In Misfit Preachers inaugural episode Tullian Tchividjian shares his firsthand account of his own "CRASH and BURN" and how finding himself at rock bottom led him to see the grace and forgiveness of God in a whole new light.

A pivotal moment in the episode occurs when Tullian discusses the community he found in recovery spaces, where authenticity reigns supreme. He contrasts this with the often superficial interactions found in church settings, noting how the raw honesty of people grappling with addiction provided him with a sense of belonging and understanding previously absent in his life. This revelation reshapes his perspective on ministry; he envisions creating a church environment that mirrors the openness and acceptance found in recovery groups, prioritizing real relationships over performative piety.

The episode culminates in Tullian's reflections on his current life, where he embraces a quieter, slower pace and values genuine connections with his family and community. He acknowledges the ongoing nature of his healing journey, filled with both victories and setbacks, while reaffirming that the grace he once preached is the very grace he continues to lean on in his everyday life. The Misfit Preachers successfully convey a powerful message: that embracing our misfit nature and sharing our stories can foster deep connections and transformative healing.

Takeaways:

• The Misfit Preachers podcast aims to create a space for openness and honesty about struggles with faith and life.
• Tullian shares his journey of falling from grace and the lessons learned through his failures.
• The importance of unconditional love and truth in relationships is emphasized throughout the episode.
• Recovery is a continual process, and it's essential to understand that healing takes time.
• The conversation highlights the significance of community support in overcoming personal failures and challenges.
• The hosts discuss how being vulnerable can encourage others to share their own stories.

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In every episode, Tullian Tchividjian, Jean Larroux, and Byron Yawn grab the mic, lose the disclaimers, and let the honest truth take the lead. This isn’t church talk— think barstool sports meets grace and grit—without the barstool, the sports, and without a church. It’s a space for Dead Beats, Prodigals, and Screw Ups to remember that that God loves and uses failures. Because people who fail are the only kind of people there are.

You're listening to the Misfit Preachers, Talian Chavidjian, Jean Leroux, and Byron Yan from ProdigalPodcast.com. we're plagiarizing Jesus one podcast at a time. Now here are the Misfits.

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Misfit Preachers. Highly, highly anticipated moment in my life. I'm so excited to be a part of this for lots and lots of reasons. Two reasons.

Two primary reasons are to my left and to my right. To my left is Jean Le Roux III, aka J3, and to my right is Tullian Chavidjian, aka the Eminem of Preachers.

Wait, I want a nickname.

He gave you one. The Jimmy J3.

The Jimmy Buffett of Preachers.

Oh, thank you.

You're welcome.

I'm good with that.

How's that, Laurel? Fit?

Really? I tell you, Eminem and Jimmy Buffett is pretty good. It's a. It's not an analogy.

Yeah. Misfit Preachers is the brainchild of Jean Larroux. And when he was sitting around thinking about who's worse than me, Agreed, that.

Is exactly the filter.

He thought of two individual people and said, I want to invite you because you are a misfit and you understand grace. So sitting around this table, that message of grace and freedom, we took the break and threw it out the window. Gas is on the right, right?

Yeah, gas is on the right. And what we want to do is jump right in. We're going to do that with every episode.

And one of the promises we have to our listeners is to love them unconditionally, to speak the truth plainly, but also to put ourselves out there first, because we know the pathway to restoration and the pathway to freedom. The pathway to wholeness is a hard one, but when somebody else is just a little bit ahead of you in that pathway, it gives you hope.

You guys are ahead of me by a couple years, and watching you process through that has given me great hope and your love towards me. Although Tully had never called me, Jean was there.

I tried. You change your number multiple times.

So right from the start, we're going to tell our stories, and it's going to be unfiltered and true and raw and despairing in some places. We're going to take you to the darkness of our experience and show you the pathway into the light.

In our experience, we're going to go first in that regard in hopes that others will be encouraged and inspired by it.

Well, and I think what you just said, and I. I'm so Excited to hear Tullian's story. Lest anyone misunderstand what we say by being ahead of people is. That's like being. I was a casualty.

Evacuated first. Right. This is not a progressive. Yeah, like we're ahead of anybody in that sense. This is, hey, we've been there. And that's what we mean.

We've been there.

