Stop Chasing Side Quests: Finding Your Main Life Mission

In this episode of the HOTLCast, Matt, Ryan, Cody, and Mark, unpack the concept of "Side Quest Life" — the tendency to get so distracted by life's detours that we lose sight of what truly matters. From Skyrim analogies to therapy culture and social media traps, this conversation is honest, funny, and deeply practical. If you've ever felt off-track, overwhelmed, or unsure of your purpose, this episode will help you recalibrate.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to the Hobblecast. This is Pastor Matt.

SPEAKER_02 0:07

Pastor Ryan. Pastor Ryan.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Pastor Ryan.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Okay, Pastor Ryan. There we go.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

That's what we're looking for there. And I'm Cody. And Mark's here too. And I'm here too. Mark's here too. Yay.

SPEAKER_04 0:20

And Doug.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

So it has been an interesting couple of weeks as we've been kind of getting back into the swing of things. We've seen the services starting to get larger. We've got more people coming in. It's, you know, the weather started to break. We had summer already. I believe it was four days long this year, and we're back into winter. We are back into winter. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 0:39

Yep. It's called a midwestern summer.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

But it has been cool kind of starting to see the people who have gone to Florida or gone elsewhere start to make their return back to everything going on at Heart of the Lakes, and we're glad to have them.

SPEAKER_04 0:53

So I think it's a peninsula thing. I think they just go from peninsula to peninsula. It's just where we feel comfortable. Like, oh, I'm not in a peninsula. I need to go somewhere that's a peninsula. Just being around water is a big deal. So I mean, yeah. And our state has two of them. That's the craziest place. But yeah, no, I think I love when like we used to be in Ohio, right? Oh yeah. And when the summer hit, what would happen to our church attendance?

SPEAKER_01 1:22

It would just yeah, into the basement.

SPEAKER_04 1:24

Like in the basement, I know there's other churches in Ohio that probably don't have that, but we I I felt like everywhere we went, we really had that. Because it's almost like as soon as school's out, that's when everybody does everything. Because that's just how the world works when you're living in a state that has nothing to do. Um so they were I'm I lived there my whole life, it's fine. Uh yeah, so did I.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Well, I mean, I lived there a long time ago.

SPEAKER_04 1:48

Coming to Michigan after being in Ohio, and everybody's like, Michigan, like everybody loves this state. And I was just like, I thought I liked my state, and then I talked to you guys.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 1:57

And then I was like, why do I like that state?

SPEAKER_01 1:59

And it's funny because I'm sure you've seen this meme too, because it's oh, so often shared to people that have been, you know, born and raised in Ohio of Ohio has had more astronauts than any other state in the entire country. And the question is, what is wrong with your state that everyone wants to leave the planet?

SPEAKER_04 2:18

Yeah, but yeah. I mean, we we uh I mean there's good things about Ohio. All the all the people that grew up in Ohio that love it still, they're gonna come out in dross, but uh I just want you to know I too was born and raised in Ohio, so I still love it.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

I I mean I still go back there.

SPEAKER_04 2:34

My mom is there, my sisters are there, but I love it because I mean I'm a Browns fan. Yeah. I'm still loyal to my sports teams, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Yeah, well, Ohio's great, man. Like, you know, I'm I'm a historian, like that's what I went to school for. And like Ohio is like a center of America, right? I mean, more presidents come from Ohio, one of the original astronauts. That's true.

SPEAKER_03 2:55

You can use it to get to other states.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

It's it's pretty pretty centralized.

SPEAKER_04 2:58

Way to call it a flyover without calling it a flyover. I mean, there's no joke, like from a history perspective, there's a ton of dense, rich history that is really Ohio. So yeah, and that I mean that's growing up there, that's what we focused on. Like there, the Mohican State Park that goes through is absolutely stunningly beautiful. Hawking Hills is beautiful, you know. Like, there's a lot, there's a lot to really love about Ohio, but a lot of people only remember that a river caught on fire. And I think that's you know, I think that's the thing that people so much American history, too.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Like you go down to like Canadian Hutton and Schoenbrunn, you've got like all the different things down there from you know, wars and stuff, and like it it's really a cool area.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

Yeah, but I kind of feel like we need Tim Allen to do this for us.

