: Welcome to The Aggressive Life. Today we're gonna do something different. How often do I say that, Dirt, do something different? At least twice a month, I think. Twice a month. And I think the things I say, doing things different, they're not even different anymore, are they? Maybe we're just known for being different. Is what we're gonna do today, is it a first? It's not a first. It's not a first, but we haven't done it in a while. It still qualifies as different. It's different. Okay, well, as Dirt knows, and you may know, I wrote a book called The Five Marks of a Man. And we republished that book recently, which is the definitive edition and the last edition of the book. We've updated it, changed some things, and that's it. We finally got it right. Finally got it called The Five Marks for Man. And whenever you do a new edition, you have to go on the whole PR trail, right? You're doing podcasts, you're doing radio interviews, you're submitting articles, a bunch of stuff for that book and also the Five Marks for Man tactical guide. And so in the midst of all those conversations I was having, some of them really stood out. And the one that I just had a blast being with was with host Jenny Yurich. She appeared on The Aggressive Life earlier this year. She's the woman who talks about having a thousand hours outside, the thousand hours outside podcast. And when I had her on my podcast, we had a great time, then she had me on her podcast. And it was one of the more stimulating discussions I've ever had around the content of the book. So I asked Jenny if we could just replay this because there's aspects of me, of my personality, of my beliefs that I oftentimes don't get asked, but she asked, she drew it out. And I think that we're all gonna be helped by this. At least I hope so. If you like what you hear, be sure and check out Jenny's podcast, everyday inspiration on how to do just that, to get outside the confines of your four walls or your four windows of your car and do something that's out in nature. Next week we'll be back with some conversations to finish up the year, but till then why don't you hear me and my new friend Jenny talk about some stuff that I think is pretty important to get you moving. Let's go. All right, here we go. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Urich, and I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. I'm so thrilled and honored to have Brian Tome with us today. Welcome. Thank you, Ginny. Good to be with you. This is so cool. So we talked a couple months ago and... I'm just so intrigued by what you do. Obviously you're a pastor of a large church, but you don't fit the stereotype of a pastor of a large church, and it's apparent immediately. And so it's just real intriguing. And then- Oh, interesting. Why is that? Sorry to cut you off. What stereotype do you feel like I'm not fitting? And how is it apparent immediately? You do stuff. And I think that most pastors do not do stuff. So when I went to your Instagram, it was like, you're on your motorcycle. Like all of your posts are living life. And I would say I have rarely seen that. And then actually in our conversation, you said something about that pastors have one of the lowest testosterone levels of any profession. That really stuck with me because our jobs can really affect the quality of our lives. And I was really impressed. My father-in-law is a pastor and I've always noticed all-consuming profession. Yeah. And yet you have somehow made it to be more whole. Yeah. I guess. So let's start there. Yeah. How did you do that? Gosh, this is really, this is really good. Jenny, I don't know. I don't know that anyone's ever asked me that or noticed that. First of all, I'm really honored that you would notice that. That's because that is an aspiration of me. I don't know what's going on with pastors. If we just talk about the pastor, I'm not sure exactly what's going on. I just know a lot of us are really tired, worn out, beaten down. And the only way we know how to, most of us know how to get over it is to just, well, I gotta chill, I just gotta chill. And I don't think that does it. You gotta get outside. And I'm not just trying to tie into your podcast. This is my learnings and experiences. I was in a men's group and someone said, hey guys, how about if we rent motorcycles, go to Vegas, rent motorcycles and take our wives and kind of cruise around Wild West. To me at that point, that sounded as Decadent is going to a strip club. I was like, what? You don't just go and spend money to have fun outside? What, you don't? And I did, and I was outside on a bike, and I realized, wow, I'm so focused on staying alive on this bike and noticing all of the beautiful creation. I haven't thought about my job once, not a single time. So then it laddered there, to use your phrase from before, then it laddered there to. I need to start riding motorcycles and I had a 12 year old son and I said, I need to take him a motorcycle trip, but I don't have the, the money for hotels and food for both of us and gas and the bike. And so we're going to have to camp. So we can't purely cause we couldn't afford anything else. And we realized, wow, this kind of created actually new memories, actually camping, huh? Not, not bad. And then from there, I've gotten into hunting. I just got back from an elk trip. elk hunting trip, which I actually more say it's an elk hike instead of an elk hunt. You're just hiking around a lot trying to find elk instead of actually seeing them to pull the trigger very often. So I think all that means that I think I'm probably a bit more vibrant, a bit more refreshed than the average guy because I know that doing difficult things outside is actually restorative for me. Wow, I think that those are the two perfect words. You are more vibrant and refreshed than the average guy and certainly the average pastor. And it comes across from the get-go. Like, it's like, whoa, there's something different here. It is really empowering to others to have this message like, look, your whole life does not have to be this one thing. And then to see that when you do these other things, it also enhances what you're doing as a career. I know that that's rubbing off on others. It's giving them the permission to do it. and to do it in whatever way works for them. And this is one of the topics that's in your book. Okay, these are cool books, Brian. Whoa, whoa. So this, I read it the whole thing. Do you always make your people feel so good, Jenny? Is this your goal to make me feel good this podcast? Because it's actually working. Well, it's called the five marks of a man. This is a cool cover. It's got the tally marks and then we got the stickers and the sticker is the tally mark. I don't know if I have one in this book. And then we got, I didn't do the tactical guide. I'm gonna give this, oh, I have one. This sticker is so cool. We got an orange one and we had got a black one. There you go, good. This is really fantastically laid out. Oh, thank you. Like I would pick this up. This is the tactical guide. We're heading into the holidays. This is a phenomenal gift. The five marks of a man finding your path to courageous manhood. And then you also have the five marks of a man tactical guide. So starting for teens. These would be great. The tactical guide looks like the coolest thing I've ever seen and I love the message behind it, which is that we don't have anything in America to mark the transition to manhood. And you said, so I'm gonna make something. Right, yep. Yeah, men are in crisis, Jenny, or I should say rather males are in crisis because there's a difference between a man and a boy and it's not an age thing. It's a attitude, it's a character thing. There is such a thing as 15 year old men and there is such a thing as 45 year old boys. That transition from boyhood to manhood is not happening. Ancient cultures would have a swearing in ceremony and some cultures in the world still do that would tell somebody, you're not a boy anymore, you're a man. Today, I think one of the reasons why men are in crisis, make no mistake about it, men are in crisis. The life expectancy for men in the most medically advanced culture in the history of civilization is decreasing. Men's life expectancy is decreasing. We are four times more likely to have suicide than is a woman. Actually, I just saw a study just yesterday. 