Your Body Knows You Didn’t Have a Dad (Justin Earley)

Father wounds don’t just live in your mind—they live in your body.

In this powerful conversation, Joshua Brown sits down with Justin Early, author of The Body Teaches the Soul, to unpack how absent, distracted, or destructive fathers shape men’s mental health, habits, addictions, and even physical responses like anxiety, anger, and shutdown.

Justin explains why information alone doesn’t heal men—and how embodied practices like sleep, food, exercise, male friendship, and lament are essential for breaking generational cycles and becoming the dad you never had.

This episode is especially for men who feel:

• Spiritually saved but emotionally disconnected
• Stuck in anxiety, addiction, or shame
• Like they’re “half alive” and don’t know why

Healing doesn’t start in your head alone. It starts in your body.

🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why father wounds are stored in the body, not just the mind
• How habits shape your heart more than intentions
• The connection between mental health, addiction, and embodiment
• Why ignoring your body keeps men spiritually stuck
• How male friendship and physical presence restore safety
• What biblical lament is—and how it heals anger and grief
• How to break generational patterns and model wholeness for your kids

📘 Featured Resource

📖 The Body Teaches the Soul: How to Build Habits That Shape Your Head and Your Heart
By Justin Early

(Bible Study Guide + Streaming Video available)

🎧 About Dudes Without Dads

Dudes Without Dads exists to help men heal father wounds, break generational cycles, and become the dads they never had. Every episode offers real conversations, practical tools, and hope for men who want a different legacy.

👉 Apply to share your story: https://dudeswithoutdadspodcast.com

👉 Subscribe & follow for weekly episodes
👉 Share this episode with a man who needs it

🕒 Chapters / Timestamps (YouTube)

00:00 Intro – Father Wounds & the Body
 02:00 Justin’s Mental Health Collapse
 05:00 Why Habits Shape the Heart
 07:30 Why God Cares About Bodies
 10:30 Father Wounds, Addiction & Anxiety
 14:00 Can You Be Spiritually Healthy but Physically Unhealthy?
 17:30 Eating as an Act of Worship
 21:00 Lower Brain vs Upper Brain
 27:00 The Healing Power of Male Friendship
 34:00 What Is Biblical Lament?
 38:00 Hope for the Man Who Feels Half Alive

📌 Pinned Comment (YouTube)

Start here → 21:00 (Why father wounds live in the body)

Key moments:

• 05:00 Habits shape your heart
• 14:00 Spiritual health & the body
• 27:00 Why men need male friendship
• 34:00 Lament explained
• 38:00 Hope for men who feel stuck

👉 Apply to share your story: https://dudeswithoutdadspodcast.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

But you're gonna have thoughts in your head when you have a broken father figure, a distracted father figure, a destructive father figure, or just an absent one. Of I'm not sure if I'm gonna be okay. I don't know if anybody's got my back. I better look out for myself. Or this woman's getting in the way of what I'm trying to do in life or trying to get in life. Or these these kids are problems, not gifts.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

My life is just spyrolling downhill, depression, alcoholism, incarceration, death by despair. One guy who showed up is just Jesus. If you can give a man clarity and community, he can start to live out his purpose.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Welcome to Dudes Without Dads, the show that trains men how to become the dads they never had. Justin, welcome to the pod.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Thank you so much, Joshua.

SPEAKER_02 0:51

Hey, you have helped so many of us rethink habits, family, formation. But now you're connecting all of that to our bodies. Can you help me understand why?

