s like, well, that’s amazing, but a little detail we miss sometimes is the city that Jesus told them to go to they don’t end up at. So they halfway there, Jesus gets in the boat and then they end up in another city miles away. And sometimes God does that. You were on one journey, you had the start of this business. It was fairly successful. You thought you understood things. You thought you understand the direction you were going. You meet Christ. And then why don’t you go from there?

And for the longest time, this was his path for me. So it’s so interesting that at his timing, he can change your direction. Absolutely. Not at yours or mine. In my example, so I launched in I think November of 2022, a group coaching program. It was high ticket. It was scary because I’d never done anything like that before, but I just got the sense a lot of things were like, you just need to start running. I felt God saying, I’ve cleared the runway, just start running. I’m like, oh, okay. I guess so. And I did

Get in the boat and go across.

And so here I am and I’m rowing and it’s kind of working because we’re getting people to sign up and it’s the most successful thing I had done in sort of a three month period ever in terms of financials.

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And it ended up being fairly successful in terms of the intent behind it, which was to help men become leaders in their homes, hard to kill, easy to love and equipped to lead. That was the whole point. And so I’m very grateful for that. And somewhere along the way, I just started getting these niggles of discomfort about July, and I had gone and went all in on the business side and all sort of talk about the things that were wrong, probably in a moment here, but I thought it was working awesome. I was super cool. It was the first time I’d done something like this and growing on Instagram, growing on the podcast, on other people’s podcasts once again, hilarious to put these together, but I kind of had it going together and I figured it out. There you go. In the summertime, there’s a huge pattern here, and I think this is the pattern of all of us.

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In the summertime, I was getting ready to go to a mastermind of Christian business owning fathers, and something was eating at me and I couldn’t tell what it was, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to learn here. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my business, and I just had this sense of there’s something wrong with my identity. Now that seems pretty specific to have a question about, oh, I think there’s something wrong with my identity. But I had been praying with a number of people, and we’ve been talking about this a lot because I certainly had a lot of my worth tied up and what other people thought of me, me too, my success metrics, et cetera, all these things that are eyes focused down on everyone around you rather than eyes focused up on God and his eyes being the only eyes of judgment that I really should care about. So anyway, that was big in my heart. I knew something was off, but I didn’t think that it had anything to do with business. So anyway, I get to Colorado, I get into this mastermind group, and because they’re all Christian business owning fathers, I get the sense that, oh, all of these guys are probably better at this stuff than I am. And yet I see myself as my business as the dad and husband guy. I know what I’m talking about because I’ve got a business that does this.

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And it was so challenging, and I could hear God the second I walked into the room of 80 guys and I looked in there and I just went blank inside except for God saying, are you ready to just be my son? And I was like, oh man, where have I been putting my identity? And it was in business, it was I’m dad work, Kurt, that I know what I’m talking about. And that doesn’t stop the fact that I was able to help people while doing that from a heart position that wasn’t quite pure. Let’s say it was good. And we help marriages and save marriages. There’s guys who have kids today because they didn’t get divorced, dah, dah. And I praise God for all of that working through my idiocy and weakness. And yet that was the start of it, all this really huge challenge to my identity.

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And I’m going, well, if I’m just that and I don’t have to be the dad and the husband and the dad, were a Kirk guy, what am I doing in business? I just started feeling wrong. And so in July I closed down applications to join our group and I was like, I just got to figure this out. I don’t know how I feel about all this. I was the product, and this is the thing that a lot of people don’t get about social media and influencers. I was the product, my life was the product, my life people wanted my life not perfect, but because it’s better than what they had. And I struggle with the same things that they did. And that’s just the way of social media. People see you, they think they know you want to be like you because they’re only posting the good stuff.

