Every Man’s Battle Podcast

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Every Man's Battle podcast, brought to you by New Life Ministries. In this podcast, you'll hear honest conversations and encouragement for living a life of sexual integrity. In every episode, licensed marriage and family therapist JJ West and licensed professional counselor Doug Barnes break the silence around sexual integrity struggles that millions of men face but rarely discuss openly. Each episode offers practical strategies and genuine hope to dissolve the shame and isolation that keeps men trapped in destructive cycles. Let's get to today's episode.

JJ West: Welcome back to the Every Man's Battle podcast, season three. I am JJ West and I'm with, as always, my good friend Doug Barnes. Hey, Doug.

Doug Barnes: Hey, JJ. How are you doing?

JJ West: I'm doing really good. We are getting ready to do another Every Man's Battle Intensive here in Dallas. We're set up in a different location. This is a little bit different environment than we normally do these shows in, but we have a topic that we want to tackle today that is maybe a little bit different, still within the bell curve of what we do, but it's a little bit different today.

We're going to be talking. The title of the episode is Finding What Matters. Really what it boils down to is learning how to be mentored and to mentor young men. This was birthed out of listening to another podcast, and the husband and wife were telling their story, how they met, and how they got together. It was interesting because as they were telling their story when they first met, neither one was interested in the other.

The husband was saying how the reason why he wasn't interested in her at the time is because his values, what he was going after, and what was important to him was askew. It was off-base. He said really one of the main reasons why was because he didn't have any good mentors in his life. He was a young man at the time, probably in his early twenties when they first met. At this point, they're married. I think they're in their late thirties, mid-to-late thirties. He was talking about how as a young man he just didn't have good mentorship.

It got me thinking about how there really is this lack of mentoring.

Doug Barnes: There is a big gap.

JJ West: There's a big gap. There's this tremendous need for mentoring, and yet there's also this command to mentor. There's a model and a command in Scripture. Jesus had his disciples. He mentored them. Paul mentored Silas and Timothy. In Titus, we're instructed that the older men should instruct the younger men, and the older women should instruct the younger women.

It's all through Scripture that this should be happening, and yet there's a lack of mentoring. I thought about even my own story and how early on in my Christian walk, I was really messed up. I had a lot of bad ideas. That goes back to high school. I became a Christian at sixteen, and I had some pretty jacked-up ideas. I didn't have a strong leader, a strong mentor teaching me until much later.

It got me thinking there are people in the audience, younger guys in the audience listening to the podcast, and maybe they're in that same boat.

Doug Barnes: I hope they're in the same boat. People come to Christ in all different places. I grew up in the church, so I didn't know what it was like not to go to church. It was such a part of my life that I went every time the doors were open. That was my family. Most of us don't understand the concept of walking in community.

I certainly didn't. I had great friends. We did all kinds of great stuff. We did the camps and the trips and all that, but we didn't actively sit down as young men and talk about the hard struggles we were having. We talked about the Bible stories we were learning and the concepts of walking the Christian walk, but we didn't talk about each other and how we can help each other. I thought I was supposed to get this on my own, which leads to where that leads.

JJ West: There also needs to be a guide who is a little bit further down the path who can give us some wisdom. It's good that we're fellow brothers sharing our lives together, but if that's all we're doing and all the chuckleheads are sharing each other's wisdom, there's a bit of a feedback loop, an echo chamber there. There's a time and a place for that, but not in what we're talking about here.

What we're talking about here is how do I know what to look for in a relationship? How do I know what to do in the early stages of a relationship? How do I know to walk this out in a godly fashion so that I'm not in the dark making my best decisions that got me here? It's to bounce those off of other especially godly men who have. They can be a step or two further. They don't have to be a long way away. They can be just a step or two ahead, a few years, five years, ten years, two years, it doesn't matter. It's more of a maturity level than it is an age factor.

Doug Barnes: Age does count. Don't get me wrong. Age counts, and I think maturity plays a huge role. My wife would probably say I'm still not mature, but hopefully, I'm more mature than I was. I'm more mature than I have been. Am I where I really want to be? No, I'm not. I want to finish well.

JJ West: That is a really important point when we think about because really we have two audiences today. We have the younger men that we want to share some wisdom with, but we also have the older men who we need to give a call to say it's time to step up and be a mentor. It's time to pour into the lives of these younger men so that there isn't this gap that we talked about earlier.

