Once we have begun to get our deepest wounds in our hearts healed, we can then enter into training. But not until then. If an athlete undergoes training before he gets treatment for an injury, the injury only gets worse.
The first mission must be to go back and find the origins of our injuries and what is plaguing our hearts, stealing our glory, and diminishing our roles.
We live in a very Large Story, and neither you nor I are its author. Often, though, we seek to write our chapter on our own, because the story involves something we would rather avoid—something that, though glorious, is also unpleasant, frightening, and painful: battle.
My work with men these past twenty years has convinced me that men are either entering a battle, they are in a battle, or they are emerging from one. If not for their own lives, then men are battling for the lives of those they deeply desire to protect and provide for. There are many moments when the actual Author of the Larger Story, God, invites a man to be a man, called up and into important moments of conflict. If the New Testament is true, there is never a time you and I are not at war. There will always be a need for Warriors.
An excerpt from The Heart of a Warrior.