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And then they start to go, oh, I can’t believe I’m talking to you, Kurt, when you’re on the sales call with them. And of course, this is elevating my ego and all of that pointed to I couldn’t just be the actual dad and husband in my home that I needed to be because when I’d go do something at the table, we’d have a great family meeting, I’d say something profound and I’d be like, I got to make a post about this. I’m got a podcast about this. So even in my most intimately connected times with my family, I was pulled away 25, 50, sometimes a hundred percent so that I could think about helping other guys with their families. I’m like, this makes no sense. Just a quick

Question on that, did you feel because man, my wife and I have been there and it’s definitely a struggle. We have our ministry online and not doing things in the home just for content, not doing things at home just to look like we’re doing. Did you feel in those moments as you were starting to recognize this fake, you’re like, wait, did I just do that just because I have a persona to upkeep or because that’s who I am and that’s who I want to be to my kids?

I want to say the fakeness was not something I really relate to, but I do relate to, I’m trying to think about the right way to say this. I would make content and my wife would be there in the kitchen, for example, as I was talking about something and she’s like, you are making it sound like you’re the only one who does anything around here. And I’m like, oops. Oh, yikes. And so that was a thing where I think I was just trying to condense what we did as a family into my social media,

But

I ended up almost stripping her of the parts that she needed to be recognized for

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That really frustrated her. And she would also tell me, and this is sort of a personality thing, she would also tell me, you’re so unrelatable. And it was because I was trying to show everyone how good I was. And it’s not that I was lying about that because the thing is, I just so happen to be fairly high functioning in terms of what society deems good. Now. That’s really something that I have learned lately is not all it’s cracked up to be. I have a ditch equally to those people who think, oh, I could never do that. I can never measure up. My ditch is, well, I’m as good as God, I can do this myself. And I’ve already talked about that multiple times in this podcast. And so anyway, that’s a little bit of a passing point, but I would just tell, Hey, guys, if you’re not doing all these things, waking up at four, going to the gym, doing a hundred burpees, spending hours every day with your wife and kids building a business, dah, dah, dah, dah, then you’re essentially not doing it right.

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She’s like, how could peaceful possibly do all of that? I’m like, well, I am. She’s like, yeah, but why is that really your heart to this, or do you think you have to prove something? And that got to another identity problem, which was I was proving myself to all those people around me and to God, because heaven forbid I let someone love me for me because that was the lie of my life, my childhood, whatever you want to call it, was that I had to earn my place. And unless I was perfect, that love was gone. And even when I was perfect, it probably wasn’t going to be as much as I wanted. And so here I am trying to prove myself to these guys who paid me, prove myself to Instagram, prove myself to God because I thought that results equals success instead of coming to learn that obedience equals success.

(28:41)
Repentance equals success, but results. I mean, man, I will sow. I will water, but God makes it. Oh, I’ve just forgotten the verse. God gives the increase. Thank you. Yes. So anyway, that was some of the stuff that I went through and I think that gets us almost to the end where I decided to put it down. But that was a very hard decision because it was my only business. It was the only money we were making. It was all of these things like, God, you told me to run. I’m talking about God on social media. I’m helping Christian men. What do you mean stop. And so through all of this identity challenges, through all of this discomfort inside, I threw a bunch of stuff at the wall. I’m like, I’m going to make this work back to my old habit of trying to do it myself.

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And I got to the point in December, I hadn’t had a new client join the program for whatever that was July to December now, and we’re still serving the man inside the community. He was trying to write on social media, couldn’t really make it work. And someone just asked me, well, just imagine that nobody could see you. Nobody’s going to know anything. You just get to make the choice that you want with no repercussions. What would you do? And immediately I was like, oh, I would stop talking about this because who am I? And I was like, oh, that’s the answer. And so I stopped and I shut it down and I didn’t sell the list to anyone, even though a bunch of people asked because I was like, I just need to stop. And that was the right choice. I didn’t know what I was going to do. We had a little bit of savings enough to get through half a year at least, and I was like, look, God, if you could please just give me a few thousand bucks to get through the rest of the year, this year will be a success. I’m just going to give it up. And he’s been so gracious and faithful obviously. So that was the actual crescendo and apex, I guess, of the decision to finally pull the plug. Even though everything externally, like you mentioned before, looked amazing, but he said, stop. And I did.

