The Reclaimed Man · Episode 8

How A Skeptic Found God At 51 — Without Religion

When I was seven or eight, I talked to God every night. Lying in bed in our house in Colac, with the dog asleep down the end of it. I’d tell him about my day — what went wrong at school, what I was worried about. Nobody taught me to do it. We weren’t a religious family: no church, no Bible in the house.

Then somewhere in my late teens, I stopped.

Here’s the part it’s taken me nearly forty years to notice. I don’t remember why. I don’t remember deciding. There was no crisis of faith and no argument I lost. It just went quiet.

I wonder if that’s what happened to you too. You didn’t reject God — you’d have had to think about it to reject it. You got on with it instead: the career, the mortgage, the kids, the business. And one day you’re fifty-two and there’s something missing you can’t put a name to, and you’d never in a million years connect it to a boy talking out loud in a dark bedroom.

For the thirty years after that I’d have told you I was spiritual but not religious. I thought that was open-mindedness. It was a fence, and I was sitting on it — the same way I’ve sat on every other fence in my life, running the whole thing at about eight out of ten so that if it ever didn’t work, I’d have somewhere to put that.

Then two things turned up at once. I’d spent a year saying this is not happening to me, it’s happening for me — and one day I actually listened to what I was saying. Because if it’s happening for me, then who’s arranging it? Who’s the architect? That’s the noble version. The other one is that I was at rock bottom and had run out of things to try.

I know exactly how this looks from outside. A bloke gets debilitating anxiety, twelve months later he’s diagnosed with stage four cancer, and then he finds God. If I were an academic looking at my own case I’d have me down as a prime candidate, and I’d probably write me off. I’m not going to argue with that.

So I’m not here to prove anything, or to debate what’s right and wrong, or to convince you of a thing — because the moment I start trying to convince you, I’ve already lost.

In this one: why I went to church three different ways and still haven’t landed. Why trust is a better word than faith, and the page in a book that had me pick up a pencil and write five words in the margin. What I don’t ask for when I pray, and why. The 11:11 thing, and the reason I think my own brain is probably doing it. And the one I didn’t see coming — twelve months ago I was terrified of death, and I’m not now. That isn’t me giving up: I’d like to be here a very long time and I’m doing everything I can to make that happen. The fear has just gone out of it.

I also read you the prayer I say every morning. The whole thing. I have never once heard what another bloke actually says to God on a Tuesday morning in his own house, and I don’t think you have either.

One question at the end, and it’s the only thing I ask of you: how’s what you’re doing right now actually working for you?

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

I was seven, maybe eight years old.

And every night, when I got into bed, I’d talk to God.

I can still see the room.

Our little house in Colac.

My bed against the wall, and the dog asleep down the end of it — Jezebel.

And I’d lie there at the end of the day and debrief.

That’s what it was.

What happened at school.

What I was worried about.

Questions I had.

Whatever was sitting on my chest that night.

Sometimes out loud.

More often just in my head, lying there in the dark.

Nobody taught me to do that.

We weren’t a religious family.

We didn’t go to church.

There was no Bible in our house.

I’d been to Sunday school a couple of times — at a mate’s place, on a weekend, when I happened to be staying there — and I was bored out of my mind.

But at home, at night, with the dog on the bed, I talked to God.

And I remember it clearly.

And then at some point, I stopped.

Not all at once.

Somewhere in my late teens it just got less and less, until it wasn’t happening at all.

And here’s the part I want you to sit with.

Because it’s taken me nearly forty years to notice it.

I don’t remember why.

I don’t remember deciding.

There was no moment.

I didn’t have a crisis of faith.

I didn’t sit down at seventeen, weigh it all up, and conclude there was nothing there.

I just drifted.

Although — I’ll be honest with you.

I think there was something else in it.

I was a teenage boy.

Church wasn’t cool.

God wasn’t cool.

Not in the group I was running around with.

Nobody sat me down and talked me out of anything.