40% of all men show depressive symptoms. 44% of all men had thoughts of suicide in the past two weeks. Think about that. 4% of all men, especially younger men, in the last two weeks have seriously considered suicide. Oh, come on. I'm just telling you what the data says. Wow. I'm like tearing up over here. What a sad way to live. Yeah, it's horrible. It's horrible. And that's why our suicide rates are four times higher. Now, there's a bunch of reasons here going on here, Jenny. So we could talk about the crisis that we have with masculinity, what's even saying the crisis of masculinity, that even itself is even a... flashpoint phrase that's loaded with political meaning by people on the left and the right. So there's a way to talk about that in this. There's a way to talk about outdoors and our primal cells tapping into our primal cells. There's a lot of stuff here. So whatever you want to talk about, I'm all game on. Yeah, I'm in. Okay. And the books go through it. And the tactical guide, it's like a guide. You actually do things in it. There's challenges, there's things to actually do. Once again, just phenomenal. And then you've got a lot of books. You also have this devotional. move a guy to get up and go forward. I mean, one thing after the next, and I know that's not even all your books, and you're such a good writer. It's interesting because you said in your story that you weren't amazing in school. No, I was horrible. I was horrible in school. I had a 2.2 GPA in high school. In college, I probably had a, I don't know, two, five maybe. I took accounting one three times. Because I just wouldn't study. One of the marks, Jenny, between a boy and a man. is a man has a vision, a boy lives day to day. I was living day to day. Stupid me, I didn't realize, hey, if you get a college education, you have a higher likelihood of having a higher salary, which opens up more opportunities for you, opens up more potential scenarios in your life. That vision, I just didn't have. And so I was a pretty late bloomer, and who would have known, if you had told me back then that I would actually write as a part of my living, that every, actually every week, I have a brand new term paper I gotta turn in and it gets graded by tens of thousands of people every single weekend. And I gotta do that, be like, oh my gosh, you gotta be kidding me. But here I am and you know, God does unusual things that we could never hope, anticipate or expect. And it gives us a lot of hope as parents because if you have a child that is struggling in a certain way, it doesn't mark the whole path of their life that you change and you grow. These are phenomenal books. Let's start with play just because it's a really good fit with this podcast. Okay. So we talk about the five marks of a man and you go through these five marks within each one. There's these different subcategories and they're so creative. Boys are short sighted men play the long game. Always want to go with the flow. Men are willing to stand against the tide. So each chapter, so cool. One of the chapters is about play and you wrote something in there about play that I had never read in my life. So boys live to play. Men Play to Live, this is in the men are team player section. And you said, I have never heard this, play purges unhealthy desires. And you talked about how we're wired for pleasure. And I don't know, nobody really talks about that. Certainly nobody talks about that in the church. Can we start there? I know there's a whole lot in here about play, but I thought that was such an interesting one. Like you were saying, these people that you see, and especially I think in the pastor world, they fall and they just, their lives become a mess. And you say, look, I look at a lot of them and they're not playing. Yeah, okay, so this may be very basic for some people. For me, it was profound though, when I started putting these together. I came from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was a steel town, even though there's not steel really made in Pittsburgh anymore, that's still the ethos, the persona. In Pittsburgh, in that kind of environment, you work. It's about work, it's about difficulty, it's about rolling up your sleeves, it's about all of that. I roll right into there, into coming to know Christ, I become a Christian, and the brand of Christians I'm with are the brand of be very cynical if it ever feels good. If it feels good, God probably doesn't want you to do it. It's all about sacrifice. It's all about pain. It's a more modern form of ancient monasticism where you're flogging yourself. We weren't flogging ourselves. Just assuming if somebody had nice things they should have been given more money to the poor. They must not be tithing. Just assuming if somebody had a good-looking life they were compromising someplace. And that was kind of my background, right? Then I start to realize Why is it that God's given us taste buds? Godless evolutionists, and I think there is a form of evolution, theistic evolution, if someone wants to believe in that, that God is using evolution to bring us, okay, that's fine, no problem, godless evolutionists would tell us that we have taste buds purely so that we could determine whether or not something is poisonous or not. That must be what it is there. No? Maybe we have taste buds because God wants to bless us and have amazing flavors. Why is it that none of us can think of an animal that we've ever seen an animal have sex face to face? If you believe that sex is a gift, maybe it feels good because God wanted to bless us with good feelings. Maybe we taste things because God wants to bless us with beautiful taste. Most of us who've studied music realize there's something magical about music. It's pleasurable. scientifically does something to us. Now this is all a background for where I'm going to say this. Now as a pastor of a large church who hobnobs with other pastors who are well known, by the way, when pastors fall, small church pastors fall just as much, actually more, than large church pastors. It doesn't make a newsworthy item. But when large pastors fall, because I run the circles I run in, I can find out why they fell. And there's two things that they all have in common. You wanna guess what those things are? Well, I'm guessing that one of them, they don't have recreation, they don't play. That's what I'm guessing based off of what I've