Dr. Alison Cook is a psychologist, host of The Best of You podcast, and the author of The Secure Soul — and the first line she wrote for that book was: a part of me doesn't like God very much. She assumed her editor would cut it. Her editor said it was staying.

That moment — a prayer walk in London, an eight-year-old part of her that didn't want to be there — opens a conversation with Michael about what it actually looks like to pay attention to the inner life. Alison and Michael talk about bids for connection: the tiny, persistent movements within us that signal something needs to be seen. They discuss how trust breaks — not just through the big wounds, but through the ordinary absence of presence, the childhood of empty sunlit rooms. They get into the shadow self, the young one, and what the difference between bruised and broken might mean for people who don't see themselves in the language of shattered things. And they talk about what it looks like to train the soul — not through willpower or discipline, but through two movements: recognize and return.

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Seven spots remain for the October men's weekend — and Michael wanted the men (and women!) who still needed to hear about it to hear it from two men who've been there.

Matt found out about the Restoring the Soul podcast from a therapist in 2018, listened for a few months, heard an ad for the men's weekend, and signed up. He showed up to the airport terrified, texted his therapist from the gate, flew to Denver, and left four days later with something he'd never had before: the sense that he was seen without anyone trying to fix him. That experience eventually redirected his career. He's now a licensed therapist who staffs the weekend himself.

Brian arrived at 3:59 for a 4:00 start. He came because he was exhausted, running from everything, and carrying more shame than he knew. He was told it would be the safest place he'd ever been. He didn't believe it — until it was.

This episode is a conversation between Michael, Matt, and Brian about what 66 hours in Monument, Colorado actually looks like, and what it's still doing in their lives years later. The weekend runs October 1–4. Seven spots remain. restoringthesoulweekend.com

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Dr. Jim Wilder has been thinking about the relationship between brain science and spiritual formation since before most people knew the question existed. He trained under one of the inventors of the EEG machine, spent years working alongside Dallas Willard, and has spent decades building what he calls the Life Model — a unified account of what it looks like to grow up into the likeness of Christ, neurologically and spiritually. This conversation is an hour inside that work.

Michael and Jim talk about why the right brain runs faster than the conscious mind — and what that means for every Christian who has tried to think their way into a changed life. They talk about why joy isn't a rare gift but the baseline the brain was designed to run on, and what happens when it isn't. They discuss identity, shame, and what it means for the brain to perceive itself only through how other people see us. And Jim tells the story of a professor who looked at a kid who couldn't spell and said, "You might want to consider being a writer." Eighteen books later, that moment still explains everything.

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Andy Crouch's The Tech-Wise Family isn't about keeping pornography out of your home. It's about building the kind of home where you know what you actually want — and where technology doesn't quietly replace it. In part two of this conversation, Michael and Andy get into the ten commitments at the heart of the book, and they're not what you'd expect.

They talk about why the goal is wisdom and courage rather than limits, and how untethered access to technology quietly reinforces the fear of being known. They discuss what Sabbath actually looks like — not collapsing on the couch but feasting, playing, worshipping, and resting — and why Andy thinks it's the most broken commandment. They get into what kids say they actually want help with when it comes to devices, which turns out not to be pornography but sleep. And the episode ends somewhere no one expects: at the bedside of the dying, and what it means to be a family that knows how to show up, put the phone down, and stay.

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Andy Crouch didn't set out to write a parenting book. But when he'd mention offhand that his family had no screens in the house until his kids turned ten, young parents would rush to him afterward with what he described as hungry desperation in their eyes. The Tech-Wise Family came out of that hunger — and out of original research with Barna that helped quantify what most people were already sensing: something has shifted, and it isn't just about the kids.

In part one of this two-part conversation, Michael and Andy discuss why the real problem isn't screen-time limits but the entire posture of a life shaped around "easy everywhere." Andy makes a surprising case that the quest for effortless technology is, at its root, the same quest as alchemy, and that something spiritually dangerous coils around devices that promise to make us like God. They also talk about boredom: what it actually is, why creativity lives on the other side of it, and what we lose when we never have to sit still long enough to find out.

