@ Sea With Justin Mcroberts

On most Sundays, I get the privilege of gathering in my house with a group of preteens and reading through bits of the scripture and talking about them. And then praying together, it's a thing we call the good news Club, which borrows from a tradition we've gleaned from. One of my favorite parts of these gatherings is that we don't just read from one translation of the Bible. We actually crack open three or four different translations and interpretations of the Bible and read the same story, the same text, and the same bid, including the Jesus storybook Bible and the message we read from the NIV. We have an NRSV. We have like a bunch of different texts and translations. And it's been a kick to pay attention to the ways these sometimes first-time Bible readers will notice the difference between word usages, that in this version of Mark, this person uses this word. And over here, they use this word. It's the same story, the same moment, different words.The practice is less about developing a taste for or a part

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry, I could not travel them both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth, you might recognize that as the opening stanza to the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken. It's the poem that ends, Two roads diverged in the wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and it has made all the difference. It's probably even more familiar. I remember being exposed to that poem. It was probably the first poem as a whole poem that I was actually taught or read really fully exposed to. I think I was a freshman in high school. And as I was exposed to and read and saw this poem, really for the first time, two things happened in me that I recall. One was a kind of, I guess, embarrassed response poetry, poems. They were written by and for hyper, emotive, weird people. And that if you were into poems and you liked poetry, then you must be a hyper-emotive and weird person. I was on the football team. I ran track. I wa

Welcome to the At Sea Podcast. I'm your host, Justin McRoberts. I'm recording this on December 21, 2022. It is the winter solstice, the day where I live that features the least amount of light. The night is longest. And I'll be honest with you, I'm not feeling great. I don't know if I quite have the flu yet, but I might. Because my daughter does. And I found that out a few hours ago. It's been really since Sunday. She wasn't feeling well on Sunday. She was feeling not so great on Monday, so she didn't go to school, then she didn't go to school on Tuesday, and then today, Wednesday. She certainly did not go to school. She has been very sick. Last night, when she went to bed, it was mostly just cold symptoms. That was sniffles, and it was a little bit of a headache. And then she mentioned that one of her ears wasn't feeling great. Oh, I thought. And not too long ago, her being in bed by herself. She woke up and started vomiting. Her brother came downstairs to let us know that she had, in his words, puked everyw

It's possible, if not likely, that if you are remotely pop culture aware and spend any time on social media platforms, you'll see news about or posts about the death, the passing of dancer, DJ, choreographer named tWitch.I was struck by the moment I heard about his passing. A fan of his, I've liked his work, I've liked him on TV. I've liked his posture online otherwise. I was saddened by the fact that h e's only 40 years old. And I felt the thing that I read that Jen Hatmaker wrote in her public post.She said this line that struck me and sort of set this thought in motion, she said he was suffering, and we didn't even know pain has never been easier to hide. Some of what you might have seen, which is what I have seen, is folks confessing or saying out loud, like, you know, he seems so happy. It's so shocking. And it's always shocking. When depression or anxiety, when mental health issues surface. A lot of the time, it's a surprise; we're shocked. We're even to some degree scandalized. We didn't know that that

I'm recording this introduction a few days after Thanksgiving. And if you're listening to this when the episode comes out, it'll be roughly a week, maybe a week and a day or so after the Thanksgiving holiday, which is to say this is the holiday season. And between Thanksgiving and maybe some things that happen in between. And the Christmas holiday is a season during which we sit down at a table with neighbors, with friends, with family, with people who share different ideas hold different ideas about how the world works. Usually, what we mean by that is they hold different religious or different political perspectives. And the rule the cultural rule has become you don't talk about politics. You don't talk about religion. At the dinner table, and specifically during the holidays, I see story after story or anecdote after anecdote on most of my social media platforms about nightmare scenarios or nightmare fears, things happening during the holidays, around politics, and religion among family members and neighbo

In 2002, I wrote and recorded a song called love. And I've been waiting to write some kind of follow-up to that song pretty much since I released it. It was a song that meant a lot to me at the time because I was trying to publicly and personally redefine the word and my experience of the word love for myself. And for people that were interested in paying attention. To me, it was this hopeful attempt, I guess, to push back on the idea, or the constant suggestion that love was a feeling. And that just hadn't been my experience. Certainly, there have been feelings involved, as it were. But love, while it included feelings was just more complex, it was more difficult. It was harder, it was Messier. It was just bigger. And I wanted to write something that actually spoke to maybe the more difficult and messier and poetic slash practical elements and aspects of love. And so I wrote this song that is, as it's recorded, both Sung and screamed, which was part of my experience of love. Here's a clip of that song and ho