read. That's true. No life-giving hobbies. And maybe no good relationships, that would be my second guess. Yes. Damn, who are you? I read your book. Yes, it's more specifically. It's like cheating. Oh, ha ha. I don't even, that was in the book? I thought those two things came to me after I wrote the book. Well, you talk so much about. having a team and not being a lone wolf. Yeah, they don't have life-giving hobbies. And then two, they don't have deep friendships in the church, in the church, people who see them in the church. So back to pleasure, we are wired to have pleasure. You will find it one way or another. It's either gonna come upon you accidentally and unhealthily, or it's gonna come on you intentionally and healthily. Nobody says, you know what would be a great idea? is tonight to spend two hours doing porn. That'd be a great idea. I look forward to doing that tonight. No one, when they get done doing porn, which is way more than people recognize or admit, nobody, when they get done having a porn session goes, man, that felt good. Whoo. Man. Well, it felt good for a moment, you know, but like, it's not like, Oh, I feel more alive now. I feel more invigorated. I feel more, no, it's, it wears you down, but we're drawn to those sorts of forms of quote unquote recreation. because we don't know any healthy recreation, which is when we recreate ourselves. And if you don't have a healthy form of recreation that you look forward to, that you budget against, that's on your calendar, that you're going to have something that's unhealthy come your way and you will be out of control. So you can get on the front end and you can enjoy your life and you can have some healthy play, or you can wait for a fall. because you are created for pleasure, whether you embrace it or not. Wow, I have never heard this. I mean, I've read so many books about play and never heard that perspective. And this is just one small chapter of this book. It's fantastic. And there's other things in there. Like you were talking about Dr. Stuart Brown, which I have his book, who is a medical doctor, trained in internal medicine, psychiatry, and clinical research. And you said he recognized the importance of play by discovering its absence in the life history of murderers. and felony drunk drivers. Wow, is that powerful. Right, right. One of the cool things I gotta tell you right now, I've been trying to track down that dude for years. Wait, no! And I finally found him, Dr. Stuart Brown. Did you get to talk to him? Yes. I haven't got to, well, actually, I. Someone who works for me tracked him down, and so we actually have him booked on my podcast. So I can't wait. Is it next week? It is next week. Yeah, he blew me away. His conclusions, I look forward to digging into this more, was more specifically, Jeddy, the thing that all mass murders had in common was the absence of rough play as a child. Whoa. Yeah, and his theory is that when you're wrestling around as a little kid, you're wrestling in the grass, or let's say you're climbing tree houses with friends and you get in a fight or whatever. when you catch an elbow to the nose accidentally or something like that and you feel pain because somebody just put pain on you and you're ah, it enables you to empathize and understand pain. And so these folks had the absence of rough play and they would just, they would kill small animals and have no remorse about it at all. And so that's one of the things that he mentions in it. And so yeah, let your kids wrestle, let them get bloody noses. You might actually stop other people from being murdered. That's just his conclusion. How to stop murderers 101. That's incredible. Well, and then you see, he had another, you had another quote of his in this play section where you said, when adults don't play much, and this is the majority of people, I don't think many adults play much. No, when adults don't play much, the consequences are rigidity, depression, lack of adaptability, loss of irony. This is so fascinating. And I love that you put in the book, you went through and you talked about, in this section, in other sections, like certain companies are mandating some recreation, some downtime, like Google mandates it 20%, 3M mandates it 15%, and then you said, God mandates it a minimum of 14% with your Sabbath. Yep. Well, that's not the Sabbath, it's all the festivals. We look at all those festivals in the Old Testament and we think, oh my gosh, more rules. more holidays, I gotta do those things now. But we forget, those things were blowout parties, most of them were. Those things were times of celebration and we just tend to not have that in our culture. And I think the, you know, so funny, Jim, it's not funny. I would really, really love to get to the bottom of what is happening with mental illness in our culture. I don't understand how it's come up on us so much. It also seems to me that sometimes we're just taking the easy way out and labeling something as mental illness instead of saying, no, that person's just unhealthy and out of control of their life. I believe in mental illness. I believe that medication is necessary for some situations. I just don't understand why we're having it the level we do now that we didn't 50 years ago. One theory is maybe it's the hormones in our food. Another theory is we're more inside than we've ever been before. And when we're outside, it's restorative. Another theory is we're imploding ourselves because we're not playing. Going and playing the slot machines and gaming is not play. I go to Vegas every other year for some thing and I like playing blackjack, so I'll play blackjack. That's fine. Got a budget, I can lose, I lose a thing. But that's not the kind of restorative play that I can be carried on with for the rest of the year. Well, and that's a whole point. This is another point in this section that also no one else is talking about. You said, most likely, your best and worst days are still ahead of you. That's a powerful statement. I don't think anybody thinks that. I don't think, like, I've never thought that. I think the best days are ahead. You know? No, I mean, there's some hard days coming. And you're saying, look, when things are good, you have to suck the joy out of life because hard times happen, and so you have to go have fun today. Go have fun when you can and bank that up. So that's a really interesting perspective too. A while ago I said on stage, I said, your worst days are coming, your worst days are ahead of you. I just put that, your worst days. And part of it, I think I said that is, Crossroads was really growing a lot, and it is still growing a lot. That's my day job, Crossroads Church. And I kind of like to fire a shot across the bow of kind of the mega pastor, everything is happy-clappy, everything's gonna be perfect, everything's gonna be nice. And I believe things can be good and nice, I like all that, but I also just... I want to do some differentiation and just say, yeah, your worst days are ahead of you. And man, people came at me like, well, you're uttering a curse on somebody. I'm not uttering a curse on anybody. At least there's gonna be one awful day it's gonna be when you die. If it's quick and you have a heart attack and it's excruciatingly painful for 10 seconds, or if you're in hospice for the, at least we can believe the very end of your life is going to be painful, even