Keeping Your Spiritual Formation Fresh : Brady White

Full-Text Transcript

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I am your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week, I have the honor and privilege of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and we dive into a topic to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you really thrive in life and leadership. I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation. I’m going to be joined by Brady White. Brady serves as the executive pastor of staff care at Mosaic Church, and his book on spiritual formation is entitled The Well Worn Narrow Path. Brady, welcome to FrontStage BackStage. Good to have you with us.

Brady White
Oh, thanks, Jason, it’s good to be here. Man, what a great compliment. You said that you have conversations with trusted ministry leaders, so I guess I don’t know if you intend that to apply to me, but, man, I’m gonna let my mom know. She’s gonna be so excited.

Jason Daye
Yeah, let her know you are in, Brady. You are definitely a trusted ministry leader. Yeah, awesome, brother. We are going to dive into a topic that, as pastors and ministry leaders, we often think of this particular topic as something that we do, or something that we lead, or something that we help others with. But, Brady, you and I are going to talk about this as something that we experience ourselves, and that’s this idea of spiritual formation. It seems that oftentimes in ministry context, when we talk about spiritual formation, we’re always talking about, okay, what are we doing to help our people? Which is important. But we’re going to spend a little bit of time, Brady, talking about some of the challenges that we have as pastors and ministry leaders ourselves when it comes to our own spiritual formation, right? And some of the ways that you can help us process and think through that. I’m excited for that. So, Brady, let’s start there. As a pastor, as a ministry leader, we can often get really excited about other people’s formation, but sometimes overlook our own. So, why is that kind of something that we run into? What are some of the things that might distract us from our own spiritual formation?

Brady White
I tell you what, at least, as far as I’m concerned, as soon as I learn anything new, I want to share it with someone else, even before I put it into practice, because it’s just so exciting. Anytime something is interesting to me or intrigues me, I want to share it with someone else. So sometimes, at least for me, that’s as far as it gets. Into my good, old left-brain, and then I want to spit it out to someone else. I think, also, it’s easier once we really have to start putting things into practice. That old word that Richard Foster used so well, discipline, comes in, and it’s just, oh, it’s the longest four-letter word I know. Just discipline. It’s hard. I don’t like it. It reminds me of getting in trouble as a kid. So I think anything, at least for me, that requires discipline, is hard. So I’d much rather teach it, figure out an intriguing way, or fascinating way for people to think it’s amazing, and then maybe they would go and put it into practice. That’s one of the reasons, at least for me, it’s hard, and I like to stay in my left-brain a lot.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that makes sense, and I think what you say is very true. We tend to receive something and instantly start thinking about how we pass this on. God invites us to just stop and hold some things for ourselves and enter into those things ourselves. Brady, you’ve spent some time, energy, and years of looking at this journey and processing through this journey, and even in your book, The Well Worn Narrow Path, you mentioned that for years you were kind of thinking about this process of spiritual formation and thought about, maybe, writing a book about it, or putting pen to paper and kind of getting some of these thoughts out. But you kind of had a struggle to a degree, until you came up with this imagery that kind of pulled it all together, right? So I’d love for you to share with us a little bit about that journey as you’re processing through spiritual formation, what that means for you, what that means for us, and what took you to that next step with The Well Worn Narrow Path that kind of put things together and helped pull pieces together that you were wrestling through?