My friend Nadia, a few years ago in an interview was asked a question, and this was her answer. And I think it summarizes what we're about perfectly.

She said, when I'm asked why I share so openly about my struggles, I say, quote, I hope that by being honest, I can create a space around me that others can step into and feel safer admitting things about themselves. It's a form of leadership. I call, screw it. I'll go first.

I had no idea we plagiarized her. That's fantastic.

Solid.

Fantastic. We want to jump right in. Intellian volunteered to do this because Jean told him he was going to do this, which were. So two things are true at once.

Have you ever tried to push a rope?

No, you didn't. Tullian wants to do this for those reasons. So, brother, we're going to let you talk and share your story and probably come back and ask you some.

We're going to toss some heaters your way, ask some questions.

And I would love for you guys to ask me questions as I tell my story. Clarification questions. Questions to expand on what I'm saying about what I'm saying. Yeah, I've thought about this.

First of all, I'm honored to be here. I was not dragged into this thing kicking and screaming. When Jean first texted me and said, I've got an idea. Are you in?

Before I even knew what the idea really was, I said, I'm in. You and I have known each other for many years. I probably met you before I met you, but you and I have known each other for many years, too.

We hadn't been in touch a lot in the last five years or so, but you and I stayed in touch while I was going through my stuff and you were going through your stuff. So to be able to sit here with old friends and talk about our lives and the way that God's grace has met us in our darkest places is a.

It's a privilege. This is easy for me in that sense.

Thanks.

I've been out there now for six or seven years, telling my story, traveling, speaking. I wrote a book about it that came out earlier this year. I've done a lot of Interviews where I've told my story very openly, uneditedly.

And so as we were thinking this through, my challenge was how do I tell my story in a way that is unique on this platform because anybody could google my name and go to any number of podcasts or any number of talks that I've given and hear the whole thing. I'm not going to go back to when I was born and my family of origin and all of that stuff that's pretty well known.

Up until that point, I was pastoring a large, well known church in my hometown of Fort Lauderdale. I was writing a book a year. Some of them became bestsellers. I had a lot of notoriety because of that.

My sermons were broadcast on television around the world. They were broadcast on the radio every day around the country. I was living the dream in our industry. I was at the top, at least in my mind.

I lost everything overnight, obviously my job, speaking engagements that had been lined up for the rest of the summer and fall, all canceled within 24 hours. A lucrative book deal that I had just signed, canceled. People that were an integral part of my life, professionally speaking, scattered.

And my initial reaction to my destructive behavior was anger. Anger at God, anger at other people. I was free falling. And my reaction was not one of contrition. It was not one of repentance.

It was not one of sorrow for the damage that I had caused, primarily to my now ex wife, Kim. I vowed to keep her, protect her, honor her, Forsaking all others till death do us part. And I failed miserably. My three kids, Gabe, Nate and Jenna.

Gabe was 20 at the time, Jenna was. Nate was 18 and Jenna was 13. Catastrophic for them. And because I was a public person and had a public platform, the news was incredibly public.

Every news source, everyone, not just Christian news sources, but all mainline news sources, reported on it. It was embarrassing. It was shameful.

As a family, we had to deal with not only my destructive sin and the way that I hurt the people that I love the most, but since it was all playing out publicly, it was incredibly challenging. Lots of voices, lot voices that we knew Voices that we didn't know. It was loud, really loud around us.

I was obviously ashamed, pissed that I got caught.

So I was going to ask you, was it something, when you said it came out, did. Was it exposed or was it something you.

Yeah, it was exposed. There were some text messages, somewhat benign text messages, but enough of them that were on the church server and it was exposed.

And I was confronted about it and I admitted it and that was that. So everything. I was approached by the elders of Coral Ridge at my home one night. That was a Thursday.

On Friday afternoon, I gathered my kids in a room. My oldest son, Gabe, had just recently gotten married and had his first child.

My grandson Mason, got them in a room, told them that I had cheated on their mom. And that moment, of all the moments, was without question the most painful I can remember to this day.

The words that they spoke, the looks on their faces, the fact that I had devastated three lives that I loved very much was paralyzing to me, that moment.

Can you describe it further? Things evaporate.

Yeah.

You mean your kid, like trust?

Yes. Oh, I. So Jenna was the first to speak and she looked at me with a look of total confusion mixed with disgust.