if you're hit by a bus, it's gonna be a second of pain, an awful pain, right? So it's coming then, or it's coming in your layoff, or it's coming with a diagnosis of a child, or it's coming, I mean, awful stuff is coming. And when I realized that, like, well, right now there's not awful stuff. Let's take some pre-vengence out on the awful stuff that may yet to come. Hey, have you ever considered God gave you your life and he wants you to enjoy it? Have you ever considered that when a parent looks at his child and he doesn't know how to sit in the sandbox and play, a parent's heart goes stale. We go, oh, what is wrong? We don't like, I think that our heavenly father looks at his children and those of us who don't know how to play or forgotten how to or think it's frivolous to, I think it breaks the heart of God. I think this is a life-changing, a world-changing message, absolutely, and especially coming from a pastor because I think that most people, whether they attend church or not, they have a view of a pastor as often stiff and like you said, often not exuberant. Or what were the words you used? Your words were so good, vibrant and refreshed. I don't, I mean, if people are like, okay, give me two adjectives to describe a pastor. I don't think anyone would use vibrant and refreshed and maybe less they're talking about you. So interesting. I think this is fantastic. Well, think about Jesus. I mean, come on, do you think people followed him because he looked like he was a serious man of business? John comes fasting and you says he has a demon, the son of man, myself, I come, you say that I'm a drunkard and a glutton. Why do they say he was a drunkard and a glutton? They exaggerate things because they saw him drinking wine and they saw him eating nice meals. Wow, I've never thought about that. Okay, so that's Jesus, right? That's Jesus. Jesus had a level of attraction in his life. He lived his life in such a way that people looked at and went, if that's the life I could have and I could look like you in terms of your joyful spirit, I'll have some of that please, I'll have some of that. And if you wanna have a spiritual impact on people around you, whether you're a pastor or whether you're a parent, whatever you are, and someone looks at your life and they don't want your life, then they'll never believe your beliefs. You've gotta have something about you that says, that I want it. I'm sorry, people are not attracted to beat down depressed looking faces and boring monotonous filling out of the checklists. That doesn't inspire anybody. That was not Jesus and I don't want that to be me either. And it's not. And that's what I was saying. You know, it's like when we connected, I, you know, it's like, who is this? Who's this guy? What's this guy about? And I popped on and I was like, this is a cool guy. Like look at all the things he's doing. This is exciting. I want to do those things too. And it's very catching. Oh, you're so kind. It's amazing. Like you say, the church was wrong about play, our country is wrong about play. And like I said, this is just one chapter of this phenomenal book. Let's talk about play in terms of friendships. Because when you talk about the mental health crisis and men are lonely and men are committing suicide, we're going about male relationships wrong is basically, or maybe not in the most optimal way. You have to do stuff together. Yes. Tell us about that. Yes. been said before, women connect with people, men connect with things. Now these are generalities. Generally speaking, women are less intimidated to strike up a conversation with someone they've never met before. Generally speaking, women are up for going to a book study. Generally speaking, women are up for just meeting someone they've never met before coffee and it's not part of their job, they're up for that. For guys, that's not the case with us. If we form friendships, It happens while we're doing something together. It happens while there is a hobby. And so one of the things you can do as a wife or as a girlfriend to your boyfriend is encourage them to have a really good hobby because when they have a good hobby, they need other people's help. They wanna share it with people and that's where male friendships are formed. A woman who has a husband who isn't connected relationally is a woman who feels threatened. I believe women feel that. I believe women know if their man wolf or not. And if he is a lone wolf, they inherently feel more vulnerable because he's more apt to not be as strong as he could be. So finding and doing things with other people are critical for us. And I think in our society that's built in through school age years, because it's built in through sports or clubs and maybe even through college. Maybe you do intramural sports or you're on a team, whatever. But then once that's over, then you have to be really intentional about it. Right, you ask guys, who's your best friend? They'll say, well, my wife is my best friend. And I say, not a good answer. You're probably saying that your wife is your only friend and your wife is more than a friend. She's your flesh. She's bone of your bone, flesh of your, you're one person. The word friend isn't a high and holy enough of a word to describe your relationship with your wife. Plus, on top of that, there's things that your wife will never understand. And she wants to, she will empathize with you, but there's some things that I can tell a male friend of mine that he'll get and be more supportive to me than my wife. That's why, you know, in First Samuel, it says of David and Jonathan, that they had love for one another that surpassed the love of women. They're not saying there that Jonathan was gay and David was bisexual. They're saying there that there was a kind of love, a kind of support that a great male friend can give that a female can't give. Doesn't mean they're not important. That's what it means. And so what has to happen though, is we need to have something to do. Now, this is part of our problem in our culture. All the natural connective tissue, Ginny, we used to have decades ago, it's gone. You get out of college, you're done with your events in college, and softball leagues that men used to be in, they're gone. Bowling links for the most part, they're gone. The Elks Club. It's gone. The Lions Club, it's gone. The thing about the fraternal organizations, those things are all gone. There's nothing that connects men with men anymore. Nobody takes that on as their mission. And I think that's why we consider suicides also we do. And that's why we're four times more likely to do it to women. We're lonely. We don't know what to do with our free time. We're not getting restored. It's a crisis. I'm telling you what, it is not good. It is a crisis. You had some pretty strong statements in here. And I thought this one, was so interesting, you say, if there was one discipline, one I could impart to every male, it would be this. Now here you are, you're a pastor. So what are people gonna say? What discipline would you impart? It's like fasting, prayer, Bible reading, right? This would be like what I would think would be at the top of the list that a pastor would say. And you said this, choose the right friends and leverage them wisely. Top discipline for males. Yep, not an even close second. And people get offended with me like, what about the Bible? I