Brady White
Yeah, wow. It’s been a journey, and it was a journey with all the ups and downs, a lot of me making a fool of myself, and not knowing what I was doing. I think I just found myself as a pastor, and there were a couple of things that I realized. One was that I didn’t look much more like Jesus than I did 10 years ago. At the same time as I’m studying the scripture to teach it, I’m learning about Paul talking about peace that you can’t understand, joy that you can’t explain, hope that abounds, and life abundant as Jesus describes it. I looked at my life, and I just don’t think I could have honestly described my experience of life like that. So there seemed to be this giant gap between who I was and who God was calling me to be, and who it seemed like Scripture said I can be, and the life that I was called to or gifted by Jesus to experience, and the one that I was experiencing. It just so happened that at the same time, I was with a group of leaders, and I was supposed to be leading them through a year. Know what to do. We were going to meet twice a month. Then I remember this book. It’s like, I thought, okay, there’s a book. What is it? Oh, yeah, yeah. Disciplines of the spiritual… what is it by Foster? Celebration of Discipline, by Richard Foster. I thought, I think there are 12 chapters. I think there were 12 things in there. I’d read the book three or four times. Listened to it a couple of times. In fact, I had recommended the book to a number of people, and this is one of the most embarrassing things, but I didn’t put anything into practice. It was interesting. It was intriguing to me, but I never put anything into practice. But I didn’t have anything else to do. So I thought, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll learn about a different one of these spiritual disciplines every month, and we’ll figure out some way to put it into practice together, and then two weeks later, we’ll come weeks later, we’ll come back together and say, how’d it go? Well, what was the struggle? Then we’ll find another way to put it into practice. So by the end of the year, we’ll have these 12 things. I had no idea that these were the foundational ways that God had created us to abide in the true vine. So, as I began to actually put it into practice, because I had to. Because I knew I was going to be asking them, they were going to be asking me, and I was going to talk about my experience. When I finally began to put these disciplines of the faith, or I like to call them rhythms of intimacy, into practice, it really began to be radically transformative to my journey into greater degrees of Christ-likeness and greater degrees of the experience of the abundant life that Jesus talks about. It just so happened around that same time I was experiencing a great degree of burnout, but I just didn’t know it. God, in His kindness, called my wife and me away from Orlando to go to a city in the Midwest, this incredible city, but it felt like we went back in time 15 years and slowed down to half speed. At first, it was jarring. I remember I was stopped at a stoplight, and there were two people in front of me, and the person right at the beginning of the light, when it turned green, didn’t go, and then they didn’t go, and they didn’t go. For me, what I realized, and this is when I knew I had a problem, is I wasn’t mad at the person who wasn’t going. I was mad at the person in front of me who wasn’t honking at them to make them go. I was so frustrated. It was that same week I was in the grocery store line at the express checkout lane, and the sweet lady in front of me was writing a check, and I was freaking out. It really began to take me on a journey of, like, okay, what’s going on in here? God, in His kindness, gave me a lot of clarity. I got to really take this journey. Well, I’m still taking this journey. It’s an incredible journey. But as I’m experiencing all of these things over the course of a decade and a half, I wanted to write it down for people, because, and even today, if this is new to you, it’s going to feel like you’re drinking through a fire hydrant. It’s just so much. So anytime I would get to talk to someone about it or teach about it, I wanted to give them more so that they can go on this journey like so many great men and women of faith have gone on. In fact, that’s why it’s called The Well Worn Narrow Path, because Jesus talks about the narrow path, and it is narrow. I think one of the reasons it’s narrow is because the disciples tried to step on Jesus’ footsteps, and then their disciples stepped right in their footsteps, and then their disciples in their footsteps, and the closer that we stay in those footsteps, the path just stays narrow. So I got to do this, and am getting to do this, and it has been incredibly impactful to my life and my journey with Jesus, and so many other people have gotten to. But, as you said, I wasn’t able to write. I sat down a number of times, in the 10s of times, to try and write. I just couldn’t put it together. Because there’s so much out there, it’s all good stuff, and there’s so many great contemporary and ancient writers that wrote about this kind of thing, but for me, it was hard in my own life to really put it together in a way, in a system that made sense for me. So when this picture came to my mind, I just believe it was a gift from God. It all of a sudden happened to begin writing, and it just went. It was really neat to see the way that God helped me work through this. But basically, the picture is, if you imagine a vine, and you’ve got a vine on two sides, one side is in the dirt, and the other side is out of the dirt. In the dirt, you have these four layers of soil, and these layers of soil are the energizers. These layers of soil are the motivation for the growth of the vine. Then, as the vine goes out into the surface, if you know much about vines, they have great growth potential, but they need some sort of structure to help them grow, to facilitate their growth, and if they have some kind of structure, they thrive. This trellis, or this lattice that this vine is growing on, is made up of a bunch of different puzzle pieces, a bunch of different kinds of things that are fashioned together. As this picture came to my mind, I thought, This is it. This is how I understand it. This is how it’s been helpful for me to put it to practice in my life, and how now that I think I’ll be able to help someone else, and that was such a fun moment in the journey.