And she said, dad, how could you do this? How could you do this? I thought we were best friends, Daddy, why?

Oh.

Nate was sitting to my right. He's the one that's not as expressive as his sister and brother. I've probably seen Nate cry as an adult four or five times in my life.

And I looked over, he didn't say a word. His lip was quivering. And he gets up, walks out the front door.

Gabe, who was standing there by the table, the dining room table with holding his new baby, Mason, who was maybe a month old at the time, with his new wife Jamie sitting by him, looked at me and he said, dad, how could you do this? I've always looked up to you. I tell everyone that you're my mentor. How could you do this? It was a moment of sobriety for me, all of the emotions.

I was scared, I was embarrassed, I felt a lot of guilt, a lot of shame. But in that moment, the predominant emotion was just absolute heartbreak. I never want to see that look on my kids faces again.

I never want to hear words like that from their mouth again. Ever. The news then. So the elders approached me on a Thursday. I sat down with my kids on a Friday. The church made it public on Sunday.

Had no idea what was happening, what I was going to do. Lost, desperate, angry. Got a phone call from my friend Paul Tripp at the time, and he said, get up here. He lives in Philadelphia.

He said, get up here, buy a plane ticket, get out of town, come stay with me. So I went up there that first week. I was with Paul and his wife Louella in Philadelphia.

We just spent five days talking, thinking, crying, that sort of thing.

It's always interesting to know how you've got two camps of response. What was his response to you get off the plane response, and what did that mean to you?

At that time? He and Luella picked me up at the airport. I got in their truck and he just said, I am so glad you're here.

Wow.

That was it. I stayed with them, like I said, for five days. We walked, we ate, we talked. He showed me around Philadelphia.

I had been to Philadelphia many times, but had never been to the Rocky statue, which, you know, I'd always want to go to. We walked there. I took a picture in front of the Rocky statue. The news was spreading.

The mainline news outlets and the Christian news outlets had been telling the story, but now the bloggers were picking it up and social media was heating up and all of that stuff.

And I'll say this, that without going into step by step, details of this happened next, and this happened next, like I said at the beginning, all of that information is out there in other places. But I will say this, that the first six months after everything blew up, I was on a mission to get my old life back. I was not in a posture of sorrow.

I felt horrible. The only contrition I felt at that time was not even toward Kim, my now ex wife. It was toward my three kids.

If you're in a marriage that you find, for whatever selfish reasons unsatisfying or you're frustrated, you can justify bad behavior against that person as much as you want, as long as you want. And I was still doing that to some degree in my mind when it came to her.

But when it came to my kids, that was where I felt the most contrition, the most sorrow, the most devastation, while at the same time, like I said, I was on a mission to get my life back.

One of the narratives out there is that the denomination that I had been a part of put before Me, a process of church discipline and restoration that I fled from. That is categorically false. They.

They defrocked me, which means they took away my credentials, meaning I could no longer be a pastor in that denomination. That was my discipline.

And honestly, it's a gift to me that they did not give me a pathway of discipline and restoration because I would have jumped through every hoop they put in front of me in order to get my old life back. That's what I would have done. And I would have done so insincerely. I would have feigned repentance, I would have feigned sorrow.

That was my mindset, was I am going to get my old life back.

In fact, if I play my cards, I can even turn this story and this episode in my life into something that will catapult me even further than I have been. That was my mindset.

Now, just an observation, because I've been through something similar. You've been through something similar. I know contrition and repentance when I hear it now.

Me too.

Meter is pretty intense.

Mine too.

If I went back to you at that time, a month later, whatever, and suggested what you just said to you, then you would have cut me off forever.

If you had, had. Had inferred.

Yes.

If you had inferred that to him.

That it was fake. Oh, it would have been game over. Yeah, it would have been game over.

But you hurt my feelings imaginarily back then.

Right?

Yeah, that's a great question. Because it really, I mean, looking back now, and I appreciate the honesty so much of saying, oh, I couldn't see, I can see it now.

But if you had told me that, then I would have never.

You know, the sad thing though, I think is that there's a part of me that knew exactly what I was doing. I, I knew the game and I knew I could play it and I knew I could win.

The night before I moved, I went into her bedroom. I couldn't sleep And I went into her bedroom, knelt by her bed. She was sound asleep and just started praying and crying.