I’ve long lived with Seth Godin’s suggestion that art is anything you make that forges a connection between people. Over time, and in that light, I’ve also come to recognize that the depth and sustainability of my professional art life has a lot to do with the particular people I am connected to in/through my work. Which brings me to my now 12yo son, Asa. Asa wrote a lot of the melody for the song “Graduation” and is the main vocalist on the finished track. It was the thought of connection with him on this project that really moved me to do it. Of course, there were many points of connection throughout the whole process (and definitely now, after is release). But what provided the project’s core energy was specifically sharing the writing and recording process with my son.So, on a personal level, the life in and behind this EP is rooted in the love I have for that remarkable young man, Asa. And, on a broader scale, I think being able to name/identity specific people is what makes it possible for an Artist (of

It used to confuse me when, as people talked about relationships, romantic or otherwise, they would refer to the relationship as, like a third entity, there was the person and a person, or a few people. And then there was the relationship that they're in like it was this other thing. You, me, and then the relationship. But it turns out there's actually something to that. Sometimes what's being referred to by the relationship is this idea of what we should be or what we could be like, if we did this. Well. Sometimes it's a good thing, specifically when that vision is a shared vision. And we're in lockstep and headed in that direction, trying to become that vision, that ideal of what a relationship looks like. But sometimes, the relationship we're referring to and feel responsible for isn't at all reflective of the actuality of the connection between us. It doesn't help us love each other or even see each other.I can see this clearly. And so often when the relationship we're speaking of is with the church, or j

I've never really enjoyed fighting. And while I know there might be some folks who come to a different conclusion, depending on their experience of me, the reality is that while I certainly did Hone some skills in the art of argumentation, I've always actually hated what it's cost me to fight. Which brings me to the question, what is worth fighting for? And the truth of the matter is, for the most part, I've lacked a really clear or wisely discerned answer to that question. I could reason the question on a large scale and say things like racial justice is worth fighting for, affordable healthcare is worth fighting for, or clean water is worth fighting for. But when it comes to answering that question, on the scale of my life, my limited life, things get quite a bit foggy here. I've boiled some of the important bits of wisdom I've gained in this area of my life down to these two short poems. The first reads some battles should be lost. That is, sometimes, the best way forward. Losing battles has opened me not

My social landscape does not look the way I expected it to a few years ago. Some of that comes on the heels of religious difference or political disagreement. And as sad as that stuff can be, it's also a bit cliche and predictable. If I'm being honest, what's been harder, is recognizing that the more I've grown into who I am, and the more distance I've experienced between myself and people I was once connected to - those connections have been harder to let go of, as has been the familiarity I had with my former self. I felt some of these things before I was experiencing something like it in 2004, when I first heard the song, let go. And on the other side of a very strange season, marked by both grief and newness, I found myself liking where I was in life, and also tasting the bitterness of saying goodbye to what had been true, and had been comfortable before. So it is again today, and maybe you resonate with that feeling, I have a feeling you might. So is there beauty in the breakdown. That's what I'm countin

When I first started playing music professionally, it wasn't the beginning of a dream. It wasn't the culmination of a wish from my youth, not really. I thought of playing music. I thought it would be cool. But it's probably most true to say about that moment, the moment in which I decided to see what it would be like to have a career in music was that it was another step. And a long trajectory of vocational decision-making that wasn't about a particular career. So it wasn't about I really want to play music, or I really want to perform. It was always about connecting with people. And finding the best way to do that for me, before I started playing music professionally in 1998, I'd been on Young Life staff for about five years. And during that stretch from 1993, to 1998, I also picked up some jobs as a teacher. I was looking for ways to connect with people to give myself away with the best of my gifts, my talents, and my energies. Over the course of time, that made it kind of easy to let go of some of the musi

So I've been really enjoying this new feature of the podcast, taking a question from my Monday q&a sessions at Instagram, and digging just a tad deeper into one of those questions, specifically, those questions when you seem to resonate with those questions and my response. This past week, I got a question that I've been around and asked a lot as a question by somebody who asked "Why do churches struggle with attendance?"  It's like I said; it's a question I've been around for a long time. I pastored or helped pastor church for 20 years, and questions about attendance and why people show up or why they don't show up. Pretty regular, comprehensive conversation, especially as time went on. At some point during my tenure as a church staff person, we were looking at numbers gathered by experts in church culture, church attendance, etc. And the numbers that jumped out to us were that while the population of the United States of America had grown by something like 11%, church attendance had fallen off by someth

You've probably had the bad experience that I had recently, that I'm about to tell you a story about, in which when your mind is already focused on something. You're already thinking about something regularly, and you start noticing it or connections to it everywhere. That happened the other night while I was reading a book to my daughter to help get her to sleep. I am in the process of editing and finishing this book called Sacred Strides, which will come out in 2023, about belovedness, about discovering my belovedness through both rest and work. My daughter, who's five right now, picked a pair of stories for me to read. And one of those stories was Lobos Classic Collection, The Adventures of Frog and Toad. I don't know how familiar you are with the stories, but they're brilliant. They're hilarious. They're well written, and there's wisdom in the stories that sneaks up and pinches me every once in a while, including this moment. So the story specifically is called the garden. And in that story, Toad notices