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(31:48)
And there’s so many men that man, we find everything in the identity that we’ve made for ourselves or that we’re striving towards because often it’s an identity that we don’t even live up to. We have this ever moving goalpost of an identity that it’s like, oh, once I get to there, then I’ll feel, well, I will feel whole. I’ll feel satisfied. I’ll feel loved or valuable or successful or at the basis level, I’ll feel like a man. You were talking about, you were looking for what does it to be a man? What does it mean to be masculine? What does it mean to be whole? Because really what it is, and there’s so many men and women that the husbands wives that listen to this show are probably in a very similar place of they’re seeking and they’re pushing and they’re rushing for this thing that’s always moving away from them.

(32:44)
And Christ is there saying, Hey, find your identity in me. And I think that’s what you’re describing is exactly what that verse means when Jesus says, if you lose your life for my sake, you will find it. Because we’re constantly looking for life in death. We’re looking for true life and all the things that only are death, they don’t bring life, they don’t identify or they don’t bring true life as Christ does lasting life. And it sounds like anyone listening would be like, Kurt, you had this successful business. You were making money for your family, you were doing it for God. You can on paper, you can say, this is the Lord’s will that God wants this. How dare you stop doing what God wanted you to do. How do you know? That sounds foolish. That sounds foolish to me. But it sounds like what you’re saying is no, at the end of the day, God was looking for me not what I could do for

Him.

And he wanted that. And I said, man, if men and women, if husbands and wives around the country would hear that God’s looking for you, Kurt. He’s looking for me and not what we can do for him. Now, what we can do for him comes out of him having us. Correct. Which leads to the next part of this of you start shutting this sort of thing down. By the way, praise God for your wife. What’s her name?

Natalie.

Natalie loving you so much to tell you things that probably were really, really hard for you to hear.

Oh yeah. We are so blessed. And this is sort of why I wanted to do dad work. I don’t know how we stumbled into this, but this really works. And because it took me a long time, I was very guarded, but my sort of definition of true love in a marriage is that you give one another your hearts

(34:36)
And you allow the other person to put it under their boot and you trust that they will not stomp on it. That is the vulnerability that is required, I think, at least in our marriage, a hundred percent to be able to do things like that. And so I don’t like hearing that and I react childishly, but we always make it a point to come back and to apologize and to repent and get on the same page. And I think that most of the guys that were in my program, we spent a lot of time saying that things might not be your fault, but they’re always your responsibility. And especially for men, especially for husbands, that’s been one of the biggest things, at least for us, is that it’s always my responsibility. And it might take me a couple of days to come back and repent and hopefully these days a little bit sooner than that, but even at my worst, Natalie told me, I trust you. And that was at least because I took responsibility for how bad I was. And so if you’re out there struggling, I just wanted to drop that because that’s been a huge blessing to just realize that if there’s a problem, it’s because I’m a problem. So yeah, she’s extremely special.

Yeah, I always tell people, you are the common denominator in all your problems. Bingo. You’re

Always exactly.

It doesn’t mean that you’re the responsible for every aspect of it, but we have a role in everything that’s going on in our life in some level. So you go from a

Transition, sorry, I’m getting away from the question. Yes.

Oh, it’s okay. You go from transitioning. You had this ministry that was successful, it was moving forward, which I would imagine a lot of men may not relate directly with having an online ministry, but maybe they’re successful in their businesses, successful in their work, and then you feel the Lord saying, Hey, we need to make some transition, some change before we go into what you’ve transitioned into. And that process, there was the in-between of you coming to this conclusion and making the decisions because you don’t make him alone. You did it with your wife. She’s your one with her. How was that support from her? You already mentioned one thing. She says, I trust you. She saw you even in your failings, respond with humility. So what was that support? Was she a major support in this? I’m sure she was just as nervous and scared of like, well, what are we going to do then?

