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Hello and welcome to restoring the soul, a podcast dedicated to helping you close the gap between what you believe and what you actually experience. I'm your producer Brian Beatty. Thank you for listening. For the next two episodes of the podcast, we're excited to partner with the fine men of foxhole symphony. Mark Vesper and Steve Sargent, have served arm and arm for over a decade, seeking authentic Christian community by helping other men fight against isolation and living in the dark. Together, they host an amazing podcast called foxhole symphony, we've added a link to the show notes, and highly encourage you to subscribe today. It's a podcast about the transformational value of men who are on a journey from broken to whole. Now a few weeks ago, they interviewed Michael and featured their conversation on the foxhole Symphony podcast, we're thrilled to be able to share their discussion with you and trust you'll also be impacted enough to share it with someone else who could use the encouragement. And now without any further delay, here's your host, Michael JOHN CUSICK, along with Mark Vesper. And Steve Sargent. It's good to be here. I'm really thrilled. We've been talking about this for a long time. And no one could be more thrilled than we are. Because there's a message we are trying to get out to a community of men around the world that has everything to do with seeking authentic Christian community, right, knowing the value of not being isolated in in the darkness, or what we call caving up, you're in in the foxhole. And we're really glad that you're a kindred spirit. I do similar DNA in your ministry as there is in our podcast and live. So it's great. If you don't mind. I'm going to jump right in. We'll, we'll do some q&a and and see where God takes us. Okay. Yeah, we'd love to cool. We don't have time for your whole life story. But could you summarize for our listeners, the events leading up to the summer of 94 that basically blew up your double life? So they have some context? Yeah, you bet. I was born in 1964. The very last year of the baby boomers as I as I understand it, so my kids call me a Boomer and they are technically correct. So at 29, just two months before my 30th birthday, I came home from work one day, and I had graduated from a master's in pastoral biblical counseling at Colorado Christian University. And I began working out in the community as a counselor psychotherapist, but had a heart to be in ministry, and I was doing Christian counseling on the side and teaching some classes at Colorado Christian. And yet I had a double life where I was acting out sexually, I was acting out with prostitutes and going to strip clubs and acting out with women and attempting to do so in bars. And I was drinking to try to assuage the shame that was deep inside and the anxiety that I lived with, which had frankly, I had lived with since I was a young boy. But the anxiety was really about it's just a matter of time until I'm found out. And my behavior got so out of control. And my my deception became so pervasive, although, I still felt like I was just a nice Christian guy living a nice Christian life, things were so compartmentalized that one day I came home from work, and I was doing some work part time on call in emergency room. So I carried this pager back then. And I came home late. And my wife said, I thought you were working late, you told me earlier that you got paged, and you're gonna go to the hospital. I said, I didn't say that. She said, Yes, you did. And I went back and forth and turned out, I was lying. I made up the story. But I had forgotten that I actually told her I was coming home that night. So it's kind of like a drunk who just got lost in my story. And that was the beginning of the end, the best day of my life, in an unexpected way, but the worst day of my life in terms of the damage that I caused her and the way that I broke her heart and betrayed her and created really three years of illusion in our marriage. And that was the beginning for me, of healing and experiencing a very different life from not just that sexual sin that I have been committing for three years in our marriage secretly, but from a life where I've been sexually abused starting at the age of four through about the age of 16, by numerous different people, and re victimized over and over again. But also, it was the first time of my life on that day, July 10 1964, when I felt like everything about me was known, and I was exposed and I had absolutely nothing to hide I. But somehow though everything had blown to bits, I felt like something was finally coming together. And through that season of weeks and months, and years, God saved my marriage. And my wife and I just celebrated 30 years marriage together. Congratulations. Thank you. And for people that are hearing this, I hope that that gives hope. But I want to say it has been brutal. It's been really hard in those early years. But