Read Article ⟶: What Was It Like To Grow Up In Your Home?
  • What Was It Like To Grow Up In Your Home?

    What Was It Like To Grow Up In Your Home?

    There are millions of us. We carry around leftover pain from childhood wounds. As a result of this unprocessed pain, we act out in ways that damage our relationships. We’re easily offended. Fragile. We lash out. We withdraw. We’re baffled by our behavior. Frankly, we’re not even sure what normal behavior looks like. We all…

  • How Our Parents Wounded Us

    How Our Parents Wounded Us

    If your parents were never properly parented themselves, that put them at great risk to repeat the cycle with you. And that puts you at risk of repeating the vicious cycle all over again. If you or someone you love is caught in a cycle, can put a stop to your family’s intergenerational dysfunction. But…

  • How Childhood Wounds Affect Adults

    How Childhood Wounds Affect Adults

    The following questions might apply to you or a loved one: – Do you struggle to believe that people really care about you? – Do others accuse you of being oversensitive or taking things too personally? – Is there something that routinely triggers your anger? – Is there a particular area of your life where…

  • How Childhood Wounds Affect Adults part 2

    How Childhood Wounds Affect Adults part 2

    Do you regularly find yourself feeling insecure and looking for reassurance? Do you experience big mood swings, but don’t know why? Are you especially responsible or immature for your age? Do you have a negative experience, word, thought, or voice in your head from your childhood that stills torments you? Are you estranged from any…

  • An Overview of How You Can Heal

    An Overview of How You Can Heal

    What’s it going to take for you, your loved one, or a friend to start healing from childhood wounds? Healing is all about pain—acknowledging it’s there, identifying where it’s coming from, and then knowing how to face it, grieve, accept it, take control, and heal. Tune in for an overview of the stages of healing.…

  • How to Overcome Denial and Face the Truth

    How to Overcome Denial and Face the Truth

    Denial can be tenacious. Facing difficult, painful, or humiliating facts from your or your loved one’s childhood can be hard. Most worthwhile things are. I commend your bravery to tackle the truth. But it can also to be so liberating and soothing that you’re going to feel like you’re seeing things as they really are—perhaps…

  • How to Grieve What Should Have Been

    How to Grieve What Should Have Been

    Something was taken from you, your loved one, or friend. You didn’t have the childhood you wanted, deserved, and should have experienced. You have been afflicted. You feel the loss deeply. Now that you’ve faced this truth, you need to grieve what went wrong. In this practical lesson, Pat Morley will help you understand grief, the…

  • How to Find Rest for Your Soul

    How to Find Rest for Your Soul

    Did you know that all successful recovery programs address spiritual needs? There’s a reason for that: A relationship with Jesus can give us the rest for our souls that no amount of human effort will ever be able to provide. If you’re on your way to being mended, you have faced the truth of what…

  • How to Forgive Your Parents

    How to Forgive Your Parents

    If your parents wounded you, they are responsible for that, whether they knew what they were doing or not. But without forgiveness, the future will look no different than the past. Forgiving your parents is not dismissing what they did, or pretending that your wounds never happened. After all, there would be no need for…

  • Rethinking Your Parents’ Stories

    Rethinking Your Parents’ Stories

    To be sure, our parents are responsible for how they wounded us, whether they knew it or not. Maybe they were good people who made serious mistakes, or maybe they were uncaring, toxic, or even evil. Nothing can minimize, justify, excuse, or change that. What happened to you or your loved one happened. But what…

  • How to Rebuild Your Relationships (Or Set Boundaries)

    How to Rebuild Your Relationships (Or Set Boundaries)

    Healing and rebuilding relationships takes time and mutual commitment. What’s the current state of your relationship with your parents and siblings? What’s the level of ongoing dysfunction? How receptive are you to restoring a relationship with them? How receptive are they? Do they and you both have the communication skills to pull it off, or…

  • How To Rebuild Your Relationships (Or Set Boundaries)—Part 2

    How To Rebuild Your Relationships (Or Set Boundaries)—Part 2

    Two weeks ago we talked about how to honestly assess our family relationships and approach them with the mind of Christ. Now it’s time to explore how we can actually communicate with our parents. Join Pat Morley and learn a tension-reducing way to start an awkward but crucial conversation. Whether your family’s level of dysfunction is…