Yeah, I’m just like, let me repent of any thought that I am doing anything that Christ says because I fall short and I’m just like, I am almost overwhelmed that you would bring up that verse because far be it for me to assume that I follow him well, and I dunno, for some reason that’s impacting me a lot to just hear laying down your own life to find it in him. That’s really, really important. And I don’t think I’ve done that well, but I do try and I just want to share that I’m really thinking about that right now and it’s really impacted me. Dude. I don’t know what it is about that, but that’s it. That is it. This whole thing, the whole part of this journey, and it’s still so new. So God’s got chapters, I hope if he wants me to still be here, he is, got chapters left to right, but the whole thing knocked me so far out of my world, and what do I do when I don’t have me anymore? He’s the only thing left. And again, please don’t hear me that I’m doing this right. Please don’t hear me. Hey, guys, all you’ve got to do is just quit your job. Not at all.

Here’s three simple steps to

Yeah, the thing though that for me is I always just try to pray in the mornings and all the time, like Holy Spirit plumb me of me, flush me of me and fill me with you because what else is there? And if nothing else comes of this conversation, the only reason that I even, I mean, I liked talking to you, so it’s like, okay, I should probably do this podcast. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t done one for months and I thought I prayed on it. I was like, you know what? If I just get to talk about God, and there’s one person who’s like, oh, that’s interesting, that relates to my journey and God is glorified, then let’s go. And if 99% of other people think I’m a total dummy, great. And so all of this to say if God is not actually the only thing in your life, it’s probably going to hurt more often than not. And I experienced that because it’d be like, oh, he’s still there. I’m still helping people, but I do really want to hit the next level of my business. I do really want to get a hundred thousand Instagram followers. I do really want to have this guy in my podcast and stripping myself of all that

(39:13)
And coming to realize that it’s only him that’s left, and I have to trust that he actually is faithful. I have to trust that when I seek versus kingdom, he actually is going to add these other things to me. I didn’t know where I was going to make money. I didn’t know who I was. I was suddenly, literally nobody because I shut down what was giving me value before. So I just want to praise God here for a second, because there is nothing. There is no life. You already said it. There’s no life outside of Christ. And what that means, I think for me, this was very drastic, but it required me to empty myself as much as I knew how with God’s grace and just let him hold me and let him lead me and let him show me how absolutely brutally broken and weak and impossible it would be for me to do anything to sort of deserve his love.

(40:03)
So anyway, I’m just like, I wish I could get it out of my head and it out of my heart into words, but I just need people to hear in a less cliche and soppy way. I hope that there’s only light in life in Christ only. Absolutely. And if something else is coloring your heart and you’re looking for that somewhere else, please don’t go through what I went through and build yourself, your little tower of babbler or whatever you want to call it, trying to outpace God because it’s painful and it sucks. And praise God that he used that for my good and for his glory, like you said before. But let me just step down now and tell you the actual answer to your question. No, that was really

Good and I appreciate it. What we all need to hear,

All of us. And yeah, I wish I could get that across. I think I probably did a poor job and probably sound a little bit too sure of myself there, but I repent for that, so forgive me. Anyway. So my wife in this particular situation, she was actually fine with it. And the reason for that, I’ll actually give a little bit of backstory. This makes more sense. She was fine with it because a couple months before I was agonizing over how do I grow this? I’m still, I’m in this. I’m hearing God tell me to stop because something’s wrong. He needs to do some work in me. Eventually it turned out, but I was like, no, I’m still going to do this. Right. Like you said, I was the guy saying, this makes sense. You should keep doing this. It’s serving God, dah, dah, dah, dah.