Nobody had to.

It was just in the air, and I’m sure that was a factor.

So no, I didn’t decide.

But I wasn’t neutral either.

Somewhere in there a fifteen-year-old worked out it wasn’t a good look — and quietly stopped.

I wonder if maybe that’s what happened to you.

You didn’t reject God.

You’d have had to think about it to reject it.

It just went quiet.

And then you got on with it — the career, the mortgage, the kids, the business — and one day you’re fifty-two years old and there’s something missing that you can’t put a name to.

And you would never, in a million years, connect that to a boy talking out loud in a dark bedroom.

So that’s what today is.

It’s not about religion.

It’s not about belief.

It’s not about whether any of this can be proven.

It’s about a relationship you used to have.

That lapsed.

And that you haven’t thought about once since.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Before I go any further, I want to tell you why this matters.

Because there’s a fair chance the word God has already got your thumb hovering over the skip button.

Stay with me a minute.

I don’t want to talk about God yet.

I want to talk about something else.

Think about the last really good week you had at work.

A record week.

Everything landed.

You did the thing you’d been chasing for two years.

How long did that last?

Twenty-four hours?

Be honest with yourself.

Was it twenty-four hours?

For me it’s about ten minutes.

Ten minutes of it feeling amazing — and then, what’s next.

Same with the weekend away with your wife, where the two of you actually found each other again.

Great weekend.

And then it’s Monday, and something goes wrong, and it’s like it never happened.

Same with the kids.

Things are going beautifully.

And then Friday night one of them’s out drinking, and you’re lying awake at midnight wondering what you got wrong.

Here’s what I want you to notice about that.

It’s not that you’re empty.

You’re not empty.

It’s that nothing holds.

You get the win and it doesn’t stick.

You get the good weekend and it doesn’t carry to Tuesday.

Whatever it is you’re actually after — you keep almost getting it, and it keeps sliding off.

If you listened to episode three, you know where I’m going.

I talked about the difference between lived worth — what you earn, what you build, what the people around you need from you — and soul worth: the fact that you are worthy, and you are lovable, and that was true before you built a single thing.

And what most of us are doing is trying to fill soul worth with lived worth.

Trying to earn our way to something that was never for sale.

That’s what I said in episode three.

Here’s what we didn’t get into.

You can’t give it to yourself.

Soul worth means something is telling you that you’re worthy.

And if you’re the one saying it — you’re also the one who gets to take it away.

On the Monday.

On the Friday night.

At three o’clock in the morning.

That’s why it never holds.

There’s nothing underneath it.

So if you can’t give it to yourself, then it has to be given to you.

By something.

Which means at some point, you have to decide what that something is.

I’ll tell you my answer, and you don’t have to take it.

For me, that something is God.

And if there’s nothing there — if you’ve got no answer to that question — then you are living on lived worth alone.

Which means you’re back to earning it.

Every day, for the rest of your life.

And it will never be enough.

Not because you haven’t achieved enough.

Because there is no amount that would do it.

You’ll keep pouring it in, and it’ll keep draining out.

I spent years trying to fill that.

From work.

From my marriage.

From alcohol — that’s a whole other episode, go and listen to episode two.

From being a good father.

None of it was ever going to work.

Not because there’s anything wrong with any of it.

Because none of it was built to carry that.

So that’s what this episode is actually about.

It’s not about religion.

It’s not about church.

I’m not going to ask you to believe anything.

It’s about where a man puts the one thing that has to hold when everything else is moving.

Because a man who’s got that is unshakeable.

Not because nothing knocks him — plenty knocks him.

Because there’s something underneath him that doesn’t move when he does.

He’s not trying to prove anything anymore.

And that’s when he can walk out into the world as himself.

That’s what’s on the other side of this.

I’ll tell you how I got there.

THE DISCLOSURE

Now let me tell you where I landed after that.

And let me put everything on the table, because I don’t want you finding any of this out later and thinking I hid it.