And she woke up and sat up and she said, dad, what's the matter? And I lost it. I said, I don't want to go. And she looked at me and she said, dad, I don't want you to go either.

And she's crying and I'm thinking, what in the hell have I done? What have I done? What does it profit a man to gain a fortune and lose his soul? What the hell have I done?

I moved to Orlando, which was at the time, the right thing to do. There was no way I could have caught my breath in Fort Lauderdale at the time. It was just. There was too much noise.

Moved to Orlando, Was there helping this guy behind the scenes with some of the staff and other things, going to counseling once a week. And with this guy began to put the plan in motion to bring my old life back. This guy was with me on this.

He was going to be my right hand man in helping me do this.

Is that a delusion in your mind at that time that is similar to the delusion that led you into destruction, or was it just pride?

And like I said, I was pissed. And I was pissed that a lot of people who benefited from being my friend when I was at the top bailed.

I believe you could have pulled that off.

Yeah, I believe it. Oh, there's no doubt.

We were in the process of putting some serious pieces together that would have absolutely pulled it off and would have potentially been bigger than anything I had done before. So this is what got me out of bed. I was grieving the loss of my marriage, believe it or not.

By this time, I'm Kim and I met when we were 18 years old. We were wild. Growing up in South Florida, we were wild. We weren't Christians. We were wild together. God got a hold of her. God got a hold of me.

Our lives were completely transformed when we were both 21 years old. Got married at 22, started having kids. She was my best friend. We grew up together. In essence, our formative years were spent together.

All of my firsts, in many ways, are with her buying our first home, you know, living in a different place for the first time. I started college after I was married. So for the first seven years I was married, I was in school, we were having kids.

This my family, my wife and my three kids. They were my tribe. I mean, we were a tribe. And I missed that.

My anger toward her had started to subside because my justification was Coming to an end for what I did through therapy. And I realized I really missed her. I missed our home. I. We had bought our dream home 18 months earlier. That was the home I was going to die in.

Had to sell that home. I missed our home, missed being with my kids, missed Fort Lauderdale, missed being around my familiar.

I'm living in a two bedroom apartment in Orlando, all by myself. Sad, miserable, quiet. But what got me out of bed every morning was this mission I was on.

Fix it.

To fix it. But specifically to fix it professionally. I was there. And those plans were unfolding rapidly and successfully.

And after being there for seven months, a previous affair, one that had happened before, the one that eventually outed me, was exposed.

So just as things were beginning to die down and my professional life was starting to pick up with hope in all of the ways that I was longing for this news breaks and the bottom fell out. I was asked to leave my association with that church. The elders there said, I wish you would have told us about this when you came.

Yeah, so that begs the question, if you're going to take the boat, you're going to stand in front of the firing squad and it already happened and one came out. Why not just take the blue pill and tell everything so you can just pull the band aid off at once.

Which is what I should have done. There's no question. And at that point, my, my now ex wife Kim didn't know about, Nobody knew about. There were five men who knew about that.

The first one.

The first one. Five. So you thought. And it didn't go nearly as far as the second one. I mean, there was, we didn't have sex. There was, it was very short lived.

It was nipped in the bud early, thank God. I confess, the girl's father approached me, who was a pastor himself.

We brought in a few other people, a couple elders from my church, a couple elders from her church, her pastor, her husband. It was dealt with well and thoroughly. And thankfully because of these men, it was nipped in the bud. So it was.

There was a part of me that A, didn't want anyone to know about it outside of the people who knew.

Secondly, I felt, man, I just got caught stealing a Ferrari and you want me to tell you about the stick of bubble gum that I got caught with a year and a half earlier? In other words, right, you brought me up here knowing a worse crime. Now that a lesser crime has been exposed, you're asking me to leave.

So there was a lot of confusion. I completely understand where they were coming From, I mean, they were getting a lot of heat already for housing me before the second one came out.

And then once the second one came out, they were just like, we don't want the noise. So all of my professional ambitions now to recover professionally came to a screeching halt. Screeching hole. So I shifted my focus.

We didn't know each other before this. She had read my books and listened to my sermons. She was from Texas, lived in Texas. We'd never seen each other, never met each other.