  • The Joy of Walking with a Limp

    The Joy of Walking with a Limp

    All of us who have ever been broken boys will have flare-ups because, to some degree, we all live with the residual pain of what happened to us. We all have an emotional limp.   Join Patrick Morley and learn how to evaluate how much pain you’re still in, some examples of what residual pain…

  • Owning the Ways You’ve Weaponized Your Wounds

    Owning the Ways You’ve Weaponized Your Wounds

    When men try to put into words what’s holding them back, many say something like, “No matter how hard I try, I just can’t overcome the destructive behaviors that keep dragging me down.” Christian men are not exempt—and no matter how much a man loves God, it’s especially hard to move forward if he’s stuck…

  • Changing the Trajectory of Your Marriage

    Changing the Trajectory of Your Marriage

    When the world gets to be too much, who do you take it out on? If you’re like most men, it’s your wife. In fact, the number one place where the residual symptoms of your childhood wounds flare up is your marriage (or it will be if and when you get married). Do any of…

  • Parenting Your Own Children

    Parenting Your Own Children

    Pat Morley writes, “When Patsy and I brought, Jen, our daughter and firstborn child home from the hospital, all three of us were exhausted. I lay down and cradled our precious Jen on my chest. The warmth of that tiny body—a living person I helped create—and the thump, thump, thump of her acorn-sized heart will always…

  • The Rat Race

    The Rat Race

    The Big Idea: The Rat Race is the conflict between who I am created to be and who I am tempted to be. The proverbial questions of the rat race–“What’s it all about?” and “Is this all there is?”–have tortured us all at one time or another. So let’s kick off this new series by…

  • Leading an Unexamined Life

    Leading an Unexamined Life

    The Big Idea: It is for a lack of discipleship that men lead unexamined lives. We all want the same things–something we can give our lives to that will make a difference, someone to share our lives with, and a belief system that makes sense of why life is so hard. Christianity and secularism both…

  • Biblical Christian or Cultural Christian?

    Biblical Christian or Cultural Christian?

    The Big Idea: No matter how men get stuck in cultural Christianity, the only solution is to disciple them out. When you look around it’s obvious that a lot of men are stuck. Some are stuck because they have yet to experience the freedom of being in Christ. Others have professed faith, yet they’ve been…

  • Significance: The Search for Meaning and Purpose

    Significance: The Search for Meaning and Purpose

    The Big Idea: The Rat Race is the conflict between who I am created to be and who I am tempted to be. The proverbial questions of the rat race–“What’s it all about?” and “Is this all there is?”–have tortured us all at one time or another. So let’s kick off this new series by…

  • Purpose: Why Do I Exist?

    Purpose: Why Do I Exist?

    The Big Idea: I will feel most alive, most useful, and most significant when I am doing what God created me to do. It’s just a fact of life. Most men don’t know their purpose in life, or their purpose is too small. Sincerely ask a man, “What is the purpose of your life?” and…

  • The Secret of Job Contentment

    The Secret of Job Contentment

    The Big Idea: The secret of job contentment is not getting what I want, but redefining what I need. What do you want from your job, and are you getting it? It turns out that most men are not content in their work. In fact, according to Gallup’s 2013 “State of the American Workplace” report,…

  • Broken Relationships

    Broken Relationships

    The Big Idea: If you don’t have enough time for your family, you can be 100% certain that you are not following God’s will for your life. Let’s be honest. Work can be intoxicating. It can also be a place to escape unpredictable emotions and whiny kids. Yet no amount of success at work can…

  • Children: How to Avoid Regrets

    Children: How to Avoid Regrets

    The Big Idea: Encourage children by fathering their hearts, not fathering for performance. Who hasn’t heard a sobering story about a Dad who alienated his kids? To be a great Dad isn’t a given. Like any worthwhile skill, there are principles to learn and time to invest. Join us to learn the valuable distinction between…

