Chapter 2 - Wild Country (The Wholehearted Journey)

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Growing up with an absent father and an addict in the family was far from easy. However, those challenging experiences have shaped me into the person I am today, and I am here to share my journey with you. I'll be discussing how the harsh environment of my upbringing forced me to learn valuable life lessons that led to my success. We'll also cover the importance of knowing who you are at the core and how to reclaim your heart to guide you through life's hurdles. 

In the second part of the episode, we'll confront the emotional trauma and the quest for abundance. Delving into the spiritual warfare that often fuels our life's trauma, we'll reveal how it can hinder us from embracing the abundant life Jesus promised. By identifying the spiritual enemies that detest us and their manipulative tactics, we can reclaim the abundance that's rightfully ours. Remember this isn't about comparing trauma stories, it's about acknowledging them and embarking on a journey to rediscover your inner self and embrace abundance. Let's take this journey together, through the wilderness of childhood challenges, towards the promise of an abundant life.

Transcript

JOEL: 0:00

Chapter 2. Wild Country. Please don't go, dad, please don't go. Came the fraught, muffled pleas of my ten-year-old brother, begging His head buried into my father's abdomen. His chubby hands gripped my dad's tear-stained shirt. Inches away, I stood on the asphalt, numb, emotionless. As a seven-year-old boy, I was doing that thing. I do the thing I still find myself doing in a crisis today Emotionally shutting down, refusing to feel, ignoring the ache of the blows until after the fight, so I can sort things out alone, heal and private. My brother's pleas didn't persuade my father to stay. He had made up his mind. He hugged my brother and me. He was Virginia-bound, which at the time seemed worlds away from this California boy. Then he said goodbye, opened the driver's side door of his black truck and slid inside the cab With the hollow metallic thud of a closing casket. The truck door slammed shut, the ignition cranked, the engine throbbed and the truck lurched forward. It merged into traffic and disappeared.

JOEL: 1:26

This was the second time my father left, the only time I remember. The first time he left, I was 14 months old and have no recollection of it. The only thing shared with me about the events surrounding my father's first departure was a despairing account of my brother shrieking at a window, both hands pressed on it, with tear-stained cheeks watching him leave. I experienced none of that. Standing there on the asphalt, there were no screams from me, no heartbreak, no warmth of tears gathering behind my eyes, just cold numbness. Though ignoring the emotional grenade helped shield the present pain, it couldn't stop the message searing through my psyche like slivers of hot, twisted shrapnel you are alone. I believe the message. Not because my father was physically leaving. He hadn't been around much to begin with. The extent of his involvement at that point included him stopping by for a few hours every six months or so. It was not the death of his physicality that made this message appear so reasonable. Rather, it was the death of hope that made it undeniable. The hope that things might be different with my dad in the future, that things could change, that someday I might lean on his strength and invoke his pride, be loved by a present father. Leonardo da Vinci said vows begin when hope dies. That day I accepted what seemed irrefutable I am on my own. I didn't have the words for it then, but I knew from that moment on I was going to have to teach myself what it meant to be a man. And in that moment, my agreement, my inner vow began. I am abandoned. I am on my own. It's up to me to make life happen.

JOEL: 3:31

My mom met Rod at the law office she worked at. She was a secretary there. He was a carpenter installing some bookshelves. She was flattered by the interest he took in her Exhausted and lonely. She found him to be a welcomed reprieve from the financial and emotional tempest of the past years.

JOEL: 3:52

When I met Rod, my heart flickered with the secret hope at the potential of having a loving father in my life. He brought with him two sons of his own and a bottle of bourbon. Even at age 11, I could see it, sense it. This was not going to end well. There were so many warning signs tremors, cracks in the foundation. Rod's temper had surfaced on several occasions prior to matrimony, but the alarms were ignored. Infatuation has a way of making one overlook obvious faults and filling in the unknown with rosy optimism. His short outbursts of anger were only the tip of the glacial mass cloaked beneath the surface. And then, on a whim, my mom and he took a trip to the courthouse and made it official. I wasn't invited.