Through my twenties — and honestly for the thirty years after that — I was one of those blokes who’d tell you he was spiritual, but not religious.

I know.

It’s a cliché.

I’m well aware.

And I had a very good home for it, because I was a chiropractor.

Chiropractic has a real philosophy underneath it.

That there is a universal intelligence that gives all matter its properties.

And that this intelligence exists inside you as an innate intelligence — which is why your body knows how to heal itself.

You cut your finger, nobody has to tell it what to do.

I believed that.

I still do.

And it was comfortable, because I got to hold something bigger than me without having to put a face on it.

I didn’t need a bloke sitting up in a cloud with a beard.

I had a universal intelligence.

Sounds a lot better at a dinner party, too.

And organised religion?

I’d more or less decided it wasn’t a net positive.

Not for me, and not in general.

I want to be honest about that one, because it matters.

I hadn’t based that on anything real.

I hadn’t read anything.

I hadn’t sat down with anybody.

I’d been bored in a Sunday school twice, forty years earlier — and I’d built a whole position out of it and carried it for four decades.

One more thing on the table, and then we’ll get going.

I know exactly what this looks like from the outside.

A bloke gets debilitating anxiety.

Twelve months later he’s diagnosed with stage four cancer.

And then he finds God.

People turn to faith when life gets hard.

That’s not a criticism, it’s just what happens.

And if I were an academic looking at my own case, I’d have me down as a prime candidate.

I’d probably write me off.

I’m not going to argue with any of that.

I can’t.

It might well be part of it.

So here’s what I’m not going to do in this episode.

I’m not going to try to prove anything to you.

I’m not here to debate what’s right and what’s wrong, or to tell you what’s true.

I’m going to tell you what’s working for me.

And then I’m going to invite you to have a look at what’s working for you.

That’s the whole deal.

THE FENCE

I want to come back to something, because for thirty years I would have told you that spiritual but not religious was open-mindedness.

It wasn’t.

It was a fence.

And I was sitting on it.

Not wanting to make a decision.

Taking the safe option.

Never being wrong about anything, because I never committed to anything I could be wrong about.

And here’s what I’ve had to face since.

That’s not something I did with God.

That’s something I do.

I have spent most of my life living at about an eight out of ten.

And eight out of ten is a very good place to live.

Eight out of ten at school gets you an A.

Eight out of ten in business gets you a good business.

Eight out of ten as a man gets you a life that from the outside looks blessed — and mine has been.

I’m not complaining about any of it.

But eight out of ten is not full out.

And this is the bit I didn’t see for forty years.

That’s the whole point of it.

Because if you go at eight, and it doesn’t work — you’ve got somewhere to put that.

You get to say: well, I didn’t really go all in.

That’s why.

If you go at ten.

If you commit everything you’ve got, in front of everybody, and it fails — you have to sit in it.

There’s nowhere to put that one.

That was just you.

Eight out of ten gets you good results and means you never have to find out.

Let me tell you what that actually looked like.

I was a chiropractor, and I believed in a particular kind of chiropractic.

Nerve system first.

The body as something that heals itself when you take the interference out of the way.

I believed that then.

I believe it now.

And what did I do with it?

I softened it.

Every time somebody sat down in front of me, I softened it a bit, so it wouldn’t get knocked back.

I flip-flopped in how I talked about it — in my marketing, in the story I told my patients, in the story I told the public.

Some days I’d say it straight.

Most days I’d sand the edges off it.

I wanted to be liked by everybody.

Instead of putting a stake in the ground and saying: here’s what I stand for.

This is what it is.

And if you ask me what I was actually afraid of, I can tell you exactly.

I was afraid of being ridiculed.

Of being rejected.

Of being made fun of.

Now go back to that fifteen-year-old who quietly stopped talking to God because it wasn’t cool.

Same bloke.

Same fear.

Thirty-five years apart.

I never made a decision about God.