then one of the things God had to do from my perspective is nine years after my addictions really began to lose their grip. And on that day, I never acted out sexually, again, there was just a major healing in my heart, as a result of a lot of counseling that I had been doing, lying to my counselors in many ways, telling them 90% of my struggle, and then not telling you the other 10%, which is kind of like saying, Doctor, I have chest pains, but I'm not telling him that I'm fainting every time I have chest. And, you know, Oh, that explains a little bit more. So, what happened nine years later was that I was diagnosed with complex post traumatic stress disorder, and that was from the childhood abuse. But the addictions had served like a manhole cover that had just sealed up that part of my life. And although I had never forgotten those memories that were really pushed down to the side, like a or like a beach ball I was holding down. So when the addiction went away, that opened up all of this pain that was there. And when it came out, it was just debilitating. So for me, it wasn't just a battle for freedom. It was really a battle for wholeness in general, and learning to live as a whole person and really what it learned what it meant to grow up into being a man. Wow, thank you compelling story. Incredibly, thanks for sharing that, bro. You know, the statistics on porn addiction are staggering. And it's not necessarily the topic for this podcast. But you deal with a lot of trauma, and sex addiction and porn. I just want to touch on this briefly. 70% of Christian men report viewing porn in the last year 70% of Christian men. In your book surfing for God, you unpack the reality that attempts at overcoming porn addiction through willpower or pure accountability. They're just not effective approaches. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah, one of my late, great mentors is Dr. Dallas Willard, who wrote the book, the divine conspiracy and the spirit of the disciplines and renovation of the heart. He was a secular professor of philosophy at University of Southern California for over 40 years. And I had one of the great honors of my life was to sit and talk with him for a few hours. I interviewed him in Southern California at a conference. And he made the statement as we were talking about the you know, how the heart gets free. He said that most Christians are caught between ceaseless striving and brokenness. But he framed it as a question. He said, we're caught between ceaseless striving and brokenness is there another way. And I would argue that Jesus said that there is another way but that most modern Christians are either living out their brokenness, like I was where albeit secretively, I was acting out sexually and all these ways. And when I wasn't acting out, I was masturbating as much as I could, and trying to look at pornography, which was much harder to obtain back then. So broken is broken, is broken. So when I wasn't doing something sexual, I was irritated and angry at my wife that she wouldn't cooperate with my agendas of her just being there to make me happy. And then ceaseless striving is okay, I'm broken. But I am going to fix this. Jesus and I are going to tag team together because I could do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Jesus is going to help me overcome my sin, which sounds so good and so biblical. But Jesus doesn't just want to strengthen me in my weakness, he wants my weakness, he wants me to surrender my weakness, and surrendering it to actually steward my weakness. And so we know that Paul says that in my weakness, I am strong. And parenthetically, if you ask a group of Christians fill in the blank when I am weak, blank, and people will say he is strong. But the passage in Second Corinthians 12 says, when I am weak, I am strong, not God is strong. In other words, there's this Genesis to Revelation paradigm that I call the currency in God's economy, is that our weakness in our brokenness is our power. And therefore rather than wanting Jesus to just help us to overcome our weakness and to strengthen us like, Daddy, you know, here's this 100 pound weight and I'm small, and I can't even lift it off the ground. So help me lift it. There's times and places for that, right? But But stewarding your weakness and your brokenness is saying, God, here's my vulnerability. Here are my limitations. Here's my humanity. Here's my addiction, here's my sinful behavior. And I've got no game. I've got nothing. I have tried and tried and tried. And so my ceaseless striving, I'm a pretty disciplined guy, when my mood disorder or bipolar disorder is managed, when I'm not my discipline seems to go out the window and I don't floss my teeth, and I eat lots of candy and things like that. So I'm kind of an all or nothing guy. So in my faith, I started memorizing Scripture. And I went to conferences that said, If you memorize Romans six, and Romans eight and James chapter one and all these other verses and