Jason Daye
Hey, friends, just a quick reminder that we provide a free toolkit that complements today’s conversation. You can find that for this episode and every episode of PastorServe.org/network. In the toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. This growth guide includes insights pulled from today’s conversation, as well as reflection questions, so you and the ministry team at your local church can dig more deeply into this topic and see how it relates to your specific ministry context. Again, you can find it at PastorServe.org/network.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I imagine. Thank you for sharing that journey because I think all of us in ministry, we all have different things that God’s doing in us, and sometimes it comes easily, like how to express that and share that. Then other times, we can express it, but we’re like, there still seems to be a bit of disconnect, right? So it’s so cool to hear your journey of how the Spirit’s speaking into your life and bringing the pieces together. I love the imagery, and I’d like for us to dive in a little bit because I thought it was pretty fascinating when I was looking at the four layers of soil, right? I’ve got to say, before I turned the page to see what those layers were, when I’m just looking at the actual diagram, in my mind, I’m kind of just subconsciously thinking of what they might be. Then I turn the page to the first one, and it says desire. I gotta be honest, that was not what I thought. Then, turning to the next, desperation, I was like, well, that probably wasn’t what I thought. So anyway, walk us through, let’s start with the soil, if we can, and walk us through those layers of the soil and explain why these are kind of the foundational, nutrient-type pieces for this spiritual formation journey.