  • Wives: How To Be Happily Married

    Wives: How To Be Happily Married

    The Big Idea: After God, but before all others, make your wife your top priority. Sigmund Freud said, “Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not yet been able to answer that great question…What does a woman want?” Too bad Freud didn’t believe in Christianity, because for Christians the answer…

  • Friends: Risks and Rewards

    Friends: Risks and Rewards

    The Big Idea: Three 2:00 AM friends can make up for a multitude of disappointments. Sooner or later we all realize that friendships are a beautiful thing. We realize that we need some other men who walk in our same shoes–who share similar problems and life experiences. But adult male friendships are difficult to start…

  • Money: A Biblical Point of View

    Money: A Biblical Point of View

    The Big Idea: Don’t buy the lie that money will do what it won’t, and that God won’t do what He will. Many Christians cling to the illusion that money will make them happy. Of course, money is important. Especially if you don’t have enough. When the 10th of the month rolls around, your mortgage…

  • The Four Pillars of Financial Strength

    The Four Pillars of Financial Strength

    The Big Idea: The greatest source of financial wisdom about earning, saving, sharing, and debt has always been and will forever be the Bible. What should be your financial aspirations as a Christian man? Does the Bible have clear cut principles to guide how we think about money? Yes, and in this lesson we’ll zero…

  • Decisions: How To Make The Right Choice

    Decisions: How To Make The Right Choice

    The Big Idea: The goal is always to bring my will into alignment with God’s will. Most of us will only make a handful of truly major decisions in the course of a year. “Do I change jobs, move, get married, have children, take on a personal ministry, buy a car, lower my lifestyle,” and…

  • Priorities: How To Decide What’s Important

    Priorities: How To Decide What’s Important

    The Big Idea: Priorities help me manage the pressures that would otherwise manage me. We are all under a lot of pressure. Work pressures, marriage pressures, parenting pressures, money pressures, health pressures. Taking some time for yourself sounds good, but then who’s going to meet that deadline? How do you decide? You have far more…

  • Time Management: Doing God’s Will

    Time Management: Doing God’s Will

    The Big Idea: Move from “Plan, then pray” to “Pray, then plan.” Each of us wants to lead a productive life. God wants that too. “Producing a crop” is a big part of His will for us. Yet adding a bunch of rules and regulations to “make it happen” doesn’t really help much, does it? …

  • Pride

    Pride

    The Big Idea: Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. The Bible says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” But what about feeling proud of our son’s grades or getting a promotion? Is that wrong? Actually, that’s a different kind of pride–let’s call it Pride Type I. Pride Type II, on…

  • Fear

    Fear

    The Big Idea: Faith in the promises of God will render fear impotent, even if our circumstances don’t change. Everyone struggles with fear: What if this deal falls through? Will she ever feel safe with me again? Will I be able to make payroll? Is it cancer? How am I going to pay my mortgage?…

  • Anger

    Anger

    The Big Idea: I pledge not to sin when I get angry, but openly confess I can’t do it on my own. Studies show that 75 – 90% of all doctor’s office visits are stress-related, and the most destructive form of stress is anger. Anger is not a sin–Jesus got angry, but anger can easily…

  • The Desire to be Independent

    The Desire to be Independent

    The Big Idea: Don’t “make” it happen, “let” it happen. Men want to be in charge–to call their own shots. And God has given us a lot of freedom. But freedom is not the same thing as autonomy. Yet we’re all tempted to think we can be in control of our lives. It might be…

  • Avoiding Suffering

    Avoiding Suffering

    The Big Idea: Suffering compels us to seek the God success makes us think we don’t need. What is making you suffer? Do you think God knows what you’re going through? If He knows, does He care? If He knows and cares, can He do anything about it? And if He can, why doesn’t He?…

  • Integrity: What’s the Price?

    Integrity: What’s the Price?