SPEAKER_04 3:38

Yeah, you know, but Tim Allen loves pure high. Yeah, exactly. We don't Ohio doesn't really have that person. I mean That's true. It's just that's not a I mean having a government line. Yeah, Drew Carey's really true. Drew Carey is holding the last thing, he's just holding the beacon for the head flag is the only thing that I just figured.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

This is what Matt can do with his voice.

SPEAKER_04 4:03

Oh, there you go. Oh, a History of Ohio podcast. It's gonna do pure Ohio like and share this podcast if you want Matt to do his own podcast with his SoTree radio voice. The funny thing is about how awesome Ohio is.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

The last time Kyle did this and he brought up my voice, he told people, you know, well, just send in money and Matt'll, you know, record different, you know, verses of the Bible and he'll send it off to you. I actually had people send me money. That was great. So I went right away. Yeah, right away the same day. So I actually went through and recorded all of Jude and I sent it off to the people that actually Venmo'd me.

SPEAKER_04 4:40

I'm gonna tell you, you should have sent it to the Bible app. You just need to be one of the regular voices. We need to mobile, we need to have like you know, James Earl Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, and Matt Plot. I think that's that's like those are the voices that we need on the Bible app.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

But yeah, so AI would take over and just ruin it for everybody.

SPEAKER_04 4:59

Yeah, exactly. You get too much recording of your voice, AI is gonna take it somewhere. You're gonna be the next Suno voice.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 5:07

Um, but speaking of Ohio, our our senior pastor Kyle, that you guys, you know, is normally on this podcast, grew up in Ohio too. He did. So we're all three of us are Ohio. In fact, we met in Ohio.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

We did, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:18

And so, like, and when he was talking, he's talking this past Sunday about side quest life. He's talking about like, you know, he's out of all these side quests. I mean, the truth is we experienced a lot of those with him in Ohio, like, which is funny because like when we talk about you know that state and what it means, and to us, I it does have fond memories for us because we think back to all the funny things and all the people and the churches that we worked at. So yeah, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

And because we've worked together at so many different churches, this has been the funniest thing to me is you and I would have a conversation and we reference something that nobody else gets, or you and Kyle have a conversation. You just you know a little hat tip to just something that has happened or occurred. When I first got up here, somebody had said, Well, and no offense to them because there's no offense, uh no offense attended, but you had said, Well, Ray and Amy are gonna take care of it. And immediately I thought of a Ray and Amy couple that we had from Dayton from yeah, from another church. That was the first thing that kind of popped into my head. And I'm like, wait a minute, what? And then you're like, oh no, we have a couple here, you know, Ray and Amy Van Zandt. I'm like, oh, okay. That's gonna take some time to get used to.

SPEAKER_04 6:35

Yeah, oh yeah. So no, I mean it's it's just cool. When you I mean, I love I love the idea. Like when Kyle, and I mean you guys are doing this in Jackson too, like when Kyle was talking about how um you know, we can spend our whole life not focusing on the main, you know, main quest, right? This the idea that like we miss the big mark because we're so focused on all these side quests and all these things that we have going on, and all these extra storylines. Like when you I mean, and we I mean I'm a I play video games. I mean, I know you guys play some video games, but like we we talked about like like I think he was talking about this new game, but there's an old game older, it's getting older that like had all these side quests and thousands of hours worth of gameplay called Skyrim. And it's like you could do you could spend your entire game just focusing on the side quest and never accomplish the main mission. And you like I think the the reality of that is we do the same thing in our everyday lives. Like we we kind of miss the plot sometimes. No, no pun intended. Uh but yeah, exactly. That plot. Uh but sometimes we do. We miss the plot and we focus on the things that aren't necessarily important. And like I think I don't know about you guys, but I think for me, I have to intentionally build time into my life where I can reflect and make sure that I'm not missing the main storyline. That like I'm not focused on the things that don't matter or that I'm not stressed about the things that don't matter, you know, because I I think so often we get so focused on we get off on these like side tangents. And being ADHD, I feel like that is my whole life is just swatting down side tangents because that's where my brain goes. Yeah, I don't know about you guys, but yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:22

And when he showed the map, I thought Skyrim too. Yeah, I was like, That's exactly what I thought. Like when he showed the map and message. Um but yeah, I feel the same way. It's easy to get caught up in all the other distractions. I know when I would play things like Skyrim games like that, where you look at the map and there's 1,500 things for you to do. You're like, uh, oh, look this thing. Like, I would see something new on the trail, like it'd be a new location discovered. I'd be like, oh, well, I was gonna do the main mission, but that that cave looks cool. I'm gonna go check that out. And before I know it, I forgot what I was even doing in the first place. And I think that that's the thing that Kyle was talking about is that in life those side quests can kind of distract you from what the main purpose of what we should do is.