Brady White
Yeah, that was an interesting part of the journey for me as well. I think that the practices or the habits or the disciplines that we’ve put into place in our lives, those things make a little bit more sense to me. The things that Jesus did. But even in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, Be careful when you do these things, these good things, because the Pharisees do these good things, but the motivation, the fuel that is driving the good things that they’re doing is wrong. It’s unhelpful, and so now the things that they’re doing that are good are not actually abiding in the true vine. It’s almost as if Jesus was speaking to, I don’t know, evangelical Christians today, He might say it’s possible for you to read the Bible and not abide in the vine. It’s possible for you to memorize some of the Bible and not be abiding in the vine. I mean, I imagine Hitler had some scripture memorized. So the Bible is incredible. It’s beautiful. It’s God’s word, you know? It’s God’s breath, breathed out to us. It’s amazing. But it’s possible for us to handle the word of truth in a way that doesn’t benefit us or the hearers. So Jesus says, What’s going on with the motivation of the heart? So in the beginning, with desire, is God created us, he wired us with certain longings and yearnings, these deep longings and yearnings. I think that you see throughout the pages of Scripture that the deepest, most foundational one is that we are wired to long for and to have a deeply personal connection with the God of the universe. We were wired for intimacy. We desire that. We want that. We long for that, and we obviously try and satisfy that desire in a number of different ways, but that is one of our core foundational desires, and there are a number of other ones. I think we all desire to experience that life that Jesus talks about. The abundant life that is characterized by joy, peace, hope, and contentment. We really want to experience that life. I think we desire maturity. I think every single one of us is just sick and tired of our immature, fleshly selves that just seem to hang on for forever. We want to move out of that. We have these core desires that God wired in us. But what happens, I think, is we don’t get down into that soil of what those desires are. So we just kind of act out of these surface desires that sometimes are those good desires twisted, and sometimes they’re just other desires. So I think it’s so important for us to begin by getting down deep and stirring inside and awakening, or allowing God’s spirit to awaken those desires that he created in us. Once they’re awakened, we realize, and this moves us to the second layer of soil. We realize I can’t get this for myself. I want this, but I can’t make this happen. As far as my relationship with God, I can’t force God’s hand. I can show up, but I can only just trust that he will do what he does. I can’t make him. I can’t force him. I can try and will myself into maturity, but it just hasn’t worked in my life. These things that we desire that God has created in us to long for, we can’t do it. So we realize we are desperate for God. I think this mirrors the gospel in that we are a people who need God to move. We need God to act. We find ourselves in this place where God, if you don’t move, if you don’t act, if you don’t do the things that you said that you would do, that you promised you would do, I’m in trouble. What I love is, as I read through the stories of Scripture, particularly in the gospels with Jesus, is he loved to help desperate people. People who realized their desperation. We’re all desperate. Just some of us don’t know it. I don’t know it oftentimes. But as people who realize their desperation and came to God with that, he loved to help them in that moment. That moves us to the third layer of soil, which shockingly is another “D”, which is delight. This is, I think it’s the most potent, powerful layer, a motivator, fuel that we can have. But it’s powerful because of those first two layers. The way that God just created things to function is that He created us for this longing. He created us to know that we can’t have it on our own. Then what he shows us in Scripture is that he delights in us, and he doesn’t just delight in us, he pre-delights in us. That God loves us before. There are so many stories that are fantastic to describe this. But I think the prodigal son is maybe my favorite, because you got the son armed with his speech to, at least in my mind, try and manipulate the dad into making him a servant, and the dad hadn’t heard his speech, and the dad runs to him and embraces him before the son says anything. I mean, the son could be coming to yell at the dad, and you just see this beautiful pre-delight. It’s also pictured in Jesus when Jesus gets baptized in his adult ministry. We don’t know anything about Jesus before this. He was a baby. We know one story about him when he was 12. But other than that, as far as anything he’s done, we don’t know anything. I think the gospel writers intentionally do this, guided by the Spirit, to let us know that the first thing God the Father speaks over Jesus at His baptism is, You are my beloved son. I am well pleased in you. Now I don’t know what Jesus had done before this. He may have healed people. He may have preached the gospel. I don’t know. But the gospel writers don’t tell us that, and I think it’s because they want to show us the pre-delight of the Father in us before we serve, before we do a quiet time, before we pray, and before we do anything God already pre-delights in us. That should be the fuel that motivates us to then move towards God, right? We love because he first loved us. Then this last layer of soil, and I don’t even know if it’s it’s a separate layer, or if it’s just a combination of the three, I’m still trying to work it out, but it’s devotion. Devotion is this deep, passionate, faithful commitment to God that is formed and forged by those bottom three layers of soil. As I at least daily, go back to, Okay, God, what is it that you’ve wired me to desire? Oh yeah, oh yeah, I do want that, God, and I can’t have it without you. Would you show up? Would you draw near to me? I’m knocking on the door, or Jesus, you’re knocking on the door. I want you to come in. Would you come in? Then, as I allow him to just delight in me, or, as Moses said to Aaron, have God’s face shine upon you. I think it’s this picture of God’s face and delight just shining on you. It begins to stir something, and it just reaffirms and secures that devotion. Out of that, I think growth and practices, and habits that we put into place can be incredibly effective.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. So the soul makes up that, as you said, what fuels us, what gives us those nutrients as we’re growing. The trellis, then, the image of the trellis, you say, and you describe this in the book, is different pieces connected together, if we think of like a lattice or trellis that has vines growing up. So, talk to us a little bit about those elements within that trellis.

Brady White
Yeah, I think one thing that was really helpful for me was to look at the way that Jesus described, or how he summarized, how we’re supposed to do this life. He says, basically, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, and neighbor. He kind of gave us five aspects of how we love, and as humans, we are holistic, embodied spirits, and we have all of these aspects of our humanity. We’ve got our brain, we’ve got our emotions, we’ve got our body, we’ve got our spirit, and we’ve got our community, our family, our people, and we need to love God with all of those, right? We need to live out in all of those. So, I think as you’re even beginning to think about different habits and practices, it’s important to think of it holistically. So I can and should love God by getting enough sleep. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but I experienced this: that it’s much easier to be godly on a good night’s sleep.