I did what I always do.

I found the position that couldn’t be laughed at, I sat on it for three decades, and I called it being open-minded.

I’d ask you to have a look at where that shows up for you.

And not with God — anywhere.

Because wherever you’re sitting at eight out of ten, there’s something you’ve decided not to find out.

WHAT BROKE IT

So what changed?

Two things.

And they turned up at about the same time.

The first one you’ve heard me say before, because it’s the thread that runs through episode one.

I said that to myself for the best part of a year.

Through the anxiety.

Through the diagnosis.

It’s the sentence that got me through.

And then one day I actually listened to it.

Because if this is happening for me — then who’s doing it?

Something has to be arranging it.

There’s a claim buried inside that sentence, and I’d been walking around saying it for twelve months without once looking at what I was agreeing to.

Who’s the architect?

That’s what I had to go and explore.

Properly.

Now that’s the noble version.

Here’s the other one.

I was at rock bottom.

My life wasn’t working.

And I don’t mean it was hard — I mean it wasn’t working, and everything I knew how to do about it, I’d already done.

You know that definition of insanity.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

So it wasn’t courage.

And I want to be clear about that, because I think it matters to you.

I didn’t get brave.

I got desperate enough that I stopped caring how it looked.

And then a bloke called Nick.

Nick’s a mate of mine, and Nick’s a Christian.

I sat down with him with a whole pile of questions, and he took every one of them seriously.

He didn’t preach at me.

He didn’t try to close me.

He answered what I asked, and he encouraged me.

I was already heading in that direction.

He just made it easier to keep walking.

And then Nick and his wife Ange bought me a Bible.

A beautiful one.

And they posted it to me.

Nick told me to start with the New Testament.

So that’s what I did.

And when I got to something I didn’t understand — which was often — I’d take a photo of it, and go away and work it out.

Some days I’d read two or three pages.

Some days I’d spend an hour on two verses.

I wasn’t studying it.

I was following whatever pulled at me.

And if you asked me what called me to do any of that in the first place — I couldn’t give you a clean answer.

But I can tell you what was going on underneath it.

I was getting quiet.

And I was starting to trust the voice inside me.

Now that sounds like a big spiritual claim, and I don’t mean it as one.

That voice had been there the whole time.

I’d been ignoring it.

Suppressing it, mostly — because it had a habit of telling me things I didn’t want to hear.

This time I decided I’d just listen to it.

Follow it.

See where it took me.

And here’s what happened, and it did surprise me.

The more I listened to it, the more clarity I got.

The more clarity I got, the more I trusted it.

And the more I trusted it, the louder it got — until I could actually understand what it was saying.

I didn’t go looking for a voice.

I just stopped talking over the one that was already there.

THE CHURCH DOOR

Now I want to tell you something that the title of this episode might have you thinking I didn’t do.

I went to church.

Not once.

Several.

I’ve been to a Baptist church.

I’ve been to an Orthodox church.

I’ve been to what you’d probably call a New Age Christian congregation.

And I want to say this before I say anything else.

There was nothing wrong with any of them.

They were all great.

I’m not building a case against any of this.

But I’ll be honest about why I went in the first place.

I went because I thought it was something I was meant to have done.

That’s it.

That’s the whole reason.

I’d decided God was real, and church looked like the box you tick once you’ve decided that.

It’s what you’re supposed to do next.

And what I worked out, sitting in those services, had nothing to do with the services.

It was this.

I didn’t want a relationship with God on Sunday mornings.

And I didn’t want a relationship with God at seven o’clock in the morning when I pray, or in the evening when I pray.

I wanted to be in relationship with God.

Not an appointment.

Not a slot in the week.

And the more I read, the more I found that’s what Jesus keeps pointing at.

It isn’t about turning up and performing something.

It isn’t about pretending to be something for an hour in a room.

It’s about who you are.

So where did I land?

I haven’t.

I’m sitting here talking to you about God, and I don’t have a church.