SPEAKER_04 9:07

Yeah. I I have a weird analogy. Can you guys go on this this trip with me for a second? Do we have a choice? I don't know. Go ahead. Okay, I was thinking about how we used to vacation. Like when you used to take road trips and vacation. Do you remember what you used to have to do before map quest? What'd you used to have to do? You did to get like a physical map, right? Like we didn't have GPS on our phones. So you had to plot out, like you had to know where you were going. And you had to look at the map and go, this is where we're going, this is what we're doing. Right. And and when you would vacation, you would you would go from point A to point B. But like now, everybody's trying to get the most juice out of this for the squeeze. And like I we went we went on a road, like we went down to Disney a couple years ago and um a few years ago now, and we drove down. And uh the amount of places that I was like, we gotta stop, we gotta do this on the way because we're never gonna, you know, like just like this desperation of like, oh, I gotta do all this stuff, like it made me think like if I had a map and I just map requested exactly the route that I was supposed to go, we would have wasted so much less time and money, right? Right, and we would have gotten to our destination, and then the destination would have been the most important focal point of the entire thing, right? And not that it wasn't, because with the toddlers going to Disney, there's it's kind of hard not to make that the focal point. But I just got thinking, like, man, you remember like people just used to like get the map out, and if you were off, you'd pull the map out and like, okay, I'm here, I get this is where I gotta get back on track. And there's a simplicity to it. And I think because of how complex our lives are, I think that sometimes we end up majoring, they say this in Jamaica all the time, I love it. Majoring in the miners. Yeah. Like where we just we are focused on the things that don't matter, and we don't realize it until we know how far off track we are.

SPEAKER_03 11:02

Yeah, I I feel like the opposite would happen with me with the paper map. I would like look through and be like, oh look, there's this thing here. I just when I use my map quest, I just go right to the location that I have in place. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:15

On the map. It doesn't have any identification. Other than roads, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really? And not even all of them. Not even all the road roads. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:24

So wait, how do you know where you're going then when you look at the map?

SPEAKER_02 11:27

You drive where you want to go, and then when you get there, you stop and you go, do you know where uh First Street and Second Street come together? They go, Yeah, you gotta go down six roads, six blocks, take a left.

SPEAKER_04 11:37

And or how do I get back to the highway?

SPEAKER_03 11:39

So like you're looking for a specific place. You just find the road it's on, and then ask somebody that lives on that road.

SPEAKER_04 11:45

You'd have to plot out the L where the address is. You'd have to find the road on the map. And then look for the address on that road. The right one.

SPEAKER_03 11:52

So let's say I'm going to that hands-on museum in Ann Arbor. Yeah. You would like find the road it's on and you'd look up what road the hands-on museum is on. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

And then you just go up and down the road until you it actually goes one step further than that. You would, if you knew that there was something in a particular location, you would try and find like a travel plaza or a visitor center, and they would have a wall of brochures where you'd be able to go and say, Okay, so I'm looking for the you know, the Penn Cave system, and you would look over there and you'd find, okay, there's a brochure for Penn Cave. You pull that out, and then on the back of it, it's got the address, it's got the location, a little mini-map. It would give you directions.

SPEAKER_04 12:31

Like out of this plaza, turn wherever, and like it would tell you the directions, like specific directions on how to get there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:40

So like each city would have this type of thing that you would go to.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Oh, the whole thing. Like visitor centers or larger destination areas, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:48

So like the the rest stops in Michigan, like that's why they have the map showing you all the stuff is because exactly what my goodness, that's so fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

When I talk to Mark, I feel like I need a can of Gerital and a walker. I'm telling you, it's yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 13:04

I'm asking myself, is he serious? He doesn't even know what he doesn't even know what surge is. What surge? The pop surge. You just miss it all the time. It's like juiced up cheap mountain dew. Do you know where why a lot of guys in their like 30s and 40s are bald already? It's because of surge.