SPEAKER_01 1:03

I started writing about habits because my body fell apart, actually. And I call this my second testimony. It was when I was 30. I was transitioning from being a missionary in China to being a corporate lawyer, which is a pretty wild transition. And I had just a great worldview. So thankful for all that I learned and that the Lord had done in my life and my time in China. But I unconsciously assimilated to all the typical habits and practices of modern lawyering, which were technological. I was always on my phone scrolling. They were busyness, yeah, always adding more to my schedule. And they were very disembodied. Because as both as a missionary and a lawyer, I'm thinking all in my head all the time, right? I'm thinking, I'm writing, I'm speaking, but I'm skipping meals, I'm short in sleep, I'm not exercising. And what happened, Joshua, is that early in my law career, really my first year, I had what I now recognize as a mental health collapse. It started with constant insomnia. It really actually started very suddenly one night where I just woke up in the middle of the night panicking over I didn't know what. My body was shaking like heart racing, but I couldn't figure out what I was worried about in my head. And that would very quickly almost explode into a month and then a season where I became converted from the missionary who longed to be a missionary to law and business. I got converted to the nervous medicating lawyer where I was either having to take sleeping pills or just have a couple of drinks to even fall asleep at night. And that was a huge wake-up call in my life because I looked up one day and I was like, my head's over here, faithful worldview, but my habits are over here, completely scrambled life. And what I was so shocked to find was that my heart had followed the habits. And I thought your head typically led the way. Nothing I'm going to say today should be against worldview, should be against preaching truth, should be against good education. I just have spent the last 10 years of my life realizing how important formation is, how important habits and practices are to cultivating a heart that truly loves and follows Jesus. One way to put this is even the demons know that God is one, but they shudder. And I've been on a journey where the Lord has been showing me how your embodied reaction, do you shudder with anxiety or are you filled with peace and joy because of what your head knows? And there's not always that connection. We can get very disconnected. And so I've been writing about this, Joshua, in lots of different ways. Some in spiritual disciplines, that's where I started. And then as a father of four young boys, I started thinking, you know what? I'm a lawyer who's talking about habits of rest and technology and healthy spiritual disciplines, but I still have this other habit of yelling my kids to bed every night. What does habit have to do with the life of being a loving father? Recently, I've just gotten really interested, and I say recently, it's been like basically the past five years, of how all our physical habits, how we sleep, how we eat, how we exercise or don't, how we scroll technology, which is very embodied, right? It's like our thumb swiping and our eyes moving, how all that stuff impacts our walk with Jesus and trains us into being a certain kind of person. And it's just been such a joy. My own life has changed a lot. And I've just really started suddenly to realize, oh my gosh, God made us with bodies. This is his plan. This is not an accident. So what do we do with them? And that's what the body teaches the soul is all about.

SPEAKER_02 4:36

I really appreciate you unpacking some of the symptoms you were experiencing. You said insomnia, you said anxiety, you said maybe even some fits of maybe outbursts of anger, maybe even to the kids. And you were actually able to connect that some of those responses were actually connected to your body. And so as you've been learning how to experience the goodness of the body in order to heal that, how have you made that connection of if I take care of my body, I'm actually able to heal some of my behaviors.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Yeah. I see it in so many places, Joshua. And I think it's I was really worried at first. This was not biblical. Okay, so I could tell you about how exercise and sleep, like paying attention to those, really helped me be a more patient father and a more non-anxious presence in my life. And so I actually want to explain that practically. But first, I want to give some theological backing so that nobody thinks these are just life hacks for like improving the surface of your life. Like this is deeply spiritual stuff. And we know this because if you look at Genesis 2, 7, where God is creating Adam, Genesis says that he took the dust of the ground, which is the Hebrew word afar. This is like literally organic compounds, like physical stuff, and then breathed this the breath of life into him. This is God's breath, this like theme throughout the Bible that wherever God speaks, wherever he breathes, life happens. So he takes this physical stuff and then breathes spirituality into it, and you get this divine union that the Old Testament calls a living soul. And in researching and writing this book, I was like, oh, this is so interesting. Because I think I always thought of my soul as the sort of disembodied, like in inner part of me, and that the essence of who I was non-physical. But Genesis is no, the essence of who you are is a divine combination of the physical and the spiritual. So God made you with the body, he's redeemed you by the body of his son, he's going to resurrect you to new bodies. Clearly, he loves bodies, they matter. C.S. Lewis puts it like this He says, Don't try to be more spiritual than God. God meant our spirituality to go through physicality, and he meant our physicality to go through spirituality. So it's us who like to draw lines and separate, not God. And this started to change the way I thought because I previously thought really the work to do in life was quote unquote spiritual. And I would say that's still true. It's just it's often going through the physical. So, for example, one of the things that I'm doing when I think about making exercise a regular part of my life is that I am actually training my body that hard things are healthy things. I'm saying it's actually good for me to break down my muscle, it's actually good for me to strain my cardiovascular system, it's actually good for me to get hurt in appropriate ways because I become a stronger, more healthier person. This has had enormous impacts on my parenting, not just because I come home like with some of the stress of the day worked out of my system, but also because now in moments with my young sons where I feel like I've reached the end of my patients or I've reached the end of my ability to care for them. Like I don't want to do this anymore. I often think back to the gym and I'm like, oh, wait, the good life is pushing past that point. Like where I think the end of my ability to do another pull-up is the beginning of where health begins, like push past the wall. And where the end of my ability to do another patient word to my sons, oh no, the good life, grace is pushing past that. Like my God's power is made perfect in my weakness. And there's that's just one small example I could give you. There's so many places in life where I now see that my spiritual life is being taught by my physical life, and vice versa.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