chapters, and I became in my young life community, among some other guys that have been on this program, like Peters rumba, kind of walking scripture machine, and I showed up for the 6am Saturday Bible study. And for you know, the he-man Jesus follower club, and I was like, all in, and I was a 16, seven year old kid doing college level navigator designed for discipleship books. And my youngest daughter was like, Wow, this guy's gotta go into ministry. And the more he got that kind of affirmation, the harder I tried, but I would literally, like read my Bible for three days and memorize scripture, and then I would masturbate, or I would look for pornography at my buddy's house, you know, in his dad's workshop, I would secretly fantasize about sex with men. I've never had a primary homosexual orientation. But because I was sexually abused by men, up and through probably 16 years old, I would I would fantasize. Not about any man in particular, but just about that sex act, because that was introduced to me at such a young age, that that actually became a comforting, soothing kind of thing, like getting a parent having that close contact, even though it was this unholy thing. So I had this whole confusion inside of me. And I was like, Okay, I'm going to get rid of this, I'm going to set my mind on things above and set my heart and things above and I was literally obsessive, obsessive about it. But it was never enough. So I find myself, just like Willard said, either broken or ceaselessly striving. And what I learned, literally, through experience is that that ceaseless striving either left me with a real false sense of pride, like, wow, aren't I great, I finally, I finally did it, I finally pulled it off, God must really be happy with me. Or on the other hand, exhaustion, just spiritual weariness, and exhaustion. And I lived that way my whole life. And I had actually had another run in prior to meeting my wife and prior to getting married, and the stories in my book surfing forgot, where, in January of 1989, I had graduated college and I started a little painting business because I didn't want to go into education. That was my degree. And I showed up at the house where I was painting that day, and I saw the newspaper on their on their doorstep. And the headline read FBI rates escort service, and I was making like, seven bucks an hour at my real job at that time. And I was racking up credit card debt with paying for prostitutes and going to strip clubs and putting it on my tab for all the drinks at the bar and just doing crazy out of control, compulsive things. So I had been using that prostitution ring. And because in that city, there was an athlete and a celebrity that were implicated in this as well. So it really became a big thing. So I was what 22 years old, terrified that my name was going to show up in the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and that would be exposed and shamed, humiliated. My family wouldn't talk to me. Plus, all my Christian friends would be like, Who is this guy? Right. So as a result of that, I went to a really good Christian counselor, who I started on this journey. Back then they didn't really have treatment or therapy for sex addiction or porn addiction. And so this counselor wisely, started working with me around issues of my masculinity, how I saw myself in God's image and started dealing with the sexual abuse. So that actually got me able to relate to and engage with women because I had never been on a real date. During that time. Women thought I was probably charming and funny, but I was always kind of they did you keep telling yourself that Sure. They did. Yeah, yeah. Well, of course I tell myself that but I was the girl I was the guy that could hang around with with girls but never initiate or pursue or be romantic. So I was a quote, relatively healthy person, when I married Julianne in 1990. One but little did I know that this addiction had really been so untreated. And the proximity of suddenly being married to a woman and not really knowing who I was or how to be intimate and I had zero clue guys. So if there's anybody listening who goes, you know, I really don't know how to have an intimate relationship. Really the the welcome is welcome to The Club. And the strength and how to begin to do that is by acknowledging that brokenness and that inadequacy, because our inadequacy is really our first qualification to become who we are. So yeah, I got married, which was pretty miraculous, fell in love with my wife at first sight in Colorado. We were married eight months later, and have been together ever since despite my own brokenness and the wilds of evil. So thank you, brother for sharing that. So you, you, you shared a lot there. And I want to just dig in to try to get a practical tidbit or an application for, you know, men or women, frankly, that are that are listening, who are wondering, you talk about this, this ceaseless striving, right. And this, you know, this is failing. And you talk