She had made an encouraging comment when the news broke and I responded and then she responded and I responded and we basically became pen pals first and then we became friends and then that friendship developed into a romance and so we were pretty serious. I was divorced at by this point, by the time this particular church in Orlando had asked me to leave, I was divorced. Stacy and I were together.

She was a breath of fresh air. Her wisdom, her discernment, her loyalty was something I desperately needed at the time.

She was a non blinking friend of the highest order and I needed that. She had been through a lot of her own crap, so she wasn't surprised or shocked by this. And we were going strong.

And when I decided I was going to do my best to recover everything that I could personally, now that my mission to get back everything I had professionally was axed, I broke up with Stacy, went back to Fort Lauderdale to try to reconcile with my ex wife. I thought if I can just get my family back together, I'll get my familiar back.

Regardless of what I end up doing professionally, I know that if I can get my family back together, I'll be okay. And I write about it a lot in Carnage and Grace.

It's a crazy part of the story, but basically broke up with Stacy, tried to reconcile with my ex wife during that process. Missed Stacy like crazy. Went back to stacy for about 10 or 12 days while I was with her. I realized I really need to be back home.

Broke up with her again, went back to Fort Lauderdale, this time trying for about six weeks to reconcile with my ex wife. Going even as far as buying her an engagement ring in the to propose again, to get remarried. She wasn't having it either.

Now Stacy's get the hell out of My life, you have no idea what you want. My ex wife is get the hell out of my life. You keep flip flopping.

So I was at this point now, everything I had wanted to recover professionally done, that mission was over. Everything that I had wanted to recover personally done, that mission was over. I had nowhere to go.

Stacy and I, right after Orlando, when I left, I didn't know where to go. So her and I rented a house in Texas where her whole family's from.

We moved there together and after being there 10 days is when I broke up with her the first time.

Went back to Fort Lauderdale after being there for three weeks, left, went back to Texas after being there for 12 days, left, went back to Fort Lauderdale. So now I'm like, I can't go back to Texas, I can't stay in Fort Lauderdale. Where am I going to go? I had all of my clothes on hangers.

I was living out of my car essentially at that point and, and I nowhere to go, smiling.

Byron, why are you smiling?

Because all of my clothes are in my car in the Airbnb right now.

Besides today I wish I would have had an Airbnb. Oh my God.

But it's only seven days and the rest is in a storage unit in Nashville.

So I didn't know where to go. So I called my mom and of course she's in western North Carolina, Black Mountain, North Carolina.

I was gonna say this is my favorite part of the story. How old were you at the time?

Did you, did you ever, when you were living with your mom, go, mom.

But you moved, you said you called it, you moved there.

I called her. I was, it was 3:00 in the morning. I had given my last ditch effort to reconcile with Kim, my ex wife.

44 year old man, had the engagement ring, walk out of her townhouse at 3 o'clock in the morning after she said no, like I'm done with you, understandably, walked out, got in my car at 3:00 in the morning, had no idea where I was gonna go. I have a brother that lives in Boynton beach, which is about 30 minutes north of Fort Lauderdale. He was out of town.

He had left his key under the mat for someone to come in and feed the dog or something. So I texted him first. Thankfully he was awake and he's dude, go stay at my place. It's empty.

So I went there for two or three nights trying to figure out where am I going to go? What am I going to do? Called my mom. She said, come here.

So I drove from Boynton beach to western North Carolina, just outside Asheville, to Gigi's house, to Gigi's house, moved into her place. And after being there for about 10 or 12 days, I missed Stacy miserably and realized then that's who I needed to be with.

That's who I wanted to be with. So I reconnected with her, apologized. She was, of course, extremely skeptical. I had hurt her. I would.

I had not been careful with her heart in the same way that I had not been careful with Kim's heart. And Stacy was gracious enough to give me a shot.

Wow.

We had some long conversations prior to me going back to Texas. So one night, my mom was thrilled that I was there. She knew I needed to be there, and she was excited that I was there.

She was an empty nester and loved the fact that I was moving in. I was going to be her roommate.

We were going to take us. We. This is what people want to like. Did you do puzzles? Did y'all wear matching. Matching clothes?

She drank wine. A lot of wine. Yeah.

Is this Buster Bluth and Lucille doing? Mother.

Son, ask you this question. How early did the two of you get to the Golden Corral?