No, that's so good. And as it relates to the context of our group, that's dudes without dads or distracted, destructive fathers, and what we've noticed is that father wounds often create more father wounds, and we disconnect ourselves for God or for people and ourselves. And so when it comes to the body, have you noticed or processed what father wounds might create this disconnection? I am on mission to help men become the dads they never had. Many of us struggle with father wounds, addictions, identity issues, and really what we need is we need a model. We need to see people that have broken the patterns and come alongside of them. I want to simply invite you to join me on the journey. Every Thursday, we're gonna release a new episode. Each episode is gonna help you and others become the dads they never had. Hit subscribe and share with a friend. Now let's get back to the story. From being a good steward of what God has given us as it relates in our bodies.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Yeah, absolutely. So in my personal life, I know friends who have significant father wounds. And that has 10 out of 10 times shown up in some embodied failing or mental health issue. It might be a porn addiction, it might be a tendency towards anxiety, depression, or bipolar. And as these friends have walked through in many other things in between, it's I've watched these friends do the hard, wonderful work of walking through their past with trusted friends, with pastors, with counselors. Again, 10 out of 10 times, they're like, what was going on in your mind and your heart because of these father wounds was showing up in your body. And what that means is that we've got two things to work on. This is the holistic picture of life that I just mentioned from Genesis. When you realize that you are an indivisibly spiritual and physical thing, you start to realize that every spiritual problem is going to become physical. And every physical problem is going to become spiritual. If you are needlessly hurting or harming your body, that's a spiritual problem. We know this from the sexual commands in the Bible. We know this from the commands to respect, to be moderate, to not get drunk, all these things. So the work that these friends have to do when they're dealing with father wounds are both top-down. You need to be told the truth. The truth being that though your father abandoned you, your heavenly father won't. You were not loved the way you should have been. Your heavenly father has perfect love. You need to be told the truth about who you are, right? You are loved, you are lovable, and you will be made new. He will heal you. At the same time, you actually need to do that embodied work of saying, I have now trained my body to be panicky in rooms that my father used to be in or in situations that I used to be in. And you need to go bottom up at the same time. You've created patterns in your life that are harming your body and thus harming your mind. And I now see those as a dual process relationship that God intended, which is why I'm so big, Joshua, on habits, because habits are where you're training the lower body to match the truth your upper brain is telling you. And so much of our life is my head's going one way, my habits going the other, and your heart tends to follow the habits. So when you're practicing habits of the body, let's say by denying yourself food, drink, porn, alcohol, something, you are training a way of your mind to say, no, God is enough. No, I don't need to abuse my body with these things. Paying attention to your body is to pay attention to your soul and vice versa.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Yeah, so solid. And our tagline is become the dad you never had for our listeners that are thinking about what does it look like to model to our kids, to our family, to our community, what a godly man looks like. It is someone who stewards their bodies that has learned to master certain behaviors or certain habits. And so we're about to get into the 10 habits of kind of some real life practical tools. And so if you're listening, if you're watching, make sure you grab a piece of paper, grab a pen or your phone, and make sure you take these notes. But I'm gonna ask you a question. I've got 22 years of vocational ministry experience. I heard you say that you cannot be spiritually healthy and physically out of shape. Is that true?