So many times, guys who are older, especially if they've made some pretty heroic mistakes, feel like they are disqualified or don't have anything to offer. They think they have to get their life all squeaky clean and then they can be a mentor. No. We share. Wisdom comes from the mistakes I've made. Here is the hard-earned wisdom that I have because of all of the mistakes and the learning that came along with making those mistakes and the consequences of those mistakes. That's what I share with others that is really valuable.

Before any of you are hearing this or saying those guys are old and don't know what they're talking about, I know what I'm doing. We both said the same exact thing when we were at your age. I promise you I said the same exact thing and look where I ended up. From a wisdom perspective, I did not honor the real wisdom that was there. It was there all around me, but I thought I was bulletproof. I was invincible. That's what I thought.

Had I had some of the men to step up in a formal fashion and say, "This is what it's like to live as a teenager, as a young adult, and to be young married," and to provide that wisdom at the appropriate mature level, I might not have made all the mistakes I made. I mean, I would've made some of course, but maybe it would have shielded us from some of the bigger mistakes and the bigger pain that we went through. That's really what we're hoping that we can offer to the younger guys to say you don't have to go down the same painful paths we did. We want to be able to offer that.

The other interesting aspect of this is, at least for me, so much of my adult life I keep looking around. When are the adults going to come in and take care of this? Who's in charge here? When are you guys going to get in here? Then all of a sudden it's like I look in the reflection in the mirror and there's an old man staring back at me. It's like, oh, now that's my role. I have that role now. I'm not a spring chicken anymore, but I have to step into that role. Amy and Russ are talking, and Russ, we've talked about what we're going to be when we grow up. Well, we are up. We are grown up now. It's time for us to step into that place, and that's really a lot of what we're talking about today.

Doug Barnes: Absolutely. As we're thinking about this, we kind of laid the groundwork. There's a biblical framework for mentoring younger men. We want to follow that. A lot of guys are not sharing their lives with one another. They're kind of doing it all on their own. They're doing life solo. Unfortunately, a lot of us are left with trying to find answers to these big questions like what do I look for in a spouse? What do I base a relationship on? I'm getting those answers from either some of my friends who are just as lost as I am or from social media. Is that the best blueprint for love that lasts? What is feeding my love life, my lust, my hormones, and my desires, let's say my wants and desires, versus what is God's design?

Are we really teaching that in our churches? That's not a knock on any church. I'm just saying are we really teaching that? I don't know that we're getting alongside social media and saying this is what your influencers are saying, this is what your social media is feeding you, but is that the appetite you want that's the healthiest for you? I can eat Cheetos and brownies and Diet Cokes all day long, but it's not healthy. It'll sustain me, but it's not healthy. Where do I want those paths to cross? Where do I want to go?

Everyone watching here, we have agency. All those guys that are watching this, all those wives that are watching this, everybody that sees this, they have the ability to make that decision. Do I want to live healthy or not? We get the choice. I made wrong choices when I was younger.

JJ West: So what we're hoping to do is offer a compass to help make some of those better choices. Let's start there with that agency. If you are a younger man who is saying I don't really have guys in my life, older men, wise men that can speak into my life and can mentor me, I really am doing the solo thing just trying to figure it out, reading this article, watching this TikTok video, this thing from Instagram, whatever. I'm just trying to piece it all together. So, start small. What would that look like to start small?

Doug Barnes: That's a great question. Honestly, I would start with someone that I trust or admire, whether that's in my social setting or in church or a family acquaintance, someone who I look up to who I trust their decision-making. I'm going to go to them and say, "John, Bill, do you know anyone?" Or if I know someone who I've got my eye on, "Hey, do you know Bill? Do you know what he represents to you? Do you know his walk with Christ? Do you know how he lives his life? To me, it looks one way, but you may know him better than me. What do you think?"

Get some input on maybe a redirection. They might say, "Maybe not Bob, but John over there. Maybe he would be better for you because you all live in the same ZIP code and you have the same likes." So it's starting with one person. I need to start with someone who I trust who might can guide me or steer me at least to some of those possibilities. That's what I would do.

JJ West: Sometimes that's going to be your pastor at church or the youth group leader to go to them and say, "I'm really looking for someone to mentor me. Do you have a recommendation?" But you also may know somebody that you think would actually be a good fit. Maybe there is the uncle that you respect or the neighbor or a guy in your church, and you may even just go directly to him and say, "Hey, would you like to go grab some coffee, a Coke, whatever, and just talk for a little bit because I want to learn from you?"