Jason Daye
Yeah, there’s truth to that, isn’t there?

Brady White
There is. Yeah, and if you look at anxiety and depression and how closely they’re related to sleep, it’s huge. Sleep matters. Getting nutrients in our body matters, having some sort of physical activity matters, and we can love God in those ways. In fact, some of the ways that I feel most deeply connected to God are when I’m doing something physical, when I’m going on a walk. When I’m going on a walk and I feel a breeze on my face, especially in the summer in Florida. Man, it’s this gift from God, and I just know that God loves me because there’s a breeze on my face, cooling me down a couple of degrees, and I just feel deeply connected. I feel like I can talk to him so much better as my body is moving. Same thing with our emotions. Our emotions are great indicators of what’s going on inside, and when we ignore them, we limit so much of who we are and so much of the way that Jesus created us to connect to him. So I would say, first of all and look at it holistically. Yes, we can and should study our Bible. I love to study the Bible. I love doing inductive Bible studies, just like my mom taught me. I love it. But I also love to memorize Scripture like my dad taught me. I love to try and love God with my whole self, and not because I’m so great, but because I need it. If I don’t, I just find that I miss out. In fact, that’s one of the things that’s been so powerful for me on this journey is I haven’t begun to discover the unique ways that God has created me and wired me to connect with him in this season in my life. When I’m not in those practices and habits, when I don’t have healthy rhythms for those practices, I just start to miss out. Then there are some classic ones like fasting, prayer, silence, and solitude. There are so many different ways that God has created us to build our trellis, and it’ll look different from you than it will for me. If you’re a single mom or a single dad and you’ve got no time, God’s not frustrated with you. He’s not rolling his eyes and like, looking at his watch, thinking, Man, when are they going to find some time? It’s like, No, I love what Brother Lawrence said. He’s a monk from a few 100 years ago, and he said, I find it easier for me to connect with God as I’m doing the dishes than in the scheduled times of prayer. Some people find it easier in the scheduled times of prayer. That’s fantastic, but some people, just in their daily lives, and as Paul said, pray without ceasing. You can love God as you’re feeding your kid. You can love God as you’re doing yard work. You can love God as you’re driving to work. You can love God as you’re bagging groceries. You can love God as always with your heart, soul, mind, strength, and neighbor, and finding what that looks like for you in this season of life, that’s the journey. And it’s a fun journey. You’re not going to get there. You’re not going to get to the destination until you die. I love how the writer of Hebrews says, Jesus is the author and the perfecter of our faith. So all of us are in between here somewhere. We’re not perfected in our faith, and it’s already begun. So we’re just all somewhere in here, and that’s good. That’s a beautiful space to be. It’s an adventure. It’s a journey. It’s an exciting thing to do and to discover and rediscover. What does it look like to develop a deeply personal relationship with the God who created me, who wired me, who knows me, and who pre-delights in me? From that will spring all of the things that God calls me into.

Jason Daye
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Jason Daye
Yeah, I absolutely love that, Brady. I love that image and just thinking through how those pieces come together. As you were talking there, I was thinking about as pastors and ministry leaders, you talked about and used some words, rediscovery. You know, this freshness, and I was thinking of in ministry, seasons of ministry, where you’re working hard, you’re doing your best, you’re trying to pull things together, but sometimes it can feel dry. You need those times of refreshment, those times of rediscovery. I love that term that you use. Talk to us a little bit, Brady, about how this journey, how these components, these pieces, come together in such a way that it can help us move beyond just going through some of the motions that we do in ministry. Like, we do a lot of God stuff in ministry, and sometimes we can mistakenly confuse that for, I’m tight with God because we’re doing a lot of God stuff. So, talk to us a little bit about how we keep things fresh. How do we rediscover those things as pastors and ministry leaders?