SPEAKER_01 13:35

I don't I don't know if I would want to put it that bluntly.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

I see so many pastors, and there are dudes who go to churches and they look up at their pastor, and the dude is nailing on not looking at porn and being a godly man and being faithful to your wife, and then there's dudes that are sitting there looking up at the guy seeing this massive overweight. And so the question I want to ask you are you saying, and uh I'd like for you to be blind between you and I can you be spiritually in shape and physically out of shape.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

Okay, I'm I'm totally fine with being honest. I want to be nuanced though, because the reality of our bodies is that some of our metabolisms hide our sins, like me. I could eat 10 other people and I'll stay pretty trim. Some of our metabolisms hide our virtues. So some of the situation we're thinking about where we just see somebody who like looks overweight, it's like, hold on. One of the realities of our life is that we have different soils in the garden of our body, right? So you just want to nuance this conversation. But if we are talking about what I suspect you are talking about, and that is that we come down really hard on sexual sin, on alcohol, and on let's say cursing. But greed is fine. Greed is fine. If you want to eat your way to oblivion, if you want to cover every wound in your life by just eating, if you want to ignore exercise because that's too hard, then yes, you have a spiritually unhealthy life because you're doing that thing we do where we say, I'm not gonna give all of my life to Jesus. I'm just gonna give some parts of them and the parts that are culturally acceptable to hold back. And these change in so many places. In some places, it's like super fit bodies and really unhealthy drinking habits. Or in some places it's just a huge trend towards health. Well, sleep around with anybody. It's like you can live with your girlfriend. Jesus doesn't actually care about that. All of us do these things where we say, I'm gonna hold back this part of my life. And I do think, Joshua, that when you realize how spiritual embodiment is, you get uncomfortable because you realize the significance of the claim that God wants over your life. And honestly, if you think about it, these are most of the places where we have problems. These are most of the places where we says, I don't want to give my sex life to him, or I don't want to give this drinking habit to him. I don't want to give this porn habit to him, or this food habit to him, or that because those are the places where we are like, we want to be the God of our bodies. And God is explicitly saying, you are not your own. You were bought with a price, therefore what? Honor God in your body. Yeah, well, I want to nuance it because we all have very different bodies. You could throw in, by the way, sickness and like former trauma, injuries, things that make your body hard to deal with. I'd want to nuance for all those, but I definitely want to say if you are just ignoring your body, as many Christians are known to do, and say greed with food is fine and being overweight is fine, I would say no, we call it greed, and that's a sin.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

Yeah, so good. And so that's a great segue into this idea of eating healthy as an act of worship. Would you do that a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 17:05

