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Summary & Intro

Mark Waters – Christ-follower, husband, dad (son, daughter), great story of redemption and reconciliation, silly sense of humor, Coast Guard vet, professional audio/video tech, guitar player, lover of all things manly (he has an incredible beard), knife-sharpener extraordinaire, wilderness survivor, hammock enthusiast.

Recap & Synopsis

Mark and I have been good friends for almost a decade. Through that time, he and I have experienced tough seasons in our marriage, parenting, finances, jobs, sin struggles and in our own personal identity discovery. I know you’ll enjoy our conversation as you sit in like a fly-on-the-wall and hear Mark’s unique story of faith and fight. This conversation was very enlightening and real. We discuss personal struggles, manhood, culture, fathering and how it all relates to finding your identity in Jesus and not in what you do, have or what others think. Enjoy and be encouraged and challenged!

*The following are my favorite top quotes from Mark and I. Use them freely and widely, but please offer credit where credit is due. Thanks.

As a survival mechanism, I would make an identity for myself that would revolve around the 3 things that I feel are what the key reasons people fall into false identities:

* what you have (possessions)

* what you can do/what you have done (performance both present and past)

* what others think of you (people’s perspectives)

What you think about who you are in life is so crucial to your daily walk.

Just like a virus: you can’t understand and attack a virus until you understand where the host came from and where it started. What made me who I was so Jesus could start chiseling away and I could understand and attach those false identities.

To really know where you’re going you have to understand the origins. (Jonathan)

Action Round (1 Take-away & 1 Action-Item)

1 TA (One take-away for YOU think about)

Constantly examine your daily life in a very intimate way. Without it, you’re never going to know where you’re going to be. Tearing apart your motives for everything you do. You don’t have to be obsessive about it. Just asking simple questions. For example: “Why do I get up early in the morning?” Why do you do the things you do?

Healthy balance: Learn to be an investigator but don’t become a conspiracy theorist. (Jonathan)

1 AI (One action-item for YOU to go do.)

Within the next 24 hours, schedule a lunch/breakfast/coffee with somebody that you can be intimately candid with. Make a plan, find somebody in your church that you can connect with that you can help each other become better men. Because you’re not going to be able to do it by yourself. None of this happens on your own. God put us in a church body for a reason.

Do what most men don’t do: talk about our feelings. Talk about porn, lust, anger issues, anything that is keeping you from being the responsible Christ-like man that you are. Fungus grows best in shade. When its exposed to light, fungus dies. Those underlying sins will fester and get worse and worse. When you expose them to the light they will die.

Connect…