(41:33)
It was my voice and everyone else’s. So I had told her, Hey, I am not sure that I set the right boundaries with my guys. I’m trying to really do everything I can for them, be available as often as possible, take basically responsibility for their marriages. And still not, like I said before, if I’m not perfect, I’m not doing it well enough. If I’m not perfect, they’re not going to think that the investment with me wasn’t very good, but I can’t bring any more guys on because I’m already crushed by the weight of a few dozen guys in my program, but I really want to grow this. So the only way for me to grow is to take on more weight that was crushing me because I was not equipped to hold the spiritual weight of a community like that. And I just accidentally stumbled into it.

(42:13)
I can help. But there was definitely a savior syndrome. There was definitely too much responsibility placed, too little boundaries placed. And as I was telling her this, I’m like, we need to make more money to buy a house here because prices are so expensive in Vancouver, dah, dah, dah, dah. I want to provide for you. I want to serve you, but I don’t know how I can do this. And she started crying and I was like, why are you crying? Like it sounds like you’re just so crushed and exhausted and you’re hurting yourself. And I’m like, oh, that’s true. I never thought about that before. And I don’t know why it was that I had never even seen or experienced, maybe I just couldn’t see the forest for the trees. But when she started crying, it just clicked. It’s like, oh, I am doing something really wrong. I am letting my identity be in something other than just me, just who I am in Christ and had to perform, had to be perfect for everyone. And so I was at this impasse where I couldn’t grow, but I needed to grow. And she’s crying now. And so she knew that this wasn’t going to be the thing that was long-term because I was just being crushed. It was

Unsustainable,

Totally emotion unsustainable. So because we have lived a fairly, I don’t know, nontraditional life, well, maybe traditional, but non cultural, a countercultural life. That’s what I’m trying to say. We’ve traveled, we lived in Thailand for a couple of years with the boys. I’ve been an entrepreneur for 14 years, and the list goes on. She is very comfortable with chaos, and we both actually operate very well together in chaos. So for us, it was kind of a new frontier to come together in chaos. And she’s like, I trust you. I trust that God’s going to sort it out and let’s go. So thankfully it wasn’t that difficult. Amen.

Dude, what a cool story of what God’s doing in your life currently in the midst of this story. And like you said, there’s many more chapters to be written. I went back to that. There’s another verse when Jesus meets, the rich young ruler doesn’t tell us who it is. And it seems like a story that people like to use of saying, oh, this means you shouldn’t have wealth. This means you shouldn’t get money. You shouldn’t have a business that’s successful. And that’s not the story at all. Jesus meets a man that asks him, what must I do to enter the kingdom of heaven? He’s like, I’ve done all of these things. I’ve done all the right things. Lord, I’ve kept the commandments since my youth. And Jesus looks at me. He says, good, good for you. He’s like, sell everything you have and follow me.

(44:52)
And he’s like, what? And it says, he leaves very sad because he had great wealth. And the story that what you’re sharing with me is what all of us on some level at some points are going to be challenged with by the Holy Spirit, especially when we’re saying, yes, Lord, I want to follow you, is he’s going to come in and saying, what things are you holding onto that keep you weighed down from following me? And this happens to me all the time. We just recently had a fire. It’s kind of still going actually very close to us where we are at a level two evacuation notice. And it was one of those moments in my life where I got challenged with what am I holding onto? And I’m starting to realize how fragile and how close I was to losing everything that I have built and saved and made and kept for myself.

(45:50)
And I felt the Holy Spirit prompt me and just ask me, what if I take it all? What if I take this? Are you going to be angry at me? Are you going to hold this against me? Is this where your identity is in the things that you’ve built? And I just remember having, and this has happened several times in my life, and it’s those Abraham and Isaac moments of like, are you going to withhold your only son from me? Are you going to withhold home from me? Are you going to withhold this identity of this business from me? Because at the end of the day, Christ wants me. He wants you cur. He’s looking for people. He’s looking for the hearts of men and women to be his and to be yielded to him. And he’s, the Bible tells us he’s a jealous God.

