Become Good Soil

“It is not about the greatness of the giant. It is about the greatness of God.” — King David

“Can one stone change the course of history?”

It is the question we reflect on when considering the life of David.

In his youth, he was an outcast—rejected by his father and older brothers, exiled to wild places to perform the demeaning task of tending sheep rather than the noble work of training as a warrior. Yet it was there, in the lonely hills—not with sword or shield, but with slingshot and harp—that God trained the warrior heart of David.

Through direct confrontations with both lion and bear, his courage and identity as a warrior for God’s people were forged, not in royal courts, but in the fields, watching over a flock totally dependent upon his protection and care. There was no audience to cheer him on, only the solitude of his own conscience and the friendship with the Creator of Creation. David’s heart was shaped—not for conquest or acclaim, but purely out of love for what had been entrusted to his care.

The wild beasts he faced were not only threats but also gifts from God—tools in David’s apprenticeship as a warrior king in training for God’s Kingdom. So when he would later rise to lead Israel, it was not as a tyrant adorned with crowns, but as a servant after God’s own heart.

How do we become the kind of kings who spend ourselves on a worthy cause, willing to die a thousand deaths for those entrusted to our care?

How do we become, as Chesterton put it, the warrior who fights “not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him”?

How do we engage in the slow and steady process that trains us, like David, to become one of skillful hands and integrity of heart? 

What does it look like for the warrior heart to be fully deployed in the exact context where our souls are invited to thrive—even in these modern and precarious times?

How do we become men who move toward healthy risk rather than avoid it?

How do we grow in courage and in our capacity to offer strength in ways that bring goodness and not harm?

What place does a warrior ethic have in the Kingdom of God?

What is the path and process for maturing the warrior heart within?

Join me along with another round of conversation with Grant and Nathan, as we take a deeper dive into the way of the Warrior—as apprentices of the truest warrior who ever lived…

It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan and Cherie

“We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are.” — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

In his essay The New Name, George MacDonald reflects on the mystery of each man’s unrepeatable uniqueness before God:

“As the fir-tree lifts up itself with a far different need from the need of the palm-tree, so does each man stand before God, and lift up a different humanity to the common Father. And for each God has a different response. With every man he has a secret—the secret of the new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter.

From this it follows that there is a chamber also (O God, humble and accept my speech) a chamber in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man—out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made—to reveal the secret things of the Father.”

Who are you? What is your true name?

What dimension of the Father do you reveal in a way no one else can—or ever will?

How is this mysterious, life-saving, and life-sustaining revelation being made known to you?

How is it meant not only to grow in depth and breadth over the decades, but also to become a kind of revelatory light—guiding you ever deeper into a life of faith, hope, and love?

It takes profound courage to become who we truly are.

Join me and brave allies Chris Rice and Ryan Ruebsahm as we take a deeper cut into the mystery and manna of our true name before God.

It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan and Cherie Snyder

“Your real, new self will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.”

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

How have fear and shame shaped the person you’ve become?

What patterns have you developed to avoid exposing the parts of yourself that feel afraid, uncertain, ashamed, or weak?

How do you reach for aggression or withdrawal as a way to protect yourself from the risk of being hurt or being known?

And beneath all the posing and self-protection, what do we truly long for? Who are you meant to be?

Join me and brave allies Nathan Jameson and Grant Leitheiser, as we explore what it means to become the kind of man or woman who has nothing to hide, nothing to fear, and nothing to prove.

What might a man look like—and what could his impact become, day by day and decade by decade—if he were strong and at peace in and through the God who created and sustains him?

In this episode, we take a deeper dive into a central idea of initiation: Becoming True.

It has all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan and Cherie

“(For God) is our father all the time, for he is true; but until we respond with the truth of children, he cannot let all the father out to us; there is no place for the dove of his tenderness to alight. He is our father, but we are not his children. Because we are his children, we must become his sons and daughters. Nothing will satisfy him, or do for us, but that we be one with our father! What else could serve? How else should life ever be good? Because we are the sons of God, we must become the sons of God.” — George MacDonald

George MacDonald’s reflections on receiving God as Father offer profound guidance for the encounters and process of becoming a daughter or son of God. While Becoming a King offers a trailhead largely on receiving the masculine love of God, have you considered the role of feminine love in your story and your walk with God?