I go sometimes.

I haven’t found the one that’s mine.

And I don’t want to be smart about this, because I haven’t got it worked out.

I think there’ll come a time when I’m called back to have another look.

Because there’s something in community — in actually sitting with other men who are doing this — that I can’t do on my own.

I know that.

I can feel the gap.

I just haven’t done it yet.

So when I say finding God without religion, I want to be clear about what I’m saying and what I’m not.

I’m not telling you that you don’t need church.

I’m not the bloke to tell you that.

I went and looked, three different ways, and I’m still looking.

I’m telling you that the relationship came first.

Before any of that.

And that it was available to me before I walked into a single building.

WHAT FAITH ACTUALLY IS

Alright.

I want to deal with the word.

Faith.

Because for a lot of men, faith means believing something you can’t prove.

Believing without evidence.

And if that’s what it means, then a sensible bloke doesn’t go anywhere near it — because you’ve just asked him to switch his brain off, and he’s not going to do that.

So let me give you my honest answer on the evidence question first.

I can’t give you mine.

What I’ve got is what’s happened to me.

It’s personal.

It’s the reason I’m sitting here, and I can’t hand it across the table to you.

You’d need your own.

But I want to be careful, because that is not nothing.

That’s not the absence of evidence.

It’s evidence that doesn’t transfer.

And then I read something that changed how I hold the whole word.

This is Richard Rohr.

A book called The Universal Christ.

Page sixty-seven.

He puts it in brackets, almost as an afterthought.

By the way, at this point in history, “trust” is probably a much more helpful and descriptive word than “faith,” a notion that has become far too misused, intellectualised, and even banal.

Trust.

Not faith.

Trust.

And that word I understand.

Because nobody asks me for evidence before I trust my wife.

I trust her because of what’s happened between us.

Trust gets built out of experience — it isn’t something you decide in an armchair.

So the question stops being can you prove it.

And it becomes: what are you willing to trust?

And then Rohr gives you three.

This is the part I keep coming back to.

He says we find our original goodness when we discover and own three things that are already planted inside us.

A trust in inner coherence itself.

“It all means something!”

That’s faith.

A trust that this coherence is positive and going somewhere good.

That’s hope.

A trust that this coherence includes me and even defines me.

That’s love.

And then he says: this is the soul’s foundation.

Now I’ve got that book right here.

And I want to tell you what I did when I read that page.

I picked up a pencil.

I drew an arrow next to those three lines.

And I wrote five words in the margin.

Because that’s it.

That’s the sentence I’d been saying for a year.

This is not happening to me.

It’s happening for me.

And I thought that was a way of coping.

A way of carrying something heavy.

It isn’t.

Read the first one again.

That’s exactly what I’d been saying.

I just didn’t know that’s what it was called.

I’d been living the definition of faith for twelve months — and I would have told you I didn’t have any.

THE PRAYER

Now I want to read you something.

And I’ll be honest with you — this is the most exposed I’ve been on this podcast.

Including episode one.

Every morning I sit down and I pray.

There’s a set of prayers I read, and I wrote them myself.

I’m going to read you one of them.

Not because you should use it — you shouldn’t, it’s mine.

I’m reading it because I think this is the thing men never get to hear.

We hear prayers at funerals.

At weddings.

In churches.

Formal ones, old ones, somebody else’s.

I have never once heard what another bloke actually says to God on a Tuesday morning in his own house.

So here’s mine.

Heavenly Father —

I thank you that you created me in your image.

That your life — the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead — already dwells within me.

Not as something I must summon or earn.

But as the deepest truth of what I already am.

I come not to demand healing but to remember it.

To uncover what you planted in me before I drew my first breath.

To get out of the way of the magnificent life that is already moving through every cell, every tissue, every system of this body.

Grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change.

To surrender honestly to this moment as it is — without pretending, without fighting reality itself.

Grant me the courage to change what I can.