don't do it. I read the Bible, I read it more than you, I know it better than you. So don't keep your like religious stuff, okay? Understand, I can't find a single place where Jesus tells his followers, go read the Bible. First of all, the Bible wasn't around until the printing press. It wasn't around at all. They didn't have a Bible. They didn't have the, it's a blessing. We should read our Bible. It's awesome, awesome. But I'm just saying like, He didn't talk about it. He didn't, he modeled that he knew the scriptures. He didn't model and tell people, go read this and have a personal quiet time. When it comes to prayer, he's got one sermon on it, maybe two, maybe two. He gives the Lord's Prayer, which actually is not his prayer. It's a teaching on how to pray. He says, when you pray, pray like this. Then he's got the prayer in John, where he talks about praying that they may be one, that you and I may be one. He models prayer. Jesus goes off in the morning to pray by himself. He's modeling that, but the discipline he talks about and models the most, hands down, is friendship. Greater love has no man than this that laid down his life for his friend. He's with friends, he gathers 12 friends. He has inside of his 12 friends a circle of three who he's close to with, Peter, James, and John. He takes them to have special moments up on the mountaintop where he's transfigured. You see his relationship with John. His cousin John, a long-term relationship, and John reaches out to him. He's in prison and says, hey, are you coming to get me? Actually, John has doubts. He says to Jesus, hey, are you the one or are we waiting for another one? He's having doubts. This is the guy he leapt for joy. I'm sorry, I'm giving a sermon here. I'm getting off topic. I get excited about this. Do you want me to keep going on this or just stop? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Now go. So John is in the womb of his mother, Elizabeth. That's one of the reasons I believe God has blessed us with life in the womb at conception. And John is in the womb and Jesus is over in his mom's womb and John leaps inside of the womb. He's like, he recognizes he's in the presence of divinity in the womb. He sees Jesus when he's now a prophet out in the wilderness and he sees him because he's been a boy hanging out with him. And he says, dude, I'm not fit to untie your sandals. I'm not fit, no. You should be baptizing me. Why is John saying this? It's because he's been a buddy. He's been a close friend with Jesus all grown up. They're cousins. Their moms hang together. In fact, you ever considered that they likely wrestled and one of them got an elbow in the jaw from the other one? That's what little boys do. Jesus was just like this, right? So he declares him, but then he goes off into prison. Jesus says we're back when he hears, are you the one? So now John has doubts. John, Jesus calls him the greatest man other than him who's ever lived. And now he's having doubts. And they come to him and say, are you the one? And Jesus says, tell him this. And he quotes Isaiah, which is what he quoted a prophecy about himself, except there's one thing that he leaves out in that prophecy. And he leaves out the captives are set free. He leaves that out. In other words, saying to John, dude, I'm not setting you free. I'm not gonna do it. Sorry. not coming to get you. Oh wow. Not coming. Read between the lines. Right, right. Now when people who are hearing him, when they realize that that's what he's saying, then Jesus says something else. He says, hey, when you went to go out and see that prophet, did you see a reed shaking in the wind? He goes, wait a minute, he says, it's my cousin John. Let me tell you about the kind of man this is. When you went out and saw him, would you say you saw a man who stood tall? He wasn't shaking the wind. And when you saw him, did you see what kind of clothes he was wearing? That's right, he was wearing camel skin. You saw a man in camel skin. He was commando in scratchy camel skin. They didn't have 600 thread count under armor britches. They didn't have that back then. He's going commando with camel hair. And he says to him, that's my cousin. That's my friend. He's got this. He doesn't shake in the wind and he's used to uncomfortable living. He does hard things. So while you're all bummed out that I'm not going to get John, John's got this. That's sort of the subtext. They knew each other. Yes. And that's the subtext of masculine friendship that if you don't understand masculine friendship, you're never going to understand that classic passage that most people have never don't remember reading and certainly don't remember a pastor ever talking about. Never. Because we don't know about these things as pastors. We don't know about these masculine friendships. Very few of us do, which is why so many of us are lonely and struggling. I'm doing all I can not to crack on people who don't have these things. I'm doing all I can to say, hey, there is a better life for you. Here's how you do it. Watch me. Right. There's a rich crop of fruit for you to eat, but it's going to take some adjustments and a learning curve. I know what you need on your plates this holiday season because I've had it on mine recently. Flying K Ranch Beef. Oh my freaking goodness. Holy schnikes. There's benefits to having a podcast that's growing. One of them is the people send you free stuff, hoping you'll like it and then talk about it. That's what happened with Flying K Ranch Beef. They sent me a smorgasbord of steaks. They are mouthwatering. The burgers are incredible and the roasts make family dinner a breeze. They're located in Finley, Ohio, and they have no hormones. Let me say that again. Flying K Ranch has no hormones or antibiotics. So it's basically like when I go elk hunting or deer hunting or something like that. It's pure, pure meat. They raise their cattle on pastures just the way cattle like it. Flying K Ranch is a family business partnering with Ohio State Nutrition Program. Beef Quality Assurance and Certified Angus Beef National, ensuring happy results for both cattle and people. That's a lot of words. Just to say this, the beef is amazing. Order it now, get it on your table over the holidays, and you will not be disappointed, because I have not. Find out more and place your orders at flyingkranchangus.com. That's flyingkranchangus.com. And now I'm hungry. There's a couple other passages I want to read. I'll take someone who knows how to conduct a manly friendship over someone who's good at nearly any other skill. If we know how to maintain strong, godly friendships, we'll make fewer mistakes in our lives and we'll recover more quickly from the ones we do. And then this, I never thought about this. Every great revolutionary in history had a group of friends. Yep, yep. Whoa, that's a cool thing to study and to know. Yeah, and unfortunately. just because the way books work were captured by one person. And so let's write a book on that person. I mean, Michelangelo, I've been over the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo painted a very small portion of that chapel ceiling. He designed it, he oversaw it, but he had a team of artists, team of painters who were working on that thing. And we don't think about those guys. We don't know those guys. I hear guys, and this goes for women as well, don't tell anybody