I guarantee the vast majority of the older men in your circles, if you came to them and asked that question, they would be willing to spend some time with you and share from their life, from their wisdom. Very rarely is there going to be a guy who goes, "No, I don't really want to do that." They want to share. There are lots of guys out there who are wanting to give back. They're wanting to take the next generation and say, "Learn from my mistakes. Don't repeat the same mistakes I did, please." I tell my sons that all the time. I'm telling you this not to give you an impression of me, but to say don't do these things because this will get you in a very bad place. It hurts. You really don't want to experience that kind of pain.

Just asking is the start. The flip side for the older guys is go and offer. Don't sit on the sideline. You don't need to wait to be asked. Go and start mentoring. You could go again to the pastor, the youth leader, or whomever at church and say, "I really want to be a mentor to younger men. Who would you recommend? What would that look like? Is there space for me to do that?" Maybe there is a young man in your life, maybe there's a nephew, maybe there's a kid in your neighborhood, maybe there's a kid in your small group that you feel like this is a guy I want to pour into. Go grab a drink with him. Go grab a coffee. Go grab some donuts and spend some time together just talking about your lives.

Doug Barnes: As I was listening to you, what popped into my mind was talk to the powers that be around your community, around your church, and maybe start a mentoring program where there's a structure of how we teach mentors to be mentors and how we mentor those who are really looking to do that and make them available. Man, that program could really take off because there is a need and there's a desire. Sometimes, the fear of what they are going to think of me, what they are going to say, that I'm weak, I need help, I can't make it on my own, holds us back.

That's not anywhere close to having the courage to step up and say, "I would really like some help in this area." Go to those leaders and say, "Why do we not have these guys in our community, in our church, in our home teams who can step up and really start to lead?" This is how the first church got started. This is how it spread. We're just recreating that over and over and over for the hunger that's really there. I think it is there, but there's a fear that holds us back. It held me back. I'll own it.

JJ West: What if we model a little bit of that, what that might look like? For instance, I think about when I was a young man in my late teens, early twenties, a brand-new Christian. What was I looking for in relationships? What was important to me, and what were some of the myths that I believed? I remember a conversation with my friend Trey. We're on the beach. He and I had just gone to do some repair work on our friendship, so we did some of that. Then we're just walking along the beach and we're talking about, as guys do, what are you looking for in terms of a relationship? It was all so superficial. My stuff was so, I mean, just appearance. I think I said I wanted her to be able to sing. I don't know why that was important to me at the time. All this foolish stuff that won't last, but that was what at the time what I thought was really important.

I'm glad God didn't leave me there, but there were also some myths that I was believing in. For instance, attraction equals compatibility. I was compatible with a lot of girls then. They weren't so much compatible with me, but I was really compatible with a lot of them.

Doug Barnes: That is so true. That happens so I as you mention that, that really rings true to me about where I was and where my heart really was. It was not following God's design. Looking at outward appearance, Scripture even talks about what happens with outward appearance. Now that we've been married as long as we've been married, we get that on both sides. So it's really what can the real attraction be?

When my boys were growing up, that was one of the things that in high school especially I really tried to talk through. "Hey, I'm interested in so-and-so." My first question was, "Do you know who she really is? Do you know her heart?" First and foremost, is she a follower of Christ? If she's not a follower of Christ, you're asking for trouble. Again, takes one to know one. This is where I'm trying to steer them away from my own mistakes, but that was me too. That was the first question I would always ask: "Does she love Jesus?" If it was no, then he and I have a different kind of conversation. There are those times when it was just, do you know anything about who she is? You know how tall she is, you know her favorite color, her favorite band, favorite music, and on and on. I said that's all great, but if you want something that's going to last, you've got to go deeper than that.

JJ West: If you don't go deeper than that, then you miss the deeper things. I think about the last girl that I dated before I met my wife. We'll call her Kelly. That's not her name, but we're just going to call her Kelly. I wish someone had pulled me aside and said, "So JJ, what is it that you're attracted to in this person? What is it that draws you into this relationship?" Because if I was honest in answering that question, it was all physical. There was maybe some compatibility. I don't know. We never really got to the place of looking at similar life goals. Did we even want to live in the same area? Did we want to do similar things? None of that was ever even discussed because it was all about physical attraction. That's so empty.