SPEAKER_03 13:19

Good to know. That's really good to know. Sorry, man. It's all good. I love surge.

SPEAKER_04 13:26

Oh, that makes it so much better. But no, I do I do think that. I do think that, like in our faith, I think a lot of times I do think we major in the minors and we we just lose we lose track of what the most important things are. And I think I mean there's a myriad. I mean, I I can speak for myself, but I know you guys, you know, you guys would probably share these opinions. Like, I think stress throws you off. Like, I think stress makes you like hyper focused on the things that are causing the stress instead of the things that'll take it away. Absolutely. Like, and I think there's there's been this trend, like there's been a lot of study lately in therapy and like psychoanal uh uh analytics about people that are regularly going to therapy and what the method of that therapy is producing. And it's the the method of therapy that's just listen to problems, like where people just go vent, shows that those people don't actually achieve more happiness. It's actually they get they get more and more depressed, more sad over time, and that their quality of life actually decreases because like they're so focused on the problem, right? Like they're so focused on okay, this is what's wrong with me, this is oh, and I'm just gonna keep talking about it and I keep going back. But the problem is the studies are showing that as they revisit these things over and over again, it actually keeps them bound. Like it it it doesn't allow them to grow or flourish. And I think like and and we're a very pro-therapy, pro-counseling church. Like this is not like a this is not like a PSA, like don't go to counseling. Like I think the reality though is if you're going to counseling, right? Like if you're going to counseling because you're trying to figure out what is wrong and you want a p a plan to fix it, then make sure that the people you're going to also want to fix the problem. Yes. Right. And I think that's I think that's the the key is like you you need to make sure that you're if you want to make sure you're on the main quest and you're not pursuing all these side quests, then make sure like that you have the people who want that, want to make sure you're healed, you know, not that are gonna profit from yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

Well, well and even digging into that a little bit, right? Because often in in my ex, you know, Kyle says like it's not an internal problem. Like for me, anything that I label problem in my life is an internal problem, right? And there's only one way I solve an internal problem is with an internal solution, exactly, right? And and so what I think is that a lot of like what I think you're talking about, uh Cody, is that that a lot of times it seems like the world wants to go, what's your problem? Yeah, and and what I think is that people can't deal with their like unshareable problems because maybe they don't even know what they are, exactly. But they can't be with them, right? They can't be with reality, but what they can be with is maybe my partner doesn't clean up after themselves, or maybe my kids are disobedient, or maybe my boss isn't nice. Like I can be with that, yeah, right? Yeah, that's not the problem, right? It's the thing under the thing that's the problem that you don't want to talk about, that you don't want to deal with. And and I and I think once people really get to those points, that's when they can really start figuring out those solutions.

SPEAKER_04 16:32

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's like that's goes back to like the remembering, the refreshing, like making sure you go back to okay, what's where am I headed? Like if you don't have a clear direction of where you're going, like if you're not intent on where you're going, then you're you're gonna be distracted by those right and those un unsharable problems. Like you're gonna be at the place where you're like, okay, I'm the the plot is this, like this is the main storyline, but I'm stuck in this.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

We get caught up in some story that we told ourselves, right? I I know for me, like years back, like you know, you hear me talk about going to Save a Warrior, but one of the things I did at Save a Warrior was when I came there, I was lost, I was lost in the wilderness, I was broken, I didn't know who I was or what I was about. And something that we do there is we give everybody the opportunity to say who they are. Yeah to re essentially reinvent yourself, like say who you are as a man. And like what my my four declarations who I declared myself as being was available, right? Because before I just wouldn't make commitments, I would not commit to anything and and accountable. I would lie, I would do whatever I could, gaslight to get out of situations. Um, that I was honest, right? Because you know, I wasn't always an honest person. And another thing was courageous, because I had a big story from the war that I was a coward, and and that's a whole nother day, a whole nother story. But so I got to declare myself as being those things, and that's kind of how I see that that main quest. Like for me, those four things in this world are my main quest. And and anytime God offers me a situation in which I can live out those declarations, I know that is the man that I want to be. Yeah, and so I'm always working towards that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