this, Jane. Actually, the five marks for man actually work for women too. Don't tell anybody this, you know, because it's actually a man book, but it's actually women get a lot out of this book too, because women also, these five things. Oh, guys will say, well, I'm kind of more of a lone wolf. And I'll say, huh, you mean you're small and weak and you die sooner than other men do? Because that's what lone wolves are. I met a guy and I spent some time. with a few wolves out in Montana, a guy who trains them for photo shoots and stuff like that. And he clued that in me. He said, the lone wolf is a weak, sickly, prematurely dying wolf because it takes a pack of wolves to bring down an elk and be able to eat. And as a man holds himself as, I'm one of those lone wolf types, you're not telling me you're strong, you're telling me actually you're pretty weak. You may fancy yourself as strong, but emotionally and spiritually, you're pretty weak and your future's in jeopardy. This is great. So you gotta have hobbies, you gotta do things together. And so you're modeling this, cause you're out doing it. I see you're doing it with your kids, which adds another piece of the puzzle here when you talk about in these books, like you're saying, look, I have good relationships with my kids because we do stuff together and we have gone through hard things together. There was a really powerful sentence in here about soldiers and they're saying, I wish I could go back because they're going through hard things and they're building these strong relationships literally in the trenches. but you're talking about even different things like our motorcycles get stuck in the mud, I'm with my son, we have to figure out how to get them out. All these situations, these are building relationships and so you've got good relationships. This is a great parenting book too. So you're modeling it, but then you're also providing an event for it. Like you do a man camp. Tell us about that. Yeah, so this is a good story. We were on a motorcycle trip and on motorcycle trips, you get very uncomfortable, you're outside, it's beautiful, but you get uncomfortable from time to time. And we're sitting around on a rainy morning. one of those mornings where you're not sure if it's gonna rain, but it just recently kind of had a crusty snow on the ground and it's damp and it's cold and you're in the middle of a bog, you're trying to find dry wood to make a fire, it's finally going, you're sitting around your coffee and then all of a sudden someone starts talking about something that's meaningful and deep and you realize, okay, that's why we're here because it takes a while for men to actually break down and share something meaningful. And we realize this happens all the time, we get on these things, we get outside and like, We open up. What can we do to help more guys do this? And it doesn't require them having a motorcycle. And so that day, Man Camp was born. So Man Camp is a primitive camping experience. We just had our most recent one two weeks ago. We had 41 states represented, three countries. We had people come in all the way from Brazil to go to this primitive camping experience. You park your car and then you hike in your stuff. And a lot of guys have gotten smart. They bring wagons with big tires and they load them up. They load them up and they hike in about a mile and then you set up your tents and you have a campfire and you've got a team captain that leads your group through discussions every night. And then you've got games, we have competitions and there's worship there and there's, we have, I think we went through 90 kegs of beer two weeks ago. We had to go out for another keg run, and we intentionally put the beer on the beer trailers right beside the prayer tent because people are standing in line for beer at the beginning, and they're looking, they're like, what is that there? And then by the end of the weekend, there's no beer lines, and there is lines of probably about a half hour long to get into the prayer tent to have somebody pray for you. And it's kind of the whole package just kind of comes together where it's not for everybody. That's not for everybody. Like you gotta have a sense of humor. When you're waiting in line to get in the prayer, we have guys with, you know, like stadium vendors go up and down the line with choices of cigars and cigarettes that they can pass the time with before they go into tent. And it's just kind of a humor thing. It's coming here. But again, but- This is not for everyone. No, it's not for everybody. Well, sure, yeah. there would be so many people that would be like, this is wrong. Right, well, and that's why I'd say there's, that's why there's so many people who don't understand men. If you get any 10 guys together for a campfire, and you think there's not gonna be tobacco there, and you think there's not gonna be alcohol there, you gotta get out more. This is, that's just not, you may not do tobacco, you may not do alcohol, which is fine. This is not pro, let's do this. It's just, it's an example of we wanna make a space for guys to connect, and guys are connecting, and we're seeing. Miraculous things happen. Mm-hmm. This is really a lot of work, Brian. Like when you talk about there's captains and there's games and you have this whole setup and you have people coming from all over the world. I just wanna say kudos to you. That's a lot. You're doing a lot. It's a lot to figure out. It's a lot to figure out a birthday party, let alone an event like that. It is a lot. But it's a gift. It is a lot and I spearhead much of it, but... All these things come because of the friends that I'm with. It's friends, and we started this camp, and all those friends are still pulling it off every time. It's guys linking up, and some guys become part of the team at Man Camp just because that's how they found their friends now, and so they're volunteers, because this is kind of my hobby that I do with other guys, and it gives me connections. But no, I get overwhelmed sometimes, Ginny. I do, I get overwhelmed. We just bought more land. We have actually a signed contract for more land. for man camp and woman camp and couples camp and vet camp. We have all these camps in the land because we believe it's nature outside. Gotta get people outside and we're just seeing miraculous things happen. Oh, I'm sure. And we were outgrowing our land. We want different land. We wanna be able to put a lake on the land. So we have a signed contract for land and it's one of those things where you step out in faith. Don't have the $5.2 million in cash to purchase that thing in 50 days. Don't have that. Wow. Oh, and that's one of the things too that you talked about in these books is there is a lot of judgment. It's just so interesting that you're in the church world because there is a lot of judgment about how you spend money, even on your own building or on things like that. But you see firsthand, this is changing lives in very substantial ways. Sometimes if you just have one experience like that, I think that's the interesting part. It's like if you're lost as a man and you go to this man camp, you just need to go one time to be like, oh, this is the thing I'm missing and this is kind of how I could get there. Yeah, there's a, if you're gonna stay outside, Get ready to spend money. You're gonna spend money even to be outside because you're