What if your relationship (or lack thereof) with the feminine love of God is shaping every moment of your life?

Consider these words from Isaiah 55: 

Come, all you who are thirsty,

    come to the waters;

and you who have no money,

    come, buy and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk

    without money and without cost.

Why spend money on what is not bread,

    and your labor on what does not satisfy?

Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,

    and you will delight in the richest of fare.

Give ear and come to me;

    listen, that you may live. 

What if God’s love holds both the strength, protection, and companionship of masculine love and the overflowing, satisfying, and soothing nurture of feminine love?

If God is indeed the headwaters of all that is both masculine and feminine, what feminine nourishment might be available for the human soul, nourishment we’ve been searching for all our lives?

Come, drink, and feast. There is more.

It has all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan and Cherie

“How proud we often are of the victories in the war with nature, proud of the multitude of instruments we have succeeded in inventing, of the abundance of commodities we have been able to produce. Yet our victories have come to resemble defeats. In spite of our triumphs, we have fallen victims to the work of our hands; it is as if the forces we had conquered have conquered us.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

What does a soul do with power entrusted to him by the living God?

What is its lasting legacy in the souls and spaces he inhabits?

How is a man or woman remembered long after they’ve passed from this world?

What is the formation—or lack thereof—that shapes these outcomes?

These questions and others lie at the heart of the message of Becoming a King. How do we become people whose relationship with power leads to the flourishing of others rather than their suffering? How do we respond to our deep desire to be powerful, confront what has gone wrong, and become the kind of Image-Bearers whose strength helps heal and restore the world?

Join me for Episode One of A Deeper Cut Series. As we mark the fifth anniversary of the release of Becoming a King, it feels both fitting and honoring to invite each member of our community, women and men alike, into more. Through interviews with like-hearted allies, teaching, conversations, and stories of how God has worked through this message, this ten-part series serves as a collection of trailheads—each centered on a deeper immersion through core ideas from Becoming a King.

There is more and more of God and His Kingdom available. Much of Him, a breath away. Let’s pursue it together.

It has all been prologue. The best is yet to come.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan and Cherie Snyder

“What is hard about marriage is what is hard also about facing the Christian God: It is the strain of living continually in the light of a conscience other than our own, being under the intimate scrutiny of another pair of eyes.”

— Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage

What is the fruit of a decade given over to apprenticeship, to the slow work of excavation, and to the painful but promising transformation within the Kingdom of God? More precisely, what is the fruit born from the tender soil of our closest relationships?

Over twenty-five years spent investing in the shaping of leaders, I have found one of the deepest and most gladdening sources of confirmation to be the voices of the wives of Become Good Soil men. It is one thing, after all, for a man to speak of his own progress—but it is quite another, and perhaps of far greater weight, when a spouse dares to offer her own candid reflections on what it is to share life with one who has set his whole heart upon the precarious path of becoming.

As we prepare to launch into an extended BGS Podcast series—a deeper dive into the central truths of Becoming a King—it seems only fitting, indeed right and good, and more than a little risky, to let this voyage begin with the voices of women. These are women who generously offer their honest and loving observations from a deep well of intimate relationships.

This episode features the voices of four remarkable women whose husbands have been engaged with the message of Become Good Soil for a decade or more. Join me as they share about the joyous, transformative effects they’ve witnessed in every dimension of their husbands’ lives, their marriages, and their families.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan and Cherie

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Friends,

On our unique paths of initiation as women and men, we often encounter the severe mercy—the painful hope—of having our illusion of control shattered by the rebellious parts of our own souls.

The infant, longing for nourishment. The toddler, yearning for eye contact and the smile of an attentive parent. The boyish hope and daring of a third-grade cowboy. The angry teenager, thirsting for a strength both within and beyond himself. The older man, carrying an unsung song in his heart.

When we finally summon the courage to face the collective of young men within us, what do we do?

To whom do we turn?