about I think in the book, he talks about how to overcome compulsion once it begins. And I think you started to touch on this, but you you suggest that the barrier built by porn addiction can actually become the bridge to abundant life? What do you mean by that? And what's sort of a practical application that listeners could use to help build that bridge? Yeah, that's a that's a wonderful question, because I talk about that on so many different levels. But we're about to celebrate Holy Week, and with that Maundy Thursday or Holy Thursday, where we we remember Jesus being in the upper room and the Passover meal with his disciples and washing feet of his disciples and Peter saying, No, you're not gonna you're not gonna wash my feet. And then Jesus didn't get somebody saying, God, take this cup from me, but But ultimately, I want your will. And then the agonizing, horrific, torturous crucifixion the next day. And, you know, we all know that. And then there is the resurrection. It's Friday, but Sunday's coming as Tony Campolo has always said, yep. And so that is a principle. That is not just a season that we celebrate during Easter, but back to this idea that that's the rhythm of Heaven itself. That's the rhythm of the kingdom of life, death, new life, or as Walter Brueggemann has said in his book, The message of the psalms that that Gods pattern that we see in the Psalms in the life of Jesus in the teaching of Jesus is orientation to disorientation to reorientation. Richard Rohr has said that it's ordered disorder reorder. So I have a pastor that talked about this, I think he didn't even know if those other two authors but thrive, dive revive. And anybody, including a person who's not theistic, they would stop and think and go, yeah, there seems to be that kind of pattern to life, things are good, then they're not good, then somehow something better comes out if we're attentive to that. And so this idea that our brokenness, whether that's a porn struggle, or somebody has committed adultery, or unfaithful, or whether it's alcoholism, or an anger issue, or compulsive lying, whatever it might be, that when I bring that into the light, that something actually happens before a quote goes away. And in first, John, it says that anyone who claims to walk in the light, but as in the darkness, deceive themselves. And there's this little verse there that we often pass over in that first John passage three to five, it says that if we walk in the light, we have fellowship with one another. And my paraphrase of that is that if we bring what's on the inside, if we bring what's hidden out? Yeah, not even by way of confession, like, Oh, God, I'm so sorry. But as for the purpose of being known, like, God, you already know this about me, but here I am, here's who I really am. And I'm going to trust you with this. But when we do that, and bring it into the light, it increases our capacity for intimacy with God and for others. Yeah. Because most of us think with our diseased images of God, even as Christians, we go, Well, I know if I bring them to light, God's gonna forgive me. But But surely, he's not going to like, and he's not going to give me a hug. You'll kind of stand there with his glasses down at the end of his nose like an English schoolmaster. But the reality is, is that God says, Thank you. Now we can have a real conversation. Because I just want to know you and I want you to know that I see you and I want you. I see you and I want to move toward you I want to open my arms and my heart, I want to embrace you why? Because you're my son, you're not one of my servants. Because my love for you has been since the beginning of the world. And as Jeremiah chapter one says, Before I formed you, I knew you and set you apart. So foxhole brothers, and Michael, before God formed you, God knew you, he knew that you that was the essential, true you. And the only reason why porn or sexual sin or any kind of sin is, quote, wrong or immoral, is because it inhibits you becoming you. And it inhibits the connection, and the intimacy that God longs for between us and him and us in the people in our lives. And that's why Dr. Harry Schomberg, about 30 years ago, called sex addiction, false intimacy, who's the person first person I knew to use that term. So any compulsion actually, is really just all about the pain that's inside of us, or the brokenness that we don't know what to do with. And that false intimacy is a way to get our needs met, that we are suddenly seemed super safe, secure. And those are the core needs that we have at a physiological, emotional, psychological, spiritual level is for those four essence to be there. So moving into any kind of false intimacy, that that is what then leads to the compulsion, because we can go back to that again and again, predictably and reliably where we can't predict or rely on that in our actual human relationships for the most part, because our story is, that's not what happened to me. Love, wasn't there. Mom, dad