You know, and the thing is too that whenever you let those small things kind of start to pile up, it does become a snowball effect where you might say, Oh, well, it's just this, or it's just that. I can leave that over here in this corner and let that go unchecked. But then it eventually does become like a snowball rolling down a hill or quicksand or whatever you want it to be. Even to put it in a very specific box. If we look at a Sunday morning, because all of us have experienced this at some point, where you come in and you're like, all right, today's gonna be the day. I'm gonna serve God, it's gonna be great. There are gonna be people who come in, the Holy Spirit's gonna do his thing, and people are gonna be saved by what we do here this morning. And then there's a tech issue, and then something else happens, and then you have someone who comes up and they're like, hey, after service, I need to talk to you about something. And then you've got, you know, you're off to the races with all these different things that are just one after the other after the other. And it's no longer just the idea of I'm here to serve God, I'm here to do this, I'm here to do this thing. It becomes this overwhelming sense of there's so many different things happening, there are so many things going on, and I have to be the one to try and kind of manage and handle all of those different problems and scenarios. That is that same thing that we let happen in life is what we see happen in those times where we just get so caught up in it and so dragged under by it that we can't necessarily figure out what our escape looks like.

SPEAKER_04 19:45

Yeah. And I I I feel like I feel like more more than ever I think people are plagued by what they see on I mean, social media like has become just a fact of life. Like, and un it's unfortunate. It is unfortunate. Like, I'm not gonna act like it's like a good thing, but like it is an unfortunate, necessary evil in the the scheme of things. But honestly, uh when we start to talk about how that affects how we view the world, I I think that we have to be careful that we're not uh in a place where social media defines right how we see ourselves and how we see each other. Right, because that that I think happens way too much, right? And I think what ends up happening is that when we see the people through that lens, like it starts to morph and change and shift. And I because I can't I mean you guys have seen it, you've been on social media, like you're not you're not unaware, right? Like people are mean, they're visceral, they're nasty, people who you know are kind in real life take on this different persona when they're keyboard warriors, right? Exactly. And it's and it's disappointing because you go, I know you're better than that, but at the base, there's a part of them that was always wanting to do that, that they have to walk through, like, and they have to process and they have to decide, okay, if this is part of who I am. Is this really the kind of person that I want to be? And so like I I think in general, I think it's just we always have to have that like okay, let's keep the main focus the main focus. Like, where are we going? Where are we headed, and how are we gonna get there? And I I think that's important.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

So well, in the essentials, unity and the non-essentials, liberty, and in all things, grace, right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

Yep. Yeah, well, and and that social media is like I I see it as a trap. It's just a thing that can be a trap, but it's yeah, yeah, it's like money or or anything else, like in its root, it's it's it's can be a very beautiful and and connecting sort of thing. But it it's just really risky, right? I mean, it's the same thing with me. Like anybody who who has tried to bend my friend on any kind of social media and and you got no response, that's because I ain't got it. You know, I have a Facebook account with one friend on it, yeah, and that's for Save a Warrior. So I mean But it's a trap for me.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

So I I got I I don't have to have that in exactly so I shouldn't be waiting for that friend request to be accepted then or just keep waiting.

SPEAKER_02 22:11

I haven't decided if I want to make you my friend. At least not publicly to the world.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_04 22:18

I'm about to be like, it's not real. You know that, right? Like we're friends in real life. You don't need to be my digital friend too. That's right. Don't take it personal. So well, yeah, next week, uh, this Sunday, we're gonna dive more into SideQuest life, and uh we're gonna be talking through that in this series. And I know you guys are doing it in Jackson too.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

You guys are doing we actually finished ours up. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_04 22:38

So what we what series are you on to this week?

SPEAKER_01 22:41

We are now on Who Needs, and we're looking at who needs God, who needs church, who needs discipleship, all of those things.

SPEAKER_04 22:47

And the answer is everybody.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

That's true.

SPEAKER_04 22:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

So spoiler alert.

SPEAKER_04 22:51

Spoiler alert. Well, tune in next time for more HODL cast and uh yeah. Peace.