Brady White
Man, what a great question. I think what I can do often is the things that I do, whether it’s a practice of engaging in a relationship with God, like reading the Bible or doing ministry, serving, or having conversation with someone. I found that I know how to do those things. Sometimes that’s the most dangerous thing for my heart with that is I just do it because I know how to do it, because I can do it, because in my strength, and my gifting, and my experience, I can make it happen. And I often do that. So, for me, I have to prepare myself to do basically everything. I feel like Solomon when he prayed the prayer, God, I’m like a child. I don’t know how to come and go, so just give me wisdom, help me. I feel like that’s me. I’m like, God, how in the world am I having done ministry for many, many years, and I’m still like a child? So one of the things that’s been helpful for me, and I write about this in the book, is before I will read the Bible. So right now, I’m trying to read the Bible in a year. I don’t think I’ve ever done it in a year. I’ve done it in different time frames. I’ve never done a year. So in the Bible, I have five pages a day, and in the Old Testament, there are a number of times where you have five pages of genealogies. So what I can do is I can think, Oh, the thing I’m supposed to be doing right now is accomplishing the task of five pages, and then I can get that done. But what’s been helpful for me, and what I talk about in the book, is to prepare myself with these four simple steps. To breathe, center, invite, and ask. Breathe. It’s the first picture that God gives us of intimacy with Him. He breathes his breath into the nostrils of the very first human and gives life. Jesus also does something similar. After he’s risen from the grave, he’s with the disciples. He breathes on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. The word Yahweh, or God’s name, is the sound of breathing in and out. Breath is huge. If you read through the Bible and think through the lens of breath and breathing, it’s incredible. As probably many of the people listening know, the word for spirit in the Old Testament is Ruach, which means breath or wind. You have these ideas that are so deeply intertwined. It’s incredibly beautiful. So first, I just breathe, and that does a couple of things. One, it just begins to slow me down. It also puts oxygen in my lungs, which I need as a human being. Then, if I think about breath in terms of God breathing his breath into me, I begin to cultivate that picture, that imagery, that imagination of connection with God. As I’m doing that, I’m centering my attention on him, the author of Hebrews says, fixing our eyes on Jesus, fixing our attention on God. So we breathe, fixing our attention on God, that’s centering our attention on him, and then invite. Jesus said to a group of Christians, by the way, church goers, Behold, I stand at the door and knock. So he’s knocking on the door of people who already know him and wanting to come in further. I know that God doesn’t need an invitation, but I just invite. I say, okay, Jesus, come on in. I invite you to be Lord over this moment. I invite you to be Lord over my life, over my emotions, over this time. Then I ask. Jesus said, The Holy Spirit, it’s his job to lead us to truth, to convict us of sin, to comfort us, and to transform us. So I just ask. Spirit of God, would you speak? Speak, Lord, Your servant is listening. So through those four simple things, whether it takes me one minute or 10 minutes, and it depends on where I’m at, how distracted I’ve been, and how much I really need to connect and engage, I prepare myself to do the things, the practices, the habits of engaging with God, or the practices and habits of serving other people. When I do that, I’m so much better prepared to bring a transforming presence of Jesus to this other person. Someone who is looking more and more and more like Jesus, because I think that’s the most important thing, is that I bring a picture of Jesus to you, because that’s what you need. You need Jesus. You don’t need Brady. But you do need the unique way that God has created Brady to shine Jesus. So it’s not this just homogeneous, everybody looks the same thing. As we approach Jesus, we’ll look more and more and more like ourselves. We’ll act more and more like our true selves, the way that God intended, and is going to make it happen one day for us to function. So for me, it’s all about preparing when I park in the church parking lot, when I park at the Starbucks parking lot, when I get in my car, preparing to go to bed, or preparing to wake up. I feel this all the time. It feels, I think, the terrible word for it, but I don’t do it often, but when I do, it’s really transformative. It’s incredibly helpful. I’ve connected with Jesus in genealogies.