If there had been one in Black Mountain, North Carolina, we would have gone, but. So my mom was thrilled that I was there. She knew I needed to be there. She was the safest place to be for me at the time, and she knew that.

Did she do your laundry and stuff like that?

No, I've always done my own laundry. Except when I was a. When I was a kid, I did not. But since then, I have. So we go out to dinner one night at a Thai restaurant.

This is after I've reconnected with Stacy and have made the decision that I'm driving back to Texas.

You're about to drop the bomb.

And I let my mom know. I said, I'm leaving tomorrow. And she said, where are you going? And she. I said, I'm going back to Texas because I'm going to marry Stacy.

The biggest fight, I promise you, no exaggeration. Sadly, my daughter Jenna was at the table. She can testify to this. My biggest fight with my mother.

And we had some doozies over the years, but hands down, my biggest fight with my mother I had was at that table at restaurant. She.

Give it back.

Oh, she was the instigator. Are you kidding me? She had me beat across the board.

Voices were raised.

Oh, my gosh. It Was loud. It was. It was not good. It was not good.

Police called or no, no, no police called. All right.

And because she was living in Billy Graham country, they wouldn't have arrested any of us anyway. We can get away with murder in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

Wait, wait a second. What's the association with Billy Graham?

People already know. So anyway, I left the next morning.

Drove from Black Mountain, North Carolina to Willis, Texas, back to the house that Stacy and I had rented a few months earlier. We got engaged two weeks later, got married three weeks after that. I love my wife, she loves me. God has worked it out.

I don't know what I would do without her. We were both fools to get married at that point.

I would discourage anybody who's thinking of doing something like that because I was in no position, and my mom was right, I was in no position to be making a decision of that magnitude when I was in that state of mind at all. The first year Stacy and I were married, we lived in Texas. She would get up and go to work every day at a title company. I wasn't working.

I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I was home alone most days in a far off land, away from my kids, away from everything familiar. That's when the darkness really started to set in.

So everything everybody hoped was happening to you, what's happening and more and more.

Yes. And so that's when things really got dark. I would go to therapy once a week. I would go to the gym once a day.

But other than that, I was alone most of the time. And I think there's time and a place for that.

When you are emerging from that kind of catastrophic implosion, that kind of self induced trauma, there's a place for that. My life had been loud and it was time for things to get real quiet. But I was not used to that level of quiet. So it was incredibly painful.

That's when the dark night of the soul really started to emerge in a seemingly unending way.

I remember one day in particular texting my good friend Paul's all, who was a dear friend of mine before my crash, a dear friend of mine during my crash and remains a friend today. A retired Episcopalian priest. The smartest man I've ever met in my life, the wisest.

Understands the human condition better than anybody I've ever known. Not shocked by sin. And he had walked with me up until that point.

And I remember texting him one day when I was alone at the rental house in Willis Texas. And I was, at bottom, suicidal in a very real way. And I texted him one day and said, paul, I need you to give me one good reason to keep living.

And Paul would normally respond very quickly. And an hour went by, no response. 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours, no.

Response to Air Brutus.

Yes, right.

Your. Your fear is that he's bailed, like everybody.

My fear has to be. My fear is everybody else left because things got messy. Paul's had enough. Is just done bridge too far.

Around hour five, I get this text message back from him, and it's one sentence. Well, there's an explanation of why it took him so long to respond, followed by one sentence.

Tell me explanation.

He said to me, tullian, the reason it took me so long to respond was because your question was so weighty. I needed time to think and pray because I knew my answer was quite literally a matter of life and death for you.

Wow.

And this was his response? One sentence response.

Tullian, the purpose behind the suffering you were going through is to kick you is to push you into a new freedom from false versions of who you were. And I had to read that two or three times.

Tullian, the purpose behind the suffering you are going through is God kicking you into a new freedom from false identities that you had adopted. He knew me well enough to know that much of my internal suffering at that time had very little to do with my circumstances.

Obviously, there was some of that. I was at, by this point reeling with guilt and shame and regret and loss and all of that stuff, missing my people.

But internally, what was really at work was a severe identity crisis.

I had anchored my identity so much in who I was, what I had accomplished, my role as an author, my role as a mega church pastor, the important friends I had, the financial stability, all of that stuff. And when all of those things were now gone, I didn't know who I was.