gonna want different gear probably. You're probably gonna want different, you're gonna want that stuff. And I have a man with peace, our church that I lead, we have three financial principles. One of those principles is to spend money. We call it out. Our church isn't here to save money. No one gives to a church because they want their church to have savings. They give to a church because they want their church to go do something. And so we spend money. I talk with folks, the Bible says, you know, savings, believe me, I believe in savings. I have enough savings to cover my next car purchase. I have enough savings to cover my next insurance bill. I'm not saying, but when you as a church or as a nonprofit, when you start deifying savings, something is wrong. And then I'll have people go, well, but you had a Pharaoh and having to set aside crops for seven year famine. You never know when a seven year famine's gonna come. I go, okay, okay. I've been hearing that line since I've been a senior pastor, which is 28 years. So I've been through. Also, there was a dream. There was a dream of all. Yeah, that too. Like, I don't know, I want to have the dream. I've been around for four seven-year-old cycles. Nothing, nothing. I gotta tell you, you're saving it for a rainy day. Hey, it's raining. It's raining. Can you not see the turmoil in people's lives? Can you not see the poverty striking our culture? Can you not see the suicide rate? Can you not see the hopelessness? It's raining right now. And you think that you need to have savings for when things get bad? Maybe instead you'd be praying about a vision because it sounds to me like you want an easy day. If you have a vision, you have a endless money pit because the spending never stops. Now, if you don't have a vision, then you just manage your life and watch your savings go up and fritter away to nothing. But if you're gonna get enlisted in the team Jesus, you are going to go. And when you go, when he tells us to go, there's a cost there. And I don't think a lot of us are willing to pay that cost. And I'm really not talking about the spiritual, emotional, I'm literally just talking about the financial cost. Like when you have kids, if you want your kids to be around you, you gotta pay to play, pay to play. Like your kids are not gonna hang around you unless you're fun, they're not. They're not gonna choose to be around you. on their spring breaks, they're not going, when they come back for Christmas, they'll stay for one day, because it's a cultural obligation. My kids actually like spending time with me. We hang out a lot, and I spend a lot of money, so they come around. I'm buying dinners, I'm buying a pool, I bought and sold boats. Wow. You pay to play. And I just think a lot of us are not recognizing that an adequate Use of your money is to spend it to have fun with people you love. I think that's a godly pursuit. Wow, where is this camp? Where is the big new one? Well, we just bought property beside our current one. It's in Ripley, Ohio. It's right on the river, or Neville, Ohio. Same thing, Neville, Ripley, Ohio. Wow, right next to the other one. It was available, that's so cool. That's why it's the cost that it has. They're probably taking advantage of us a little bit because they know that we would prefer not to move, but we looked at... property. They know that your God owns a... Yeah, there you go. There you go, Jenny. So we're working on that and it'll be fun. And it's tough. I want to hit one more topic. Yeah. All right. Here's the last one. It has nothing to do with being outside at all. It just has to do with my own personal curiosity. And since it's my show, I get to ask whatever questions I want. You say you had a vision to start a church, which is Crossroads, for people who had given up on church. but hadn't necessarily given up on God, which I don't think anyone says, but it is a huge part of our society. This is the world that we live in. What does that look like to have a church for people who have given up on church, but haven't given up on God? Well, I think there's, boy it's interesting, I've said that a lot and no one's actually ever asked a question to dig deeper on it. That's interesting, you're a good, inquisitive person. That's really good. So I think there's two things that I think about in that category as it relates to crossroads or if I know someone who wants to start a church, there's two things. One. You have to have the externals be the kind of externals that people enjoy in their day-to-day life. The genre of music has to be the genre of music that your friends like to listen to who don't come to church. The humor in your church, you have to have actual sense of humor in your church because your friends and people have given up on church. I go to movies, I expect to laugh a little bit at a movie. I go up to my friends, I expect to laugh. Why would we bring them inside a place for a 70 minute service, which is how long our service is, and we wouldn't give them at least a couple laughs and try to do so? Maybe that's why people wanna go to churches. It's boring, it's lifeless. So I think that's one thing. We gotta look at the externals. Do the externals match the externals that people want when they're not in the church? The second thing is, are we giving people Too many must-believes, and I think most church give too many people must-believes. My Bible tells me that to get to heaven, I only need to believe and do two things, only two. Romans 10, nine. Believe Jesus is raised from the dead and confess him as your Lord and Savior, and you will be saved. That's it, that's two things. You do not have to get people to believe whatever you believe about how creation was created. In fact, Someone may believe, you may believe, Jenny, in a 6,000-year-old earth that was created in six literal days. I'll respect your conviction, but I'll also tell you, because I've interacted with a bunch of people, do not tell your kids that's foundational to the faith. It's not foundational to the faith. In the first science class they have, their world's gonna be blown, and then they're gonna think they have to flow out your faith, even though your faith is not founded on a six-day literal creation. Your faith is founded on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's what the faith is founded on. So when we in churches, we send cues that you have to believe this, and now you have to believe this, and now you have to vote this way. And churches, we were in that all the time. And when you do that, you're just not making it very inhabitable for outside friends. I don't bring friends over to my house and have the dinner conversation, all the things that you have to believe to be in the church, to be at my table, no, it's ridiculous. Now, as I preach on a topic, will eventually hit many of those things, but I just think churches are too, they're too tied to the party line, and their party line is way too long. And they're not talking about these real world things. No. There's some sort of fear about it or who knows, but go play, I mean, I've never heard anyone talk about that. There's a lot of things that are practical in daily life that I've never heard talked about in church, and you're doing that. So people wanna come, this is in Cincinnati. crossroads, people wanna come, they can come meet you. Sometimes you ride a horse. Yeah, we have