Episode 380 - Michael & Julianne Cusick, "Deep Dive Into Intensive Counseling"

Many of us were taught that faith means believing the right things, and that the rest gets sorted out after we die. Dallas Willard spent decades gently insisting there’s far more available now. In this 2008 conversation, recorded in Los Angeles and one Michael counts among the highlights of his life, Dallas describes salvation as an interactive relationship with God: a life lived with him today, not a ticket held for later. He and Michael talk about why solitude is the most radical of the dis...

Dr. Chuck DeGroat is back for his fourth podcast visit — and this time he brings a question that has followed him through his mid-fifties: why is it taking so long to grow up? His new book, Who You’re Becoming: The Slow and Courageous Work of Cultivating Character in a Narcissistic Age, grew out of that wrestling and a decade of sitting with leaders whose language had outrun their transformation. Michael and Chuck talk about why character change is so slow, and why the answer has less to do w...

In 1995, Michael sat down with Eugene Peterson for a conversation that was published in the Mars Hill Review and later in Eugene's own book Subversive Spirituality. There were no podcasts then. No one could have imagined that someday a person driving to work or sitting alone at home could put on headphones and hear a conversation recorded decades earlier. Eugene believed words were never merely information — they carried presence, they revealed, they deepened intimacy. So Michael began to won...

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 b...

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 wa...