Jason Daye
That’s awesome, brother. That is so good and so helpful for us to think, not just like you said, doing it because we know how to do it. Doing it because this is what our job description and ministry is, or whatever it might be. But how do we get to that transformative place, and what does it take to get there and keep it fresh, which I love, Brady. It’s so good. Brother, this book, The Well Worn Narrow Path. I want to tell people, this isn’t just, it’s kind of strange to say, maybe. This isn’t just a book, but it’s literally kind of, it’s like a journey that’s within the covers. What I love in there is that there are times where you say, when you have exercises and things for people to write things out. I love when you say, write in pencil, because this is a journey, and there are elements of this that will change and adapt in different seasons of your life. So this is a journey. This is a tool to help us on this well worn, narrow path, on this journey with Jesus. So, thank you so much for that. Brother, as we’re winding down, you have the ears and eyes of brothers and sisters serving in ministry, the front lines of ministry. What words of encouragement would you like to leave with them?

Brady White
I want each and every person listening to this to know how much God loves you. He delights in you. He’s chosen you. He smiles upon you. He sings over you with beautiful melodies. I want every one of us, myself included, to be willing to every day, just open ourselves up to God loving us, because if we don’t do anything else, that will set the trajectory right for our engagement with him and our engagement with other people. Jesus said it. Love God, love people, but it starts with God loving us first. So just let God love you. I like to do all these dumb challenges that, I don’t know, keep me going. So there was this time, not too long ago, I was trying to take a cold shower every day, and I was getting ready to get in the shower, and I just did not want to do it. It just felt like God was just saying, and said to me, like, just take a warm shower today. I was like, but I can’t do this. I’m doing the thing, the challenge. It really felt like he was speaking over me, Brady, just let me love you. You don’t have to work your way to me. Just let me love you. I’m sitting there getting ready to get it in the shower, we have one at our church, and I had just exercised, and came to the church, then I’m just weeping. I’m just weeping in the church shower, just because God is loving me with warm water. It sounds silly, but for all of us here, I just hope that we would allow God to love us because he wants to. He wants us to experience his love so deeply and dearly.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I appreciate that. Good word, Brady. If people want to learn more about The Well Worn Narrow Path, because I know you have more. You have the book, but then you also have retreats and different things going on around it, and other resources. What’s the best way for them to dial in on all that?

Brady White
Well, the best way is just read Jesus and he’ll teach you about the well worn narrow path. But the second best way you can go to TWWNP.com, you could type out TheWellWornNarrowPath.com, they’ll both get you there. But just the first letter of each word. You can learn more about the book. You can learn more about the journey. There are some tools and resources there. I’m trying to figure out how to journey back into social media. It’s weird, but there’s a link on there. Then we have retreats that we do, and would love you to be a part of any of those.

Jason Daye
Awesome, brother. Thank you so much for that. For those of you watching and listening in the toolkit that complements this conversation that Brady and I are having, we will have links to The Well Worn Narrow Path, the book, to the website with additional resources, the retreats, and all that fun stuff. So you can find that toolkit for this episode and every episode at PastorServe.org/network, so be sure to check that out and get all the good details and get connected. Brother, it has been a pleasure to hang out with you today, to hear your heart, to hear a bit of your journey, and how your journey is inviting others onto this deeper journey. So, Brady, thank you for making time to hang out with us.

Brady White
My pleasure, and y’all tune in when we get to talk about Jason and his life. He’s got an incredible story.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’ll be another episode down the road, right?

Brady White
Absolutely

Jason Daye
Alright, thanks, Brady. God bless you.

Jason Daye
Here at Pastor Serve, we hope you’re truly finding value through these episodes of FrontStage BackStage. If so, please consider leaving a review for us on your favorite podcast platform. These reviews help other ministry leaders and pastors just like you find the show, so they can benefit as well. Also, consider sharing this episode with a colleague or other ministry friend, and don’t forget our free toolkit, which is available at PastorServe.org/network. This is Jason Daye, encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well.