To choose connection over fear.

To trust the life within me.

To show up fully — for Lauren, for my children, for the men who need what is moving through me.

And grant me the wisdom to know the difference.

I trust in you with all my heart and lean not on my own understanding.

In all my ways I acknowledge you — and trust you to make my path straight.

Where I have allowed fear, interference, or forgetting to block that flow — I release it now.

My body knows how to heal.

You built that knowing into it.

I speak to every cell not as a command but as a reminder — return to what you were created to be.

I am here to connect.

To learn.

To grow.

To transcend.

To evolve.

And to surrender — all at the same time.

Not my will but yours — moving through me, as me, into the world.

Amen.

Alright.

Two things about that, and then I’ll move on.

The first one.

Did you notice what I don’t ask for?

I’ve got stage four prostate cancer.

And I don’t ask for it to be taken away.

Now that’s not resignation, and I want to be clear about that.

It’s that I already believe the intelligence that built this body knows how to run it.

My job isn’t to instruct it.

My job is to stop getting in its way — to get out of the way of the life that’s already moving through every cell.

Which is the same thing I’ve been saying on this show since the start.

About food.

About sleep.

About the nervous system.

The body needs no help.

It just needs no interference.

I say it to God now, that’s all.

The second thing.

I said I wrote it, and I want to be accurate about that — because I wrote a prayer makes it sound like I sat down one morning and it came out.

It didn’t.

That’s about twelve months of versions.

I started by going and finding other people’s prayers online.

I read a lot of them.

The ones I liked, I took, and I changed the bits that didn’t sound like me.

A line from here.

A line from there.

There’s the serenity prayer in it.

There’s a line out of Romans and a line out of Proverbs.

And I worked it backwards and forwards for a year, until it said what I actually wanted to say.

So it’s not original.

Most of it isn’t even mine.

But it’s personal.

It’s mine now.

It’s about my life, and where I’m up to, and the people I’ve got.

And nobody gave me permission to do any of that.

There was no form to fill in.

I didn’t have to join anything, or learn anything, or become a particular sort of person first.

I found something that was close.

And I kept working on it until it was true.

And that’s the bit I’d want you to notice.

THE RELATIONSHIP, AND THE SIGNS

So what does that actually look like?

Day to day.

I’ll tell you.

And I want to warn you in advance — it’s very ordinary.

Five or six mornings a week now, I’m up for the sunrise.

And there’s a moment in it where I feel connected to something much bigger than me.

I’m not doing anything.

I’m not achieving anything.

I’m just there while it happens — and I’m grateful for it.

And it doesn’t stop when I come back inside.

I talk to him through the day.

Not out loud, most of the time — it just runs along underneath.

When something’s hard, I say so, as it’s happening.

Not saved up for the next morning.

When something’s good, I say thank you.

And what I’ve found is that once you’ve stood there at six o’clock and felt that — you start seeing it in everything else.

I notice beauty now in a way I never did before.

A little bird going past.

A dog belting up the beach like it’s having the best day of its life.

The blokes at the supermarket.

The conversations I have in there — the good ones, and the ones where I’ve got a chance to make somebody’s day a bit better than it was when they walked in.

And that’s what I want this to be.

Not a private thing I do at seven in the morning and then get on with the rest of it.

I want it to come out in how I am with people.

I want to be the best part of me — and I’d say God’s expression through me — in as many interactions as I can manage in a day.

And I’ll be honest with you, because I don’t want to paint something here that isn’t true.

It’s not always like that.

There are days I’m down.

Days I’m beat up, and I’m not the best part of anything, and I’m not much of an expression of anybody.

That still happens.

It happens plenty.

But that’s what I’m aiming at.

And I want to say this next bit carefully, because it’s the part that’s hardest to talk about without sounding like I’ve lost the plot.

There’s a dialogue in it.

It’s not just me talking.

There’s something that answers.

A voice, or a presence — inside me, but it doesn’t feel like me.