I want to spend a few moments dissecting and maybe even dismantling this phrase. This idea that comes up in coaching conversations and has come up for a long, long time. In my 20-plus years in pastoral ministry as an artist and is the phrase work-life balance. I've got a lot of issues with this. And not just theoretical, but more so as a practical reality. So I'll start where I'm going to end and basically say that there is no such thing as a work-life balance, and more to the point, that the ideas that lead us to talk about work-life balance are not just toxic, they're destructive, and they're anti-human. So, I don't like the phrase. First of all, because it puts a line somewhere between work and life as if there's this thing called life that we're living. And that work is a thing that gets in the way of life; I've actually had conversations with artist friends who will actually flip this terminology on its head. And they'll talk about how life gets in the way of work. And what has been meant by that? And wa

Mike Edel is a very talented singer, songwriter, and producer from Canada. And full disclosure a dear friend of mine, he's also which is a gift to me, a client. He's someone I've had the privilege of coaching over the last couple of years. And as I am with many of my clients, I'm really proud of the work they do, the work they've done. And the way they have over the course of last year and a half to two years navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. It's been a tough time to be an artist. In the early spring of 2001, Mike was touring down the West Coast, in a van with his wife, and they popped in here actually, in my neighborhood hung out with my kids. And we had a great afternoon. And we recorded this conversation that was about navigating COVID as an artist that was about navigating life, post marriage as an artist, and because of this was just then pregnant about navigating life as an artist, with a child in tow and incoming and all the complications, and difficulties and opportunities that come with all those thi

Last week, I introduced a new element to the podcast; namely, bringing part of my Instagram Q&A sessions to this space and providing a longer answer to some of the deeper or, in my opinion, more pressing questions.On Monday, during the Q&A, this question really stuck out to me:“How do we manage over-pouring ourselves when there is an unending well available?”It might be worth noting here, particularly for listeners who aren’t as familiar with some religious terminologies, that this “ unending well“ is a reference to some of the teachings of Jesus in which he promises a kind of well within those who follow him and know him. For instance in John chapter 4, Jesus says “whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life.“Now, while the dilemma of giving oneself away “too much“ isn’t just a consideration for the religious, I think that Jesus‘s teachings here have quite a bit to say, which I’ll come back around to.The

Part of how I answered the question on Instagram was to say that it depends on what my priorities are. Here’s what I mean: “Church,” as I understand it, is largely a way to intentionally practice the Divine gift of life with other people. Certainly, there are facets of regular church attendance that means I can “worship” God, particularly in music and that I can learn or be taught. I also get to join other people in efforts to act justly in the world. But those aspects of what we’ve called “church” over the past 40-70 years at least are pretty accessible without regularly gathering with the same people. Which is to say, I think the thing that makes “going to Chruch” irreplaceable (if it is) is that I can create a stainable and predictable life pattern with people withwhom I want to do those things; to worship God with these particular people or learn and be taught with and by these particular people, to do justice with these particular people.So, if it’s the people part of going to Church that is irreplaceabl

My son and I recently went to see the most recent Marvel release. It's a movie about Dr. Strange. He's one of the primary characters in the Marvel Universe. And he is, according to his title, a master of the Mystic Arts, which begs a little bit of a question about what mystic is. See in the films, him being the master of mystic arts is manifested in the ability to open portals to different universes or cast spells that send power waves that knock over buildings or enemies. My son and I had a really interesting conversation about mysticism and religion and spirituality and what makes it thing spiritual and what makes a thing mystic, after the film, I found myself referring to things that I discussed with Kevin Sweeney. During this conversation you're about to hear, Kevin's book, The Making of a Mystic is a really interesting take on his journey towards mysticism, and his practice of those things that we might call or might not call depending on who you are. mystical. I think you will enjoy this conversation. I

While the experiences of displacement and disorientation play such a significant role in conversations about cultural place, institutional belonging, and even interpersonal relationship. I am moved and inspired not only by the stories of those who endure and triumph over that sense of displacement or dislocation but in fact sometimes even choose displacement and the adventure of relocation in order to awaken some kind of new spirit in them and in the world around them. My guest Natalie Toon Patten is one such person who has been removed who's been displaced, has been in fact cast out from certain cultures, and then has chosen the adventure of relocation in order to readjust, replace, reroute, and reorient herself to a world in which she longs to belong and create belonging or a sense of belonging for others. I enjoyed our conversation and I think you will too. Check it out.

For a number of years, my favorite event in the country was The Festival of Faith and Music in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The festival host, a gentleman named Ken Hefner would stand up in front of headlining artists' audiences and challenge those audiences to be as prepared for the show, as the band that we were about to see. He would say, "That you would expect this band to have brought their A-game with regard to performance. I'm asking you if you brought your A-game with regards to listening." Stephen Covey, who's the writer of the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is quoted as saying that most people do not listen with the intent to understand they listen with the intent to reply. You've been in those conversations when the person listening to you is really just paying attention so that they can say what they've already planned on saying, along with people like Ken Hefner, John J. Thompson has spent the lion's share of his career trying to and coaching people to listen differently. Beyond trying