(46:41)
And so in hearing your story, I don’t think your story is unique. It’s unique as in the details in your life, but it’s not unique to the Christian man or woman. This is the story of those who desire to follow Christ is he’s going to come in to every room of the house and make it his. And the question is, are we going to open the doors or are we going to try and lock ’em and keep, no, you can’t have this area of my life. My identity is over here. This is what makes a man for me. And then you can just join in with that Lord. And God’s like, no, I want all of it.

(47:16)
I want it all. And he does that for each one of us. And my prayer and what you were sharing so far is that the men and women that are listening to this right now would ask themselves, is God trying to get something out in my life? Is there an area of my life that I’m holding onto? Is my identity, who I’m claiming is that’s who I am, and that’s what makes me who I am and God’s like, I want to replace that with my son, Jesus. I want that for me, and I don’t want you to have that anymore. Or I want it to be handed over so that I can turn it into what I want it to be. Because you didn’t just quit everything and become a hermit and go hide in a hole and say, okay, now it’s darkness for me.

(47:58)
No, God’s moving in you. And he’s got something on the journey with you better than what you had before. So why you said you’re an entrepreneur. 14 years I’ve been an entrepreneur, but your story is so similar to ours. You’re just a few years behind us in age wise, but married young entrepreneurs from beginning. Not that we planned on me entrepreneurs, but that was where the Lord led us many times, having these identity crisises, which I think are good to have. I’m currently in one. I’m in my forties just asking myself, who am I? What am I identifying myself as a pastor of my church, as a father of my home, as a Christian man, a person who has influence online. I’m being challenged with all of those things of which one of these is my identity, which one of these things makes up the content of my heart rather than it being Christ, making the content of my heart and all these other ancillary things get the overflow of that. And so what’s the next thing that you’ve moved on to? So you had the business online. You’ve kind of put that on an indefinite hiatus, which real quick, a small encouragement. I like that you called it an indefinite hiatus because you never know if the Lord might want you to step back into that, right?

Yeah. I came very close about three months ago, and I praise God, I did not do it

(49:24)
Because it was at a point in this new business where I was like, I wasn’t sure where the leads were coming from. I needed to have a couple more clients. And I’m like, you could justify back. Maybe if I go back on social media and I don’t have an offering so I can just heart open share without thinking there’s anything in it. For me, training dads, because I’m very convicted that we should really be finding people farther on the journey. I mean, I’ve been successful in marriage and fatherhood and all that kind of stuff compared to maybe some people who are a step or two behind me, which is what you need to coach people, and that’s fine, but I’ve just been so convicted that I don’t really know that much, and I don’t want to end up getting to a place where I say things that God then has me repent of because I didn’t know the full story.

(50:08)
So that’s just my heart right now. I’m glad there are other people out there because man, do we need it? But I almost came back into it thinking that I could get clients because I’d meet people like you and be like, Hey, I should edit your podcast. Did you know I’ve got a podcast thing? And I talked to a couple of guys, this is the lesson. Please have men in your corner who you can talk to. I’m pretty sure there’s Proverbs about this. There’s a bunch. There’s a bunch. And the word that I got from this one guy, which is sort of the crowning one for me was, you know what? Sometimes it’s right to just let sacred things be sacred. And it sounds like your heart for fatherhood and men is a pretty sacred thing to you. I was like, you know what? You’re right.

(50:46)
I’m not going to pollute that with even leads for a business, which wouldn’t have been bad. It just wouldn’t have been sacred anymore. So anyway, that’s a quick thing, and I want to say one more thing about what God is looking for from us. Before I answer your question, I think this was really impactful for me. There is a movie, it’s Russian. It’s called The Island. That’s the English name of it. I think it’s like Sav or something in Russian, but it’s about a Hermitage or something like that with a bunch of monks. And there is one month who’s kind of crazy. He’s like a fool for Christ. They call him and he’s pretty nuts. He sleeps in the boiler room. He shovels coal, he sleeps on the coal. He’s got a crazy story. But there’s this, they’re the leader of the abbot or whatever they call him.