JOEL: 4:42

We moved out of our house into a large home they built on five acres. I had never experienced anything like it. From the outside, it appeared that things were getting better, we were turning a new financial corner, but internally our hearts were barreling towards bankruptcy. External security had been purchased at the price of our peace. They had purchased a house at the expense of a home. No matter how magical the ball, it eventually ends, the music stops, the band goes home and somebody has to clean up the mess. Like Cinderella discovered, there is no amount of romantic magic that can transform something forever. Alas, in time, a pumpkin, dog or rodent eventually returns to what it always was For us. Midnight finally struck and it all came tumbling down.

JOEL: 5:39

Rod had a lot of demons. All was how he attempted to drown them, and drown them he did in a quart of bourbon each day. He would start drinking as soon as he got home from work. Unfortunately, alcohol also made him incredibly violent. So for the first time I learned what it was like to live with an addict the rituals, the cycles, the concentric circles of pain that affect those nearest and dearest. I experienced the dark selfishness addiction burst, goading its victim to reorganize everything in their life to serve the substance that soothes their inner turmoil for a time, the massive ripple this creates in a home can drown the people living within.

JOEL: 6:36

All of us are born into wild country as babies. We are born into families, societies and a geographic region not of our choosing. We don't get the luxury of selecting our father, mother or siblings, who we will or won't grow up with. We cannot elect where we would like to arrive on the timeline of human history. We arrive as new characters and an old tale, one that's well underway, and we're forced to figure out what life is all about on the fly.

JOEL: 7:09

There's a couple of things that we have to know if we're going to be successful in our journey on earth and in this life. Every traveler must be well acquainted with the realities of the environment they're traversing before they can skillfully navigate it, and this is going to help us to do that. If we are to successfully venture through the seven skills, reclaim our hearts and enter into the better life Jesus described, we must orient ourselves with the reality of this wild world into which we were born. Each of us must realize that we were born with enemies, and this is the very first truth we must assent to. In the next chapter, we'll talk about the second truth that we must come to grips with if we're going to navigate this life successfully and travel through the seven skills successfully. You know, when Jesus was born, he was born with an enemy. He was born and there was a hered who hated him. Even when he was a small child, two years old, herod sent soldiers to kill every male child in the town he was in. Jesus had a wild exodus as he left and became a refugee in Egypt.

JOEL: 8:42

My childhood Herod was rod and I experienced a lot of abuse, verbally and physically, that I detail in the book. It was some dark days for me as a young man and as a child. But as I grew older I began to recognize the same enemy that was behind Jesus's Herod was also behind my childhood Herod. You see, we are all born with a spiritual enemy and, from the moment we are born, seeks to, as Jesus said, to steal, kill and destroy. And it is his desire to steal, kill and destroy our childhood hearts so that we never become a threat to him. And usually he strikes at the place of our genius or the gift that we're bringing into the world. When I'm talking to people or we're going through our small groups, we discuss that usually at the end or at the bottom of our wound we find our gift, we find our genius, and so this is the reason we have to press into the wound if we're going to enter into the life that Jesus described as abundant, satisfying, full and free.

JOEL: 10:20

Now, when we talk about trauma, a lot of times what happens is that people compare their story. This usually happens unknowingly, and if the story happens to be worse than theirs, diminish their own story. They say, okay, well, that was really bad and that's a bad story. My story isn't so bad. Or if the story isn't as bad as theirs, they sometimes almost pridefully it's this kind of like well, their story really doesn't compare to my story. And what both of these mindsets do is they close the door to inner discovery.

JOEL: 10:58

No matter your opinion of my story or where you land with it, here's the truth of it. We have all faced trauma in our life. Our souls were made for Eden. Our hearts and our souls were made for perfect moms and dads and a deep, rich connection with God. So living in this world today is pretty traumatic period, especially when you think of the environment. We were made for Eden. The rich abundance can be reclaimed, even in the midst of this wild world.

JOEL: 11:41

And this is what Jesus was promising. He was saying you can have this abundant life if you follow me. But if we're going to have that life, we have to also understand that there is a spiritual enemy that hates us to the core and who has the ability to influence other humans and to speak lies into our mind. And if we agree with those lies, like I did as a child, saying I'm abandoned, I'm on my own, then that becomes our mindset throughout our life and, coming to a place of abundance after having trauma and after making agreements in your mind, it can be almost impossible to enter the abundant life, a life Jesus described as better than you dreamed. The first truth we must ascend to is that there is a spiritual enemy that hates our gods.