This is such a fascinating chapter to work on for me because though I, while I always loved food, as most of us do, and then fascinating by the idea that God made us to eat, I didn't really have a good theology for it. One of the things I learned was again, we're going to start in Genesis that God makes food in the garden, trees that are good to look at and good for food. Right there, you have two incredible pillars of the Bible set up that God made us to be dependent on creation. We need food, but also to delight in creation. We love to look at it. Like there's a reason we take pictures of our food. There's a reason we like to arrange a feast for each other because we're meant to delight in God's provision for us as well as depend on it. Now, in the modern American diet, you see a sim-based twist on both of these things. In a world of like abundant food and highly processed food, we move from dependence to indulgence. Whereas there's so much, we never think we're people of need. Like we're we have plenty. Like we'll eat anything in front of us. And usually we don't know how to stop. So we twist dependence to indulgence. And then, of course, that creates shame where delight should have been. And so where you're meant to have this like wonderful back and forth of dependence and delight. Now we have indulgence and shame. I find most people, like including myself, their relationship to food feels more like this. It's a swing back and forth of like too much, and then oh my gosh, I feel horrible back up too much in this chapter. As you mentioned, this is a habit-based book. So every chapter has a spiritual discipline and a physical discipline. And in the eating chapter, my spiritual disciplines are learn to fast and learn to feast. Because fasting is the biblical practice. Jesus assumes we'll do it. He says, when you fast, that it's the biblical practice of cultivating dependence again, both on food, because seriously, if anybody's listening hasn't fasted in a while, like you need to do it tomorrow. When you don't eat for a day, you suddenly realize how truly frail you are, like how truly impatient you are, how truly needy you are. You'll start to realize, oh my gosh, this is a practice that cultivates dependence generally, but specifically dependence on God. But then on the other hand, Jesus assumes that his followers will feast. Remember that passage in Luke? He says, when you throw a banquet, he assumes that we're people who know how to celebrate the goodness of what God has done for us. And this is where I want to be like church potlucks or men's group barbecues or dessert parties, Christmas, Easter, everything. These are things like we ought to be people who are like, let's blow off the top. God is making all things new. Look at what He's given us. Let us eat and feast in community. This is not a cheat day, right? This is like a holy thing. These are two spiritual paradigms that you can't do if you're not living according to what I call ordinary fare. That's like a typical daily practice of being moderate, not being mastered by anything, not constantly indulging. That's the physical rhythm of the eating chapter, learning to develop a disciplined but delightful diet. Healthy food tastes great and you'll feel great. But that sets you up to then learn to fast, learn to feast. It's honestly practicing the life of Jesus. This is how he ate. He fasted, he feasted, and he lived simply in between. And this is why I call the book The Body Teaches the Soul. When you practice rhythms like this, you you are practicing a way of spirituality. Like your spiritual life will change because, again, God made you to eat.

SPEAKER_02 20:31

Justin, I wish we could go through all 10 chapters and really dig in because there's so many questions that I want to ask. So I'm only going to pick two or three more, and then Yeah, no, it's fine.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

That's why I wrote the book because it's long form. If you ask what are all 10, oh it'll overwhelm you because there's a lot there.

SPEAKER_02 20:47

So here's what I want you to chew on if we can stick with this eating conversation.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Nice. Yeah, see what you do there.

SPEAKER_02 20:53

For a dude who grew up without a dad, actually, segue into this lower brain conversation. Let's do that. For a dude that grew up without a dad, what are the things that he might say and the thoughts he might think living inside of his lower brain?

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Yes. All right. So I want to commend anybody listening to this to go to chapter two in the book. It's the chapter on mental health. So it's on the thinking. Because there's going to be so much going through your mind that you probably don't know is in your mind. And it's showing up in your habits. So, for example, by way of contrast, I had a dad I am so grateful for. I so grateful for. And he was very present, truly loved the Lord. He worked hard. He was authoritative with us, but gentle with us. Joshua, the more I realized that I approach life with a mentality of I'll be okay. Somebody's got my Back. Like even if things get troubled, like there's somebody who has my back. And I don't even know who that is, right? But it's coming from this lower brain experience in my childhood of knowing I'm safe. There's somebody behind me who's going to take care of me. He's bigger than me. He's stronger than me. He loves me. And he's not leaving. So there's this idea of somebody's got my back. When I am in a relationship with my wife, there is an intuitive sense of this woman is worthy of my love. She should be cared for. She should be made a queen. She should be treated well. Because I watched my dad try to figure out every day how to make my mom smile and never once threat like of leaving her. And so I'm thinking like, this woman is worthy of respect. When I look at my kids, you're going to have thoughts in your head when you have a broken father figure, a distracted father figure, a destructive father figure, or just an absent one. I'm not sure if I'm going to be okay. I don't know if anybody's got my back. I better look out for myself. Or this woman's getting in the way of what I'm trying to do in life or trying to get in life. Or these kids are problems, not gifts. The world, I need to raise my fists to it, not open my palms to it. There's going to be so many things that you intuit in life that are things that have been done to you, right? Things that, in a real sense, are not all your fault. And you've got to learn to lament that, surrender that, but also to see the truth that you've been told a lie. You've been told a lie. That's not how life is, because you have a heavenly father who does have your back, who's made a wife and kids who are worthy of your love and who is changing your heart. And the reason I say this in the context of a mental health chapter is because, as you certainly know, telling yourself that alone is insufficient to convince your whole self of it. Many people hear no, remember you're worthy. And many people go off unchanged. So one of the things that I recommend in the mental health chapter is to garden your mind. Meaning understand that you are not stuck with the mental patterns that you have right now. One of the wonderful truths of the Bible that is reflected in biology is that grace is real and so is neuroplasticity. This means that you can spiritually and physically change. You're not stuck with the mental patterns that you have right now. But they are like a garden. As in, if you don't do anything, it'll deteriorate and die, it'll become a desert. But you're not also in a garden, you're not automatically in control. It's not like everything you do right away has an impact. No, if you do any gardening, if you know farming, it's like really slow. It happens over seasons. And by the way, there's lots of stuff that gets in the way, like weather and drought and family tragedy and setbacks and stuff. But this is the original human vocation to garden so good. Take Eden and cultivate it to a flourishing place of shalom. And I want to say to the fathers that are struggling with these father wounds and these things that are like, oh my gosh, no, I'll never be X. I'm like, that's not what God thinks about you. He sees you as a garden that can be cultivated towards flourishing. That's why Jesus told so many parables about farming. That's why Paul talks about the fruits of the spirit. So you've really got to think about how do I cultivate new mentalities through practices in the body and truth in the mind. You remember, don't ignore the body, but don't idolize it. Do both. This is the idea of a slow work of cultivating beauty in your mind. It's going to be hard, but God made you to do it.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