(51:28)
He’s like, I’m going to go and get to this guy. I’m going to talk to him and get into his thick head. That needs to be more normal. And so he comes there and he goes to sleep in his coal pile. And this the Abbot, the leader of this monastery, he’s got a nice pair of boots on and he brings this really nice lush blanket with him, lies it on the colon. When you’re watching this, you don’t think anything of it. But the next scene is the leader is sleeping. But this crazy monk, he’s taking the shoes off of the leader monk and he’s ripping them up and throwing them in the fire. And the guy’s like, what are you doing? Those were given to me by the archbishop. How dare you. And then he starts smoking ’em mud and he locks ’em in this little room and the leader monk thinks he’s going to die.

(52:12)
He’s like, why are you killing me? What’s going on? That’s my stuff. Those are awesome boots. You know that those hurt my feet when I don’t wear them. And the crazy monk, he goes, wait, there’s still a demon in here, the biggest one of all. And so he throws this really resplendent blanket out and he throws it in the water and he stomps on it and he says, now we’re free. I’ve got rid of all the demons. Because the story was even living in such poor, reflective, monastic lifestyles, this one monk had his heart attached to his boots and a blanket. And yes, for us, that seems like, man, if I could get there, if I could only have boots and a blanket that I care about, I would be set.

But

It goes to show that even that God wants to be part of, not the blanket, not the boots, not these little things that we don’t think about, but the tiny insignificant aspects that hold us back from giving him everything. Amen. Is your grace not sufficient? What are the thorns in our sides that we think God needs to heal us of, but he’s actually using so that we can give him? And then the leader monk in this story, a couple minutes later, he sits down and he thanks the So-called Crazy Monk. He says, you’re right. I literally was idolizing those things and I thought I needed them more than I needed God. And yes, that’s an extreme example, but when we’re dealing with the God of the universe, I think we could all use a little bit more extremeness in our worship and our devotion to him.

(53:53)
It’s something that I just don’t want to take casually. So anyway, I say that because it was a very impactful thing for me that I watched a couple of weeks ago. And it’s like, man, there’s a lot of things that even going through this big experience that I have that I’m not ready to give up to God. And I’m a little bit nervous for when he comes to take him, but I know that it’s for my good and I know it’s because he loves me. So anyway, I wanted to say that. And if there’s anything you want to jump off of please. Well, I was just going to

Say it, just because we have things that we might be afraid of losing doesn’t mean that God’s going to take them,

(54:23)
But God definitely wants us to recognize what those things are. And it’s a great question for us as men and women of God who love Jesus, to ask ourselves is what is there that it would be very painful for me to lose? And that’s a good question to be asking because it’s going to be the thing that we are holding onto the most. And I mean, when it comes to parenting, we are trying to control everything with our children so much because we’re afraid of losing them. And at some point we got to realize how much of this are we allowing God to do? Are we even trusting the Lord with our children? We’re trying to force our children into something rather than guiding them toward someone. And so anything in our life could be that those boots in that blanket. And it’s a good question to ask is, Lord, what is it? And he’s so good to show us. He’d be like, here’s some things, pay attention.

Yeah, I was thinking about parenting the other day. I listened to a talk and the guy giving it said, the title of the talk was, talk Less to Your Kids about God and Talk more to God about your children, which is to say, pray more for them and lecture them less and trust in God. I do that all the time. I’m like, oh no, I can see where my kids are going. I was so bad for the first couple of years, for the first few years reflecting, and I can still see the reflection of that badness. You’re like, sorry, years later. Yes. And I’m like, well, oh no. I’m going to be the reason that they’re ruined and God’s working with me on that stuff. I pray and I repent and I’m in tears often because I see that it’s affected my kids. And I’m like, Lord, in spite of me, in spite of me, lead them in your ways.