Part two continues next week.

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Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold — not to hide the damage, but to make the fractures the most beautiful part. Mako Fujimura, one of the world's leading contemporary artists, and his wife Haejin, an attorney and founder of Embers International, have built their lives and work around that image. This conversation is about what it actually looks like to believe it.

Mako talks about his own experience of 9/11 as a Ground Zero resident, and why he sees making — painting, writing, building an organization — as an act of invoking new creation in the middle of darkness. Haejin talks about the women and children her team serves in Mumbai's red light district, and why Kintsugi is the only metaphor honest enough for what restoration means there. They also talk about what the pandemic revealed about who a society actually depends on, why Jesus chose to appear after the resurrection as a wounded human, and what it means that the Kintsugi master doesn't begin mending until he can see beauty in the fragments.

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This is the second half of Michael's conversation with Dr. Dan Allender, and it's the more personal of the two. Dan opens by talking about his mother, her death earlier that year, the borderline unpredictability, the way she triangulated him into a surrogate role he never asked for and couldn't escape. He shares it not as a confession but as a map: here is where the wound began, here is how long it took to see it clearly, here is what it cost and what it gave.

From there, they talk about what the healing process actually looks like — not as a program, but as a decades-long practice of reading your own life with new eyes. Dan's closing answer is one of the most quietly powerful moments in ten years of this show: write your story, read it to someone, and then face the unsaid. The fear, he says, isn't really that we'll discover how broken we are. It's that we'll discover how beautiful we are.

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Dan Allender has spent thirty years doing work most people would rather not look at — and in this first of two conversations, he and Michael go there together. Dan is a psychologist, professor at The Seattle School, and the author of The Wounded Heart, among many others. Michael first encountered his work in 1989, at one of Dan's conferences, in a season when his own double life had just come undone. That history is present in every minute of this conversation.

They talk about why sexual brokenness isn't a category that belongs only to people who've experienced abuse — it belongs to all of us. They explore what lust actually means: not just desire, but desire as relief and as revenge. They discuss the ways women bear the image of God differently than men, and what that has to do with misogyny and the #metoo movement. And Dan talks about shame not as the wound, but as the thing that — when we stop running from it — leads us back toward God.

Part two continues the conversation.

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As part of our Soul Care Summer, we're revisiting a conversation that's stayed with many listeners. Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up the idea that God can only look at us through gritted teeth, or worse, has to look away. Brad Jersak joins Michael to gently dismantle that picture, showing that the ache of feeling far from God was never God's doing.

The conversation moves through a recovering addict's encounter with pure light, Cornelius in the book of Acts, and a fresh reading of Psalm 22, all pointing toward the same conviction, that the cross reveals a Father who stays present even in humanity's deepest cry of abandonment. Brad's higher Christology, it turns out, only widens the reach of Abba's love.

Brad Jersak is an author and teacher based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and serves as a reader and monastery preacher at All Saints of North America Orthodox Monastery. He previously joined Restoring the Soul in 2017 to discuss A More Christlike God, and returned to discuss In: Incarnation and Inclusion, Abba and Lamb.

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Michael continues his conversation with Dr. Curt Thompson, picking up where last week left off. There's a tender ache running underneath the neuroscience here — the ten-year-old boy on a summer evening, looking for permission to just be a kid, and the mother who couldn't see it. Most of us carry some version of that missed look, and Curt names how the body remembers what the mind can't always explain.

From there, the conversation moves into the architecture behind that ache: the domains of consciousness and body, the difference between sensing and making sense, and why the left and right hemispheres were never meant to compete. Curt weaves in Scripture, his clinical work, and his own story to show how attention, attunement, and embodied presence shape not just our relationships but our capacity to receive love itself.

Dr. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist, author of Anatomy of the Soul and The Soul of Shame, and a leading voice on the intersection of neuroscience and spiritual formation. This conversation is drawn from his 12-part video series, offered in conjunction with his book, The Soul of Desire, published by InterVarsity Press.

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