It's so good because as you talk about the garden, it brings us back to the healthy eating as worship. And if you have a kid that loves fruity pebbles, approved getting him to an apple is going to be hard as H E double. That's right. I don't like vegetables. I like fruit. And then if you liken that to thought of where we live, you have to exchange unhealthy for healthy. And it's so hard. It's possible, but it's a journey. Before we move on to a different conversation, anything else that you want to say as it relates to your upper brain and your lower brain in chapter two?

SPEAKER_01 26:22

So I stayed at the high-level parallel paradigm of that. But what let me give you an example. You heard my story a little bit at the beginning. So, young lawyer, great worldview, mental health collapse. This is a really dark time for me, like really dark. I always got in a place where I was even having suicidal thoughts for a while. And it took me not only a long time to get better, but a long time to start telling my story. I was working on my first book. It was about to come out. I was talking to a group of professionals in Washington, DC. And afterwards, a psychiatrist who was the next speaker came up to me and he gave me a huge hug. I didn't know this guy from Adam. He gave me a huge hug. And I thought it was, you know, I thought I was going to be let go. But no, he just held on. And like a father, he like said to me in my ear during the hug, he said, You keep telling your story. You keep telling people what God is doing in your life. God is changing you and He's going to change them. This man is Kurt Thompson, who I now know has written a bunch of wonderful books on the brain and spirituality and spiritual disciplines and how to heal from trauma. Just if you haven't read Kurt's books, you should go read them. But I didn't know what was happening to me in that moment, honestly, until years later. But I thought back to that moment so often because I was in this big fatherly embrace and being told, keep doing the work, keep telling your story. And I think Kurt was being totally genuine. I also think he knows what he was doing. He was doing something in that moment where he was uniting the lower body and the upper brain by saying, I'm going to hold you tightly. Like this by itself does incredible things. When we hold onto our children, when we hug our wives, when we put our arms on the shoulders of another man, when we grab his face and we look into it and hold eye contact, your brain is going haywire. You know, usually in good ways, if this is a safe situation, right? But your brain is going haywire. All your body is signaling, oh my gosh, this is another person. They're being serious with me, they're being intentional. Am I safe? Yes, I am. Am I loved? Oh wow, I think they love line. You're not thinking all this stuff. You're feeling all this stuff. We call it the lower brain. And then when in that moment, somebody speaks incredible truth to you, keep telling your story. God is working through you and He's going to change you and change others.

