Notes on Wisdom W/John Walt

This note has impacted me the most. I have been sharing this note with friends over the last few weeks, and it is impacting many of us in powerful ways. I am excited to share it with you. If this note resonates with you, and you want to go deeper in your spiritual journey, then I would love for us to talk. Please reach out to me through my website, and we will find a time to connect. 

What we regularly think of as a spiritual journey or a spiritual life is actually just a significant change in belief, ethics, and morality. This creates a significant problem because it means we have failed to understand the message of the Gospel. And instead have fallen into the timeless trap of focusing on behavior modification and continuous improvement. So the very thinking and behavior that is supposed to bring us closer to God ends up keeping us from really knowing Him. 

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In this episode, John sits down with Chris Grainger, founder and host of The Lion Within Us ministry, to discuss what it means to lead as a follower of Jesus in today's world. Chris opens up about his personal journey, navigating single fatherhood, suffering profound personal losses, and ultimately following God's call to equip men to step into leadership.

Drawing from his background in stock car racing, Chris compares spiritual growth to the grueling work behind the scenes in the pit shop, emphasizing that victory lane requires daily effort rather than passive attendance. He highlights the necessity of multi-generational mentorship, explaining how men must connect with others before offering correction and avoid letting feelings of spiritual disqualification keep them on the sidelines.

The conversation also dives into practical spiritual stewardship, touching on physical fitness, auditing digital inputs, and protecting family time. Chris encourages listeners to prioritize the big rocks of faith, marriage, and parenting over minor distractions, while holding fast to God and rejecting the enemy's lies of shame and condemnation.

Links:
thelionwithin.us
www.amazon.com/dp/B0FLWYQJMB

This summer, a friend told me that I needed to meet a guy named Dan Colacurcio. They felt like God wanted us to connect. So Dan and I sat down for coffee, and he shared his story with me. The whole time, I was captivated by his journey and all God has done in his life. So I asked him to sit down and record an interview with me. 

Dan got into the adult nightclub business when he was 18 years old and then spent the next 11 years running nightclubs and other adult businesses in cities around the country and in Canada. He was a young man who had everything he thought he wanted. Then he met God and the real adventure began. After telling his story, Dan also shares some of the wisdom he's learned along the journey. 

I hope you enjoy and are touched by his story. 

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Play, performance, identity, and finding freedom in God.

I am really excited to share with you a special conversation Heather and I got to have with our friend Jake Locker. In this interview, Jake shares his journey from a sports-filled childhood to college football, the NFL, and eventually a deeper understanding of identity. What starts out as a story about his love of sports and football becomes a much bigger reflection on how performance can steal joy, how shame can isolate us, and how God restores what we thought was lost. In this episode, Jake shares how sports first felt like pure play, a place he could be fully himself, then shifted into pressure and expectation. What I found most impactful was how Jake talks about God freeing him from performance and helping him recover his ability to play and live from Identity. We also get to discuss marriage, parenting, repentance, and the difference between trying to prove worth and living from freedom. I hope this conversation blesses you as much as it did us. 

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As I write today, I am surrounded by the beauty of nature on every side. No houses in sight, just mountains and water. The essay I have been working on in my head the last few weeks is about expansive versus restrictive language. Today I find myself sitting in the midst of a perfect example of this topic. Pictures can’t do justice to what I am seeing all around me. I keep trying to capture it, but when I compare the pictures I am taking to the beauty around me, they aren’t even close. I could try to describe it to you with the best words I can find, but that wouldn’t work either. What I am experiencing right now can not really be fully captured in a container like words and pictures. If I were to try, then all I would be able to do is help you begin to imagine it for yourself. My words and pictures wouldn’t really contain the beauty of nature; they would simply be a starting point for your imagination.

If I saw you later and started showing you pictures and telling you about the beauty of this wild place. What I told you would be true and accurate, but it would be very incomplete. You would have to come here and experience it yourself in order to really understand what I am saying. So the words I would use would only be words that help point you in the right direction. The gap between the words I used and the reality of what you would experience if you came here yourself is immense.

Most of the language that we use and the way that we use it in modern culture is restrictive. We have a very hard time thinking and communicating in expansive ways.

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Encountering God in prison

In this interview, I sit down with Brian Smith for a vulnerable conversation about a tragedy, prison, forgiveness, and transformation. Several months ago, I had the privilege of meeting Bryan through a mutual friend. Each time we've been able to talk, I've been deeply impacted by his story and the journey he has been on. In this episode, our discussion centers on how God met Brian in his darkest moment and how that experience of God’s love changed everything. I trust you will be impacted by his story as much I have been. 

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Tracy Goss says in her book, The Last Word on Power, that we are meaning-making machines. We ascribe meaning to everything, and it is all driven by our past experiences. What has happened in the past helps us interpret the present and try to predict the future. The problem is that most of the meaning we ascribe to things isn’t real or accurate. As Larry Mills says, “Most of what we think just isn’t so.” 

I have been going through a process of letting go of the meaning that I have ascribed to things in my life. Some of that meaning has shown up as judgment, “I would never want to do that.” But most of it is just incorrect stories that have shaped my thinking and actions. Many of these stories I let die years ago, but there are still others that I have been discovering recently. I am calling these stories we tell ourselves Egoic Narratives because they are stories that we believe because they help us define our sense of self. 

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One of my mentors, Larry Mills, says, “There's never enough of anything that almost works.” 

When John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, was asked “How much is enough?” He said, "Just a little bit more.” What is it that leads a man who has everything he could ever want to want a little bit more? Clearly, more money wouldn't have enabled him to buy anything that he couldn't buy. More power wouldn't allow him to influence anything he couldn't already influence. He was already as famous as he could be. So what did Rockefeller have to gain by pursuing more? I think in order to understand the answer to that question, we have to recognize that what he was chasing wasn't really, money, fame or power. I think what he was chasing was himself and a deep unconscious desire for wholeness. If he had felt at peace, would he have still wanted more? If he had felt like he had enough and was enough, would he have lived differently? 

It's easy to use someone like Rockefeller as an example, but what he represents in an extreme way is the same thing we all deal with in life. We believe that more of something is going to satisfy the lack that we feel in our hearts and minds. 

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Sometimes we all feel disconnected from God. It’s easy to try and ignore that feeling and just press on to the next thing that demands our attention. Often, days can turn into weeks, months, or even years, and we start to realize we no longer feel the connection to God we long for. This prayer is about being honest with ourselves and God as we ask Him to find us, guide us, and walk with us.

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It is impossible to overestimate the role that ego has played in shaping human history and the world. Think of all the wars and conflicts, from tribal feuds to world wars, so many of them have been sparked and fueled by human ego. Think of the economic challenges in nations around the world throughout history that have been caused and prolonged by ego. Consider all the businesses that have used and abused people in order to serve the ego of their leaders. 

I think the simplest way to think of ego is that it is, “our broken sense of self.” We want to feel like we are extra special, unique, and better than other people. So we compare ourselves, craft narratives about our identity, and live into them. All of humanity’s issues seem to be perpetrated by this simple problem. We don’t know who we are, so out of our insecurity, we try to convince ourselves and others that we are something we aren’t. If my story is that I am better than other people at something, then I will always feel that I have to prove myself. It is in this proving, this jostling for position, that the world's biggest problems have grown. All of it is the simple result of each person protecting themselves and their egoic narratives at the cost of others. 

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