I suggest that the invitation and intention of Jesus Christ is to welcome, see, love, know, sustain, restore, and champion all the uninitiated men within us—bringing them into an effectively organized community, fully held together and integrated by Him.

With permission, this episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at an authentic, real-time mentoring call with a courageous apprentice. He is noticing the parts within and creating a safe space for each one to embark on the journey ever closer to Home.

Join me as his story unfolds, opening access to our own stories in ways beyond what we can yet imagine.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan & Cherie

“Questions are the tools of transformation. They disturb our certainty and awaken our longing.”

— James K. A. Smith

The power of questions is central to the path of an apprentice—especially the questions we don’t realize we are asking and the unconscious answers that shape our every moment. What questions have you recovered along the way of your initiation? And how are you allowing these questions to shape your apprenticeship as kings and queens in God’s Kingdom?

In this episode, we seek to recover core questions of the human experience and explore how reflecting on questions helps interrupt disintegrating patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving—and connects us in fresh ways to Jesus and His Kingdom.

Join us as we continue to risk together in this deeper exploration of the big ideas explored in Becoming a King. To access the free and recently released second edition of the companion retreat, go to Becomingakingretreat.com.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan and Cherie

For the eyes of the Lord search throughout the earth 

to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him. 

-2 Chronicles 16:9

Friends, 

As our fellow apprentice Matthew McConaughey once observed—albeit in delightful colorful terms:

"We all step in shit from time to time. We hit roadblocks, we get sick, we don’t get what we want. We cross thousands of ‘could have done better’s and ‘wish that wouldn’t have happened’s in life. Stepping in shit is inevitable, so let’s either see it as good luck or figure out how to do it less often. … I’m not perfect; no, I step in shit all the time and recognize it when I do. I’ve just learned how to scrape it off my boots and carry on."

One could scarcely find truer words to describe my dear and like-hearted brother, Dave Robison.

Dave’s story is unvarnished and arresting - unorthodox, raw, at times heartbreaking, and yet - ever more radiant with the passing years. It is unique in its details and yet unmistakably universal, bearing the signs and waymarks of the initiation into wholehearted maturity every man and every woman must take. His tale is, in truth, echoes an immersion in God’s Larger Story.

It is through this ancient, sweeping narrative in which his story and our own must recover its meaning. As the psalmist reminds us:

“God is the country in which we live. He is our beginning and our end. He is where we are from, and where we are going. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit alone are the inheritance of our lives. God is the prize, our supreme delight, our everlasting portion. Our destiny, and its hour, rest secure in His strong hands.” - Psalm 16:5, BGST

So come—walk a little farther down this ancient path. Allow Dave’s story of redemption to be another narrow gate to recover more of your heart. Join us in the laughter and the ache, as we enter another Spirit-breathed chapter of masculine initiation.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan

Friends,

Jean Giono, author of The Man Who Planted Trees, penned these breathtaking and invitational lines - words that draw us back to the path of Christ’s Kingdom Simplicity and Generous Love:

“Creation seemed to come about in a sort of chain reaction. But the man who planted trees did not worry about it; he was determinedly pursuing his task in all its simplicity... For a human character to reveal truly exceptional qualities, one must have the good fortune to observe its performance over many years. If this performance is devoid of all egoism, if its guiding motive is unparalleled generosity, if it is absolutely certain there is no thought of recompense, and that, in addition, it has left its visible mark upon the earth, then there can be no mistake… This was the most impressive visible mark of his work: as we went back toward the village, I saw water flowing in brooks that had been dry since the memory of man. These dry streams had once, long ago, run with water…”

Friends, take a moment to ask yourself:

What would it be like to receive this invitation?

To become this kind of person?

To return to simplicity?

To see dry stream beds run with water once more?

To give most of our attention and affection to God and to a few things and a few others, in a way that is deeply affecting and outrageously good?

To receive the freedom from our Father to engage only what is essential?

It would change the world.

Join me for a hidden conversation originally shared among a handful of Become Good Soil Intensive alumni. For other thirsty, like-hearted women and men among us, we’d love to welcome you to explore simplicity, essentialism, and generous love—together.

For the Kingdom,

Morgan & Cherie