    The Big Idea: I have far too much at stake to risk it by cutting any little corner anywhere, no matter how small, insignificant, or inconsequential it may at first appear. I want to be known for “scrupulous” integrity. What made men like Peter, Paul, David, Moses, Gideon, Samson, Jonah, and Job so different was…

  • Leading a Secret Thought Life

    Leading a Secret Thought Life

    The Big Idea: I will make it my ambition to live “one life, one way.” Most of us would be embarrassed if our families, friends, or colleagues knew what went on inside our heads. Here’s the good news: You’re not crazy. A secret thought life is normal. However, you can live your “invisible” life in…

  • Accountability: The Missing Link

    Accountability: The Missing Link

    The Big Idea: Accountability: To be regularly answerable to qualified people for each of the key areas of our lives. None of us ever planned to fail. So how do we get off track? What makes us stumble? And why do some of us even fall away? One of the biggest reasons is that we…

  • How Can a Man Change?

    How Can a Man Change?

    The Big Idea: Discipleship (food, water, friends) = Changed Life What is something you really want to change about your life, but haven’t been able to? You already know this, but if you could have made that change on your own, it would have happened by now. On the other hand, we’ve all watched men’s…

  • Faithfulness: The Quality that Earns Peoples’ Trust

    The Fruit of the Spirit, Episode 7: Is there anything more refreshing than someone you can always count on to keep their word—or get back to you if they can’t? Easily the most frustrating part of my 40-year career has been people who repeatedly make promises they don’t keep. When they tell me what they’re…

  • The Goodness of God

    The Fruit of the Spirit, Episode 6: In this week’s study of the fruit of the Spirit, we look at goodness. This is maybe the hardest quality to define from the list. Many people have many ideas of what is actually good. Before we can define goodness, we will first determine what and who is…

  • Speaker Series: Connor Jones

    Intimacy with God: Everything we do should flow from the overflow of our Savior, found in true, set-aside time with Him – scheduled, prioritized, but especially…yearned for! Amidst the pressures of life, it can be so hard to truly run to Jesus – and learn to stay there. It seems that there is always a…

  • Kindness: Much More than Just Being Nice

    The Fruit of the Spirit, Episode 5: Obviously, it’s kind if you help an elderly woman put groceries in her car. But is it kind to: As you can see, kindness is so much more than just being nice. Join Patrick Morley and let’s recalibrate how we think about what kindness is and isn’t, take…

  • Peace: Before, During, and After Storms

    The Fruit of the Spirit, Episode 3: You are worried about the future. Anxious. Afraid. Upset. And for good reason. If something doesn’t break your way—and soon—your world is going to fall apart. Or the storm has already hit and your world has fallen apart. You’re stressing about what comes next. How will it all…

  • Joy: No Matter What

    The Fruit of the Spirit, Episode 2: Common sense and our own experience tell us that it’s much harder to feel joy when you’re in pain—whether it’s a chronic or life-threatening illness, betrayal, a broken relationship, financial calamity, or an existential crisis. But God offers a transcendent joy that does not depend on our circumstances. That’s…

  • Decluttering with the Spiritual Disciplines

    A Man’s Guide to the Spiritual Disciplines, Episode 13: You ache for a more vibrant walk with God. You long for Jesus to take you deeper into the compassion of his own heart. That’s why you’re part of this Bible study. And you’ve made good progress! But you want more. “More” is why God has…

  • Speaker Series: Brooks Cluxton

    A Man and His Dreams: Join former Rollins Basketball center, Brooks Cluxton, as he shares his adventure of chasing dreams. This 25-year-old aspiring financial advisor at Mosaic Wealth Management Group will share how God used dreams to transform his life. He’ll also discuss the unpredictable challenges he—and we—face along the way! Learn more about how…

  • A Man and Witnessing

    A Man’s Guide to the Spiritual Disciplines, Episode 12: Every day we rub shoulders with people who are lonely, confused, and afraid. Most of these people would love for someone—anyone—to take a personal interest in them in a loving, kind, nonjudgmental way. That’s how witnessing starts—just caring enough to care. There’s more to it, of…

  • A Man and Service

    A Man’s Guide to the Spiritual Disciplines, Episode 11:  Have you ever worked on a service project, gone on a mission trip, or served as a volunteer? How did it make you feel? It’s surprising how getting outside of your comfort zone and doing something that benefits others brings us surprising levels of joy and…