a, right, okay, so this one. You like come in on a horse. Well, we have campuses, physical campuses in Dayton, in Columbus, in Cincinnati, and in Lexington. And we have people who are part of our church who stream us all over the country. But yes, you just mentioned another one. So I wanna keep throwing people curve balls. We wanna keep throwing people curve balls. So I was in Elk Hunt a few years ago, I was outside. and I was with a guy who told me that he trains horses. I said, what? He goes, yeah, I go into prisons. And in those prisons, I take a horse I've never met before. Someone brings me a wild, untamed horse, and in under an hour, I can have it broken and saddled and riding it. I said, what? Like, it's a legitimate horse whisperer. And he said, yeah, I do this, and here's the thing. He says, a broken horse is stronger than an unbroken horse. A broken horse can run faster and has more control and can round up an entire herd of wild horses. And that's what happens when God breaks us. When he breaks us, we're a stronger, more capable version of ourself. I'm like crying, like, hehehehe, crying. So I said, I need to have you, a crossroads. He said, I can't do it, church. I said, why not? So everyone says that, but then they look at the liability and they don't do it. I said, well, how big's the staging to be? He tells me how big is, I make some calls. Yeah, that's how big our stage is. We can put a corral. I said, we're doing it. He said, you say that, but. No, but no, serious. Came back, told our folks, I said, look, tell insurance, don't tell insurance. I don't care, all I'm telling you is Scott, Todd Pierce, who is a legitimate horse whisperer, is gonna come here and we're gonna have a horse on a stage in a crowd, and he's gonna break a horse every service. And so we did it. Wow. And the first year, people, and we've done it every year, and it's the same thing, Jenny, there's a horse he's never seen before. We have to find the horse for him. He sees it the first time. He gets in and the horse gets ridden and people weep. They weep because we identify with the horse. And every horse is different so we've got a different sermon for every horse. So one horse has got this pain right behind its shoulder and he's got a little headset on. He says, I'm pushing here and I can tell this horse has some trauma here. He doesn't want me to touch this area, but that's exactly why I'm going to touch this area. Because if I can get this horse to allow me to push into its pain. it will trust me and relationship will be formed. People are boo-hooing all over the place because so many of us have pain and trauma. And of course, God will give us space maybe for a bit, but eventually he's gonna press into it. He's gonna touch on it. And you either allow him to touch on it and you get whole or you get bitter and you get really distracted. So these are the kind of things, again, an outdoor element if you will, you know, inside the church building. Nature. And it's incredibly risky. And fortunately, we haven't had a horse jump out of the crowd and hit anybody. We almost had a stage collapse once. That would have been disastrous. So we, at the beginning, when we were doing a run through on Sunday morning, we had three services that day. And so we had three horses in on the stage and we played music during it. So the horses actually started moving the music, operating as a herd, and they would stop and turn. And that weight of them stopping, and then turning repeatedly, the stage with three horses was starting to shake. Oh, stop, get the horses out of there. We don't need a collapsed stage. So yeah, fun. Well, what a message, what a message. Brian, this has been phenomenal. I cannot speak more highly of your books. I was really floored. I mean, I was interested. I read things that I'd never thought about before in certain ways. I love how you tie in. Creation with our spirituality with our day-to-day lives. It's really powerful. I love just the way they look You know, these are really phenomenal books heading into the holidays the five marks of a man finding your path to courageous manhood There is the tactical guide that you could get with it There is this devotional great for your sons great for your husband great for your guy friends great for you great for you I loved it. I got a lot out of it. So Brian. Thank you. I'll make sure I linked to everything We always end our show with the same question What's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside? I have so many. I'll just say it was building tree houses and specifically just the massive fear of the first time you get above the ground over your head and you've taken a little scrap piece of wood and some scrappy nails you found in your dad's garage and you put a couple eight penny nails in there and now you're standing on a step above your head and you're going oh my gosh I Could I die here? That adrenaline, I miss that adrenaline. I don't remember the last time that I had a sort of adrenaline surge that was somewhat managed. So everything with tree houses. Yeah, and so many kids don't get to do that these days. No, not at all. It's sad, Jenny. Yeah, there's just not as many opportunities. I grew up in suburbia, but it seemed like if you wanted to find woods and just kick around in woods find a build a tree house you could do that there'd be some place the Catholic Church property they had you know maybe two acres they weren't too concerned about with or something else but I just don't see many kids being able to get out and in their defense I don't think that there's the same opportunities as there was when we were kids right there's not because there's not other kids out and that is really what the draw is and so when you choose to do that you are really changing things for a lot of people when you let your kids go and they're out in the neighborhood, that's gonna change the life of the neighborhood. It's a really big deal. Brian, this has been fantastic. Really, thank you. I mean, you're like this huge mega church pastor. You could be on anyone's podcast and here you came and spent this time with us. I'm so thankful. I so appreciate it. Well, Jenny, I had you on my podcast a few months ago and I just had a, I had a ball with you. You've got a, you have a light that's in you. You've got a... You've got a zest, a zeal that I find very, very encouraging and very, very attractive. So I thought, man, wait, I get to spend another hour with that woman, with her followers? In, in, absolutely. So thanks for what you do. I'm a big fan of yours. I really do think that your demeanor and life and your outlook, we need to have that replicated as wide and far as possible. So I'm thankful for all the things you're doing. We need it. I so appreciate that. I will cherish those words. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for joining us on this journey toward aggressive living. Find more resources, articles, past episodes and live events over at bryantome.com. My new books, a repackaged edition of The Five Marks of a Man and a brand new Five Marks of a Man Tactical Guide are open right now on Amazon. If you haven't yet, leave this podcast a rating and review. It really helps get the show in front of new listeners. And if you want to connect, find me on Instagram, at Brian Tome. The Aggressive Life is a production of Crossroads Church, Cincinnati, Ohio.