Doug Barnes: It certainly leads that way over time. In the beginning, that's a great mentoring example because if I'm asking my peers, they're going to agree with me. They're going to say, "Oh yeah, she's hot. Yeah, she's cute. She's beautiful." That's not what I needed. I needed someone to say, "Do you know anything about her? What's going to last in your relationship after all that goes away?" It's never going to go away. We'll always be in love the way we are now.

What am I really after? What's important to me? I had to shift from this idea of, oh well, if I'm attracted, then we must be compatible. I had to let go of that. And if she has that similar attraction, then we're good. We both are into each other. We must be good, and this will last forever. It doesn't. Love is exciting. It's desire. It's wanting. That kind of brings up the next myth: love always feels exciting. True love is, if I have these butterflies in my stomach and I just feel all these warm fuzzies with you, then that must be love as opposed to a deeper love that lasts through the trials, through the disappointments, through the disagreements.

JJ West: Conflict, confrontation, yes, which is not exciting. We sometimes mistake that as bad when it's an opportunity for intimacy. Again, we don't talk about that. Nobody's talking through middle school and high school about how we work through, as you were saying with Trey, how we work through restoring relationships when I view it one way and they view it a completely different way, like we're speaking two different languages. Yet we can come together and we can have that compatibility of where are we in expressing our ideas and communication. It's always an opportunity for intimacy, not sex, but intimacy, really understanding what intimacy is.

Okay, a third one, then we'll get close to wrapping this up. The third one that I think we fall into is that we think it's our job to fix the broken woman, to rescue her, the damsel in distress. I'm going to ride in on my white steed and save the day, slay the dragon.

Doug Barnes: There's some masculinity that falls into that scenario of, "I go rescue the beauty." That's every fairy tale that we read. It's good versus evil. So I am constantly looking for the beauty first and then what evil is in her life, and by golly, I'm going to conquer it no matter what. I'm going to be that knight in shining armor that is invincible. I'm already thinking that about myself. Nothing can do anything to me, but it's not real. It's part of that fantasy, which goes back to our fairy tales. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not real, but it plays into our masculinity as well. There's nothing wrong with me offering my strength in service to someone, but there is something wrong with me thinking that I can save someone else. I can rescue.

You hear that a lot, especially in our practice, of, "They were the puppy in the storm and they showed up at my door and I just invited them in and we've lived happily ever after." We know that's not true. That's not the norm. Rescuing only leads us to bitterness and resentment because over the long haul in time, that bitterness and resentment is born out of the fact that they really didn't need rescuing. They certainly didn't need rescuing by us. Sometimes that's a trouble too because sometimes it leads to bitterness and then sometimes it leads to pride. "Look what I did. Look how I saved you. Look how I fixed your life. I mean, you would be nowhere without me." That's not love. That's just manipulation, pride, control, all those attachment things that we talk about in other places.

JJ West: When I do premarital counseling, I'll tell couples all the time, if you work really, really hard, a man or a woman can make a pretty decent spouse. But no matter how hard you work, you make a lousy savior. You just cannot be the other person's savior.

All right, so before we wrap up today, I'm just curious. Can you share a little bit, and I'm going to share a little bit, of how did we meet our spouses and how did that relationship cultivate? What did it look like and maybe even some of the mistakes that we've made along the way?

Doug Barnes: My wife and I went to the same church. We were a few years apart, so I went to college, I did my bit in college, she went to her school. We were not even on each other's radars. We were in vastly different grades. When I came back from college, I wanted to get back involved in church again. It was one of those, "Okay, God, all of that didn't work. Okay, so I'm going to come back and give it Your way. I'm going to try it Your way."

I got involved and we had a similar love of music. There was a performance that we were doing as a group and we just happened to sit beside each other and we just got to talking. By some semblance of irrationality, I said, "Hey, you want to go out and just talk outside?" She said, "Yeah, sure." We went and talked and that just started more and more and more conversations about what we're talking about here. We had both led similar lives: walking away from God, walking away from our faith, walking away from our purity, from our integrity. So we slowly just began to get honest about that and share some of that life.