(56:08)
And yet that had to be my children’s story because God’s the author and he’s the ultimate perfect author. And that needed to be how they were brought to him eventually, or as their little minds and hearts understand right now. So it’s all of it. And yeah, anyway, that was a nice little thing about children because man, there’s so many areas of our life that we can see all this conversation reflected in if we get out of the way. So anyway, I know you were asking about the entrepreneur thing. I dunno if you still want to go there or if you want to close it with,

I just feel like there was already a lot of really good stuff here. You said none of this is like, Hey, we’ve figured all this out. My wife and I are always telling people, don’t listen to us because you think we have the answers, as in they’re in us. No, our heart is always to point people back to Jesus, to the word of God, to trusting him because he’s the one that changes us. His holy spirit’s the one that brings to rem. It’s all things. He’s the one that puts his word in our hearts, his law on our lips and in our hearts. God, he’s the one. So you just sharing your heart and your testimony and what Jesus is doing in your life as you follow him to the best of your ability and your flesh like I do, is more than I can ever ask for.

(57:19)
And so Kurt, I really do appreciate you coming on here. I know that you are apprehensive at first. I pray that this was a good conversation with you. It was for me. Yeah, thank you. A very blessing, a huge blessing to me. I believe that a lot of men and women, husbands, wives are going to be very blessed by hearing what God’s doing currently in your life. And my prayer is always that we allow God to work in our lives. He knows what’s best for us. He knows where he’s taken us and as we say yes to him, because it’s literally what it’s, it’s like, yes, when God came to Abraham and he is like, get up and go. He didn’t say, what am I going to do there? He said, yes. He says the next morning he got up and went. And that’s what he desires from us, is that we would trust him enough to just say yes and see what’s led. And then when we fall on our faces, as we inevitably will do that, we let him pick us back up and we look at him again and just say, okay, yes. And we keep following. So praise God for you, Kurt and your wife, who is Natalie, is that her name is

Correct.

Natalie sad that she couldn’t be with us maybe next time, but she sounds like a blessing. Kurt, why don’t you share, we didn’t get into your business, but I would love for everyone to know what you do now and where they could find that because you do offer an awesome service to, it’s mainly Christian podcasters, right?

Yes. Thank you. Awesome. Why don’t you just share that. Yeah, it’s called Proclaim Podcasting. Proclaim podcasting.com, and we help Christian coaches and entrepreneurs edit, produce their podcasts. Basically you just record and we will do the rest. And yeah, we’d love to talk to you if that’s something we could provide value in.

By the way, a really cool transition from what you were doing before to now serving people, doing that and offering a service. And I’m imagine you probably have a lot of opportunities to encourage these people on the backside.

There is a massive spiritual element to this, by the way. And it doesn’t even matter what the business is. It’s just like going from me being the forward facing me being the guy, to now having a really, I say this with a bit of tongue in cheek, a really boring service-based business that I just have to make systems and that’s it. It’s like, man, who am I again? Can I be okay with this? And how do I think of work now and I’m working more, but I really bought into the lie of the four hour work week, and if you’re working too much, you’re a loser because you need to be able to exit and have all this efficiency. So anyway, all that to be said, even my work has become a spiritual battleground and who God is creating me to be more in the likeness of his son. So yeah, that’s another thing that if you are the type of person who’s going through something like this, even that can be a spiritual wellspring for you.

Amen. And I agree. Hey, Kurt, God bless you man, and your family, and it’s really cool to see what God’s doing, and I pray to hear more about this in the future. If you’re interested, I’d love to have you on again at some point, but you’ve been a huge blessing to me and my audience.

Thanks, brother. I appreciate you inviting me on and having me here.

Absolutely. And thank you for,

(01:00:46)
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