It feels like it’s coming from somewhere deeper than the bloke who’s doing the thinking.

It’s not my educated mind.

I know what my educated mind sounds like.

I’ve been listening to it for fifty-one years, and it’s usually worried about something.

This is other than that.

Maybe that’s what people mean by the Holy Spirit.

I don’t know.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you I know.

And then there’s the thing I’ve been putting off telling you.

I see 11:11.

I’ll look at my phone and it’s 11:11.

Or it’s 1:11.

Over and over, out of the blue, for months now.

And it’s almost uncanny.

Now — my logical brain wants to jump straight in here.

And it says: that’s your reticular activating system, mate.

You started looking for it, so now you see it.

And you’re not counting the four hundred times you picked up your phone and it said 2:47.

And that’s probably right.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s a miracle.

I can’t prove a thing.

But I’ll tell you what it feels like, and then I’ll leave it alone.

It feels like being nudged.

Like something saying: still here.

Not a message.

Not an instruction.

Just — I haven’t gone anywhere.

And whether that’s God, or my own brain matching a pattern, I’ve stopped needing to settle it.

Because either way, when it happens, I remember I’m in relationship with something.

And that changes how I walk around for the next hour.

THE CLOSE

So let me tell you what all of this has actually given me.

And then I’ll leave you alone.

The easy answer is peace.

Calm.

And that’s true — but it’s not the whole of it, and it’s not the interesting part.

It’s given me strength.

Not the sort you build in a gym.

The sort where something arrives and you don’t come apart.

It’s given me meaning.

What’s happened to me over the last two years isn’t a random accident that landed on the wrong bloke.

It means something.

I’ve been saying that since episode one — and now I know why I believe it.

And it’s meant I’m not doing this on my own.

That one’s hard to explain to somebody who hasn’t got it.

I’m not talking about my wife, or my mates, or the men in my life — I’ve got all of that, and I’m lucky.

I mean that underneath all of it there’s something else, and it’s with me.

I’m not out here by myself.

And then there’s this one.

And it’s the big one.

Twelve months ago — and for my whole life before that — I was terrified of death.

Not uneasy about it.

Terrified.

I’m not now.

And I’m not going to oversell that.

I’ve got stage four prostate cancer.

I’d like to be here for a very long time and I’m doing everything I can to make that happen.

But the fear has gone out of it.

Because it doesn’t feel like the end of something anymore.

It feels like part of it.

That’s what this has done for me that nothing else ever did.

Not the money.

Not the achievements.

None of it.

Alright.

Here’s where I want to leave you.

And I want to be careful, because I’m not selling you anything.

I’ve got one question.

How’s what’s going on right now actually working for you?

That’s it.

That’s the whole question.

And if it’s working — genuinely, if you’ve got something that holds when everything else moves, and you’re not lying to me or to yourself — then I’ll throw you a high five and say way to go, brother.

I mean that.

I’m not being smart.

But if you’re not sure, try this one.

If you change nothing.

If you keep doing exactly what you’re doing now — where does that end up in ten years?

Have a proper look at it.

Not the version you’d give someone at a barbecue.

The real one.

And I’ll say one more thing, and it’s a bit cheeky.

You’re eight episodes into a podcast about men putting their lives back together.

Men who are fine don’t do that.

So there’s probably something in there that isn’t working.

And I reckon you already know what it is.

And if you keep doing the same thing about it, you know exactly what you’re going to get.

Now — I’m not going to try to convince you of any of this.

I’m not going to argue you into it.

Because the moment I start trying to convince you, I’ve already lost.

This only works if there’s something in you that’s genuinely curious.

And if there isn’t, that’s alright.

Nothing I say is going to put it there.

But if there is — here’s what I’ll leave you with.

Just for a minute, sit with the idea that maybe God has been trying to talk to you.

And that you haven’t been listening.

What would it be like if you took that seriously?

I’ll see you next week.