There was a moment where I dumped all my stuff because I said, "Look, I really want you to spend the rest of your life with me. But before I do, I need you to know some things." That's when I shared that stuff. After I did, there was this long silence and I'm going, "Oh crap, I ruined it. I did." But I wanted to give her that chance. She said, "Okay, well, then I need you to hear some things, too." After that, we both kind of said, "Hey, if that's the worst that it is, that we both know each other at that level, then I can do this." That started the courtship. About a year and a half of courtship after that. Here we are 34 years later. Almost 34 years later.

JJ West: I love how so early on in the relationship there was that commitment to vulnerability. That was not on my radar to be vulnerable. Sometimes even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. That was not where I was going. I just didn't want to ruin another person's life, another one, because I'd done that for so long. I made that vow: "God, I don't want to do that again. I want to give her an out if she so chooses and let it go with that."

My wife and I, we were both serving at the Atlanta Urban Project. It was an inner-city summer mission trip in '95. What was interesting was there was a rule on the project that you weren't allowed to date. Really good rule. We were assigned to the same team. There were five teams kind of spread out throughout downtown Atlanta and we were on the same team. We worked together every single day for the entire summer. Because there was this rule of no dating, the pressure was off. I wasn't trying to perform and get her to like me. She wasn't doing the same for me to get me to like her.

We got to spend all this time together, which was really cool, building a friendship. It was the first time I'd ever experienced that. I had friends who were girls and then I had dating relationships, and they weren't the same. So this was like I was developing this deep friendship, this deep relationship of respect with this woman, but there was no dating, so I wasn't trying to do that. She wasn't trying to do that.

At the end of the project, what was funny is two things happened. One is I had to go away for a weekend. The project was in Atlanta. I lived in Tallahassee. I drove to Tallahassee, about a five-six hour drive. I get home and there's a note: "Ann called." Ann called? Why would she call me? This is so bizarre. Well, it turned out it was a note for my roommate. It wasn't for me, but I called. I'm like, "Hey, did you call me?" She's like, "No." I was like, "Oh, okay." This was so weird, whatever. We laughed about it. But as I'm hanging up the phone, I'm like there was a part of me that was really excited that I thought she had called. "Oh, she's checking in on me. She might—" and then it was like, oh, whoops, wait, what's going on here?

We still were on the project, so we didn't do anything. We didn't talk about dating or anything until the project was over. Then it was really funny because the whole team went out roller skating. On the way back from roller skating, she rode in the truck with me. The whole way back, I'm telling this twenty-minute preamble to finally me saying when we pulled into the parking lot, "I like you." Then her response to my twenty-minute preamble was, "I like you too." But we were able to build on a friendship that started without that added pressure of putting on the mask of who you think you want them to be and them putting on the mask of who they think you want. There was an authenticity to it, which really helped.

We're just getting started, guys. There's a whole another episode. This is part one of two parts of this Finding What Matters. Ultimately, when we're talking about what am I looking for in a spouse, what am I looking for in a relationship, Scripture says a man who finds a wife finds a good thing. So we're trying to find what matters. We're trying to find something that's important, but we've got to continue our conversation in the next episode.

Let me give you a couple closing thoughts. Who in your life could you either mentor if you're an older man, who could you mentor? Or if you're a younger man, who could be a mentor for you? Just begin to contemplate that question. Who could that be? Second, are my values for a romantic relationship worldly or are they biblical? Do they look more like what mine looked like when I was a young man, which was very worldly, very confused, very off-center? Or am I basing what I'm looking for in a relationship on what Scripture teaches and what God wants for me?

Doug Barnes: Exactly. There it is, in black and white right there.

JJ West: Then finally, what, we talked about the three myths: attraction equals compatibility, that love always needs to be exciting, and that it's my job to come in and rescue and save you. Which of those myths have I been believing? And if so, where do I need to repent?

As you're thinking about that, be in prayer for the continued conversation. Let me remind you guys, if you've never been to the Every Man's Battle Intensive that we're just about to kick off tomorrow here in Dallas, if you've never been, we implore you to go. This is where you can actually build some of these kind of mentoring relationships, at a place like this in these small groups. If you're a listener to the podcast, all you have to do is put in the code EMBPOD into the coupon code when you register and you get a hundred dollars off your registration. We want you to take advantage of that. Guys, thanks so much for listening. I know this is a long conversation, but I hope it's a good one. Until we talk next time, let's continue to walk in integrity.

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