wasn't there. Yeah. Well said, bro. Really, really? Thank you very much. Michael, helps us as we're going to continue this conversation journey to think about how a man might start like, what's what's that first step that as you said, the admission of this is what I really am, this is who I am. And you can start working on it at that point in getting into the light. Yep. Let's just keep going a little bit. So here at the foxhole symphony, we invite people to join us on the journey from broken to whole. You spend years counseling, teaching, facilitating these journeys for people? Can you share some common themes you've seen as it relates to the journey. And sergeant, I are interested for our listeners to hear not only the common denominators, but may be any curveballs, there were things you didn't expect, as you've worked on those journeys. Thank you for that question. Because you're right, that is what I've really spent 30 years studying and wrestling with, and reflecting on and teaching. And it's never been as those of Professor it's never been from the ivory tower from an academic perspective, that has informed where I think, but it's really been from my life experience, both as an addict and a broken man, as well as somebody walking with broken men, which is one of the greatest honors. So I want to come at this from a little different perspective. First of all, we have to ask the question, what is brokenness? And then we have to ask the question, what is wholeness? Because I think if you were to hit pause, and survey, every one of your listeners, people might say brokenness is something like, I have either screwed up. And we get this from Psalm 51, where I would literally masturbate and then I'd go read Psalm 5110 times, and I would tell God, how sorry, I was because you do not want for offerings and sacrifices, you want a broken and contrite spirit, and what I understood that to be as really, really, really, to the 10th, power, remorseful and feeling bad about myself, and I believe that the worse I felt about myself, like I'm an idiot, kind of doing a Chris Farley, smacking herself in the face, covering herself in sackcloth and ashes, that that's what repentance was. And that's what God wanted me. When David said, God, in Psalm 5110, that you don't want burnt offerings or sacrifices, you want a broken and contrite spirit, what he was saying, you don't want me to ceaselessly strive to keep trying to not be a sex addict. You don't want me to spin on the hamster wheel of trying to be sexually pure. You want me to say, God, I'm a man, or at the time, I'm 16 years old, and I know you. And this doesn't align with with who I am and how I want to live with you. And so I don't know what to do. I've got no game. I'm not going to be able to fix this. And I think we actually, subtly, although very few people would say, Well, no, Jesus. Most people would say, Jesus can help me overcome this right. But again, before Jesus wants us to ask for help to overcome it, he says, Will you trust me with that? And for me, and for many men, I challenged them to say, what if that never goes away? What if you never stopped compulsively masturbating, looking at porn or acting out with women, that would obviously cause damage to others, especially if you're married, it would be it would be like having the drain clogged in your garden hose, so that you can't water the garden. So it's actually from a prescriptive perspective. It's just not a good, productive, fruitful thing. But what if God said, Can you trust me with this and trust, my love, and my affection, and my embrace, and my moving toward you, even though you're continuing to struggle with this, and seemingly to move away from me? And I think most of us go, Well, yeah, God's like that, but not really not for me. He does that for you, but not for me. And see, even my language of that we move away from him. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence, Psalm 139 language that we are if we are in Christ, we are united with Christ, and He will never leave us and we can run from him. But he's like that Velcro parachute instructor when you jump out of the plane, God, God is that attached to you right where you can try to unbuckled a harness, but it's not going to unbuckle. And you know, God will smash into the ground from 30,000 feet with you. And that's what, that's how much he loves us. So I used to think I'm away from God, because I've done X, Y, and Z. And now I have to get close to God. And that was a ceaseless driving. So we've wrapped up another episode of restoring the soul. We want you to know that restoring the soul is so much more than a podcast. In fact, the heart of what we have done for nearly 20 years is intensive counseling. When you can't wait months or years to get out of the rut you're in our intensive counseling programs in Colorado, allow you to experience deep change and half day blocks over two weeks. To learn more visit restoring the soul.com That's restoring the soul.com