SPEAKER_02 28:48

So good.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

This is my body being aligned with my spirit. I feel like a soul. I feel loved. This is the idea of Jesus touching a sick man and looking at him and saying, Your eyes are healed, so is your soul. This is like full soul stuff, full body, full mind stuff. And not every moment's going to be like that, right? But what you're doing when you're thinking, train your lower brain to match the truth of your upper brain is stuff like if you are telling yourself correct truth all the time, but regularly staying up till 2 a.m. scrolling your phone and then getting up at 5 a.m. and skipping breakfast, you're punishing your lower brain with a world of stress, even though you're preaching to your upper brain a world of peace. And you're going to be very confused in life. And if likewise, if your father's telling you, I love you, but then he hits you when you do something wrong, and then he beats you, you're going to have this confused mismatch of your upper and your lower brain. And again, that wouldn't be your fault, but you're going to have to train that lower brain to say, I want to thank you for taking time to listen to this story.

SPEAKER_02 29:55

And if there's something inside of here that is adding value to you, I want you to stop and hit subscribe. I am on mission to help men become the dads they never had. Many of us struggle with father wounds, addictions, identity issues. And really what we need is we need a model. I want to simply invite you to join me on the journey. Every Thursday, we're going to release a new episode. Each episode is going to help you and others become the dads they never had. Hit subscribe and share with a friend. Now let's get back to the story.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Physical touch from a male is actually safe. Let me practice it. And so when you and I'll end with this one, one thing that I think every man should do is have close male friendships who know them fully and love them anyway. When we practice male friendship with other guys, and they really know our secrets, Joshua, I'm talking about knowing fully, like the things you don't tell most other people, you tell to them. I think one of the most significant parts of my life is that I'm a male without secrets. I've got two friends, they know everything. Their names are Matt and Steve. When I tell them something I struggle with, and I'm thinking of a night just a year and a half ago, telling them something I've struggled with, and they stand up and they say, just stop. Hold on, Justin. And he comes and just gives me a hug. And he's bro, Christ loves you. You're not a failure. Christ loves you. Friendships like that are uniting your body to your spirit and mind in a way that you can't even begin to describe. Science can't even grip it, neither can we, because it's almost magical. It's spiritual. It's God made it. And you can find these practices everywhere, right? But what you're trying to do is you're trying to say over and over, let the body teach the soul, practice the truth in embodied ways because it's going to help knit your lower brain with your upper brain together.

SPEAKER_02 31:54

Dude, we need a four-part series because we need to dig into sleep. We need to get into exercise. But is a conversation that most dudes without dads had never heard of. It's like a Greek word. What does that mean? And then talking about how all of this plays into a lasting legacy, which any dude that's watching this or listening right now, they're here because they want to break the cycles that have been passed on to them. And then into a conversation of being touched or held. Most dudes who grew up inside of a destructive environment, they've never felt the embrace of a dude who actually cared about them. I remember there was a friend of mine, he's a friend now, but I basically had something to say about a sticker on his car, and I just made a quick comment. He got so mad that he was going to confront me at my wife's birthday party. This is about 15, 20 years ago. He's also on house arrest. And so there was a murder, and he was with one of my friends living in his house until that his court take. When he came into this fellowship hall, he looked at me. As soon as I saw him, I said, Hey, can I chat with you? We went to the back. He had no clue what was going on. I put my hands on him and I just started praying for him. And I said, Top of your head to the bottom of your feet. He turned around, walked off. My wife and I, two hours later, are watching a movie, and the guy that he's living with gives me a call and said, What did you do to? And named his name. I said, I didn't do nothing. He's like, he's crying like a baby.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02 33:27

I come to find out that when I heard the demonic spirits that leave body and his mind when I put my hands on him, and he said this later on to me. He said, Joshua, I've never had a man put his hands on me and really care about me or love me. If you think about that's all around us, if we're ministers of the gospel, let's be ministers. There's children, there's teenagers, there's men that need image bearers to put our hands off who they are so their brains can experience the freedom that they've never experienced. Mental illness is a massive issue for him. That's our target inside of here. So I need to segue because lamenting is something I want you to maybe spend three minutes on. For someone that's never even heard the word lamenting, what is it and how do I do it?

SPEAKER_01 34:18

I think that's really important to hit on in this conversation because when you're talking about generational trauma, family wounds, things that were done to you or never said to you by fathers, you feel angry because the world is unfair, it's not right. Um, why did this happen? And I want to tell you that the incredible thing about Christianity is that it agrees with you. It says, you're right, this is wrong. This shouldn't happen, the world shouldn't be this way. And the biblical category for that done healthily is lament, because there's a dangerous version which is full of hate, as in this is wrong. And so now I'm against the world, I'm against God. Look what everybody did to me. But lament is this category of combining frustration and sadness and even anger with hope to say God agrees this is not the way the world should be. He doesn't love sin, he hates it. He doesn't love brokenness, he hates it. And you see this in the life of Jesus, where literally when he comes to Lazarus' family, and he knows he's going to raise Lazarus from the dead, but what does he do before he does the miracle? He cries. This is maybe the most famous by way of being the most short verse in the Bible. Jesus wept. Because Jesus understood that death and brokenness was worth weeping over, but also worth fixing. And so I like to draw this sort of four by four category of sadness and hope. If you have no sadness over the world and only have hope, you don't really understand Christianity because Christianity claims the world is broken. But if you only have sadness and have no hope, you don't understand Christianity because Christianity claims the world is going to be made new. When you have sadness and hope together, now you're on to the person of Jesus who is ready to lament over the brokenness of the world. Like he doesn't like what's been done to you, he wants to fight for you. But he's also not going to let you stay stuck, right? Like he's that gardener again, calling you to flourishing. And so read the psalms. I point a couple out in the book. There, there are psalms that would be really helpful for dads who are just carrying a lot of frustration and anger to realize God gives voice to that and lament, but he calls you to do it hopefully.

SPEAKER_02 36:47

It's powerful. I feel like I need to go read a psalm in the darkness.

SPEAKER_01 36:53

Some of them make you feel uncomfortable because of the way that David or this other psalmists are talking to God. My wife had a season where this is really important to her, and one of her mentors told her God's big enough. He can take your anger. Go talk to him about it. You know what I mean? It's one thing to just curse in your mind or take it out on people beside you, but I think if you're an angry man, just go look at the biggest man in the universe and tell it to him. He's big enough to take it. And then see what he says back. That's the idea of lament.

SPEAKER_02 37:26

Thank you for sharing that. And if you want to go deeper on it, of course, you can check out Justin's new book. And for the final words, Justin, I want to ask you this question. And then you're basically closing out today's podcast. And I want you to speak to the man who feels like he's half alive. Save it on paper, but when it comes to being in practice, they feel completely disconnected.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

The hope that God calls you, inviting He's inviting you to so much more. Like I'm constantly amazed that Jesus died so that we could have life and life to the full. If we're saying in our heads that, yeah, I believe that God loves me, but not yet feeling in our hearts that means joy and abundance, then there we have an invitation. We still have work to do. This is the Jesus who says, My yoke is easy, my burden is light. He wants you to come into a place of joy and abundance, even where there's lament and sadness. There's so much more for you. And that is always going to be, just like we talked about with exercise, that's always going to be through difficulty, right? The healthy and the full life is through difficulty. You don't have to stay stuck. There are things that you can do. And this is the great news of the Bible. This is why David says, I love the law. Why would he say that? Because God is in the spiritual disciplines, in the commands of the Bible, in all Paul's letters at the end, he talks about in light of God's mercy, do this and that. It's not so God will love you more. None of these habits are going to make God love you. But God's love for you should change the way you live because it's an invitation to abundance. It's literally saying, child, come and feast at my table. I can't make you eat, but I've set the place for you. There's all these things you can do. And that's why I write books on spiritual disciplines and habits, because if you're living in that sort of like half-full life, it's going to be like, come practice joy. Practice. It's not going to work every time you can just come practice living the joyful, abundant life that Jesus invites you into. That's the good life. And that's a really good life, by the way, to model for your children.

SPEAKER_02 39:47

Do you have an incredible story of overcoming the home that you were raised in? Or maybe the father wounds that were placed inside your life? If so, I want to share it with other dudes without dads. Simply go to dudeswithoutdads podcast.com and apply to be a guest on the show. The reason it's important to share your story is because when you share what God has done for you, it helps other men believe that God can do it for them. Head over to Dudes Without Dads Podcast today.