I say all the time that you typically don't know what it is you're depending on to make life worth living until that thing is gone and all of my things were gone.

Can I say something?

One of the things I love about what Paul said to you, which I think is so profound, is that people would often say, if somebody's going to be unblinking friend or all those different things, they would say they must take sin lightly to show that much grace. But to actually say another, he says, your problem is idolatry.

Yes, exactly what he was saying.

You have lived a facade, right?

He was calling out the deeper sin.

It and wrapped in love.

Yes. And that's what he was doing. He called out the deeper sin.

Yeah. He didn't say, quit having affairs.

No, no.

Which he said, quit having an affair with yourself.

He said that? Right.

That's it. Stop having the love affair with yourself.

He didn't have to tell me to quit having affairs. I knew that I was living in the ashes of my decisions. But he got to the deeper place and he said the deeper thing that I needed to hear.

Life didn't turn around after that, but I started to have a little bit of hope. Like maybe there is a purpose. Maybe God isn't out to get me. Maybe God is out to free me.

Yeah.

Maybe God isn't punishing me. Maybe God is liberating me. Maybe that's what God is doing.

Maybe I'm not experiencing the wrath of God in the midst of these consequences, but I'm experiencing the grace of God.

That's such a hard switch. Huge hard switch.

And I'm thinking of listeners who are out there in their dark night thinking, equating the consequences of bad decisions with the affection of the Father towards them.

Yes, we do that all the time. I always say that we need to keep the vertical and the horizontal connected, but separate.

The vertical is there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Not. There will be no condemnation when you clean up your act. There will be no condemnation if you behave better.

There will be no condemnation if you learn to fly straight. There is now, right now, in the middle of our mess, in the middle of our failure, in the middle of all of our sin, there is now no condemnation.

That's the vertical declaration. But there are horizontal consequences in our lives based on the decisions we make.

You drive 140 miles an hour down I95, you're not going to lose one ounce of God's love because God's love for you is not dependent on you keeping the speed limit. But you may lose your license.

You are going to jail.

You are going to jail. You may lose your license. You can talk shit about your boss all day, every day at work and not lose one ounce of God's love for you.

Because God's love for you is not dependent on how you talk about your boss. But you may lose your job. So there are horizontal consequences.

And what I had to learn during that time was when I was in the throes of horizontal consequences, it was very tempting for me to collapse the vertical and the horizontal and to think that these consequences were condemnation from God.

Right.

And they're not right. God loved me no less when I was having my affairs than he does right now.

I want to ask a brief question based on my own experience. I went from the precious moments ceramic thing idea cliche of God is with me in this to realizing it was him.

Yeah.

Using this.

Yeah.

He's not standing by. He's with me.

It was him and all the time. And I share this with people regularly.

Everything I believed about grace, mercy, the unconditionality of God's love, free justification before God based on God's love for us, not my love for Him. I believed all that stuff. Theologically, it was proven to be true in my crucible of ache. Proven.

God's promises and his friendship were proven to be real to me existentially when I was at the bottom. So I'm living in.

There were a lot of things that happened while I lived in Texas, and I don't want to go into a whole lot of details for sake of time, but I ended up being approached by a redneck cowboy from Granger Land, Texas, which is on the other side of the tracks. He was pastoring a cowboy church filled with people just like him, whose lives were way messier than mine had ever been.

When I juxtaposed Coreridge you at your.

And this cowboy church, you in a.

Cowboy church, I'm thinking God has an.

Amazing sense of humor.

Like he put a clown nose on you.

He did.

This is exactly where you need to be.

So this guy approaches me and asks me if I'd be willing to come on staff at church, which was incredibly encouraging to me. And I'm thinking, dude, has this guy googled my name? Like, he wouldn't be asking me this, but he knew the story.

It's just that he wasn't shocked by it because he had been to prison. A lot of people in his church had stories way worse than mine. And he asked me, and I was obviously excited.

This is the first time anybody had asked me to do anything since I left Orlando. Someone was putting their trust in me, which I was grateful for. But I went to church that Sunday to scope it out before I gave him an answer.

And this was not my world. These were not my people. I had never been around people like this.

I had been around some rank sinners my entire life, but I had never been around this kind of demographic. I grew up in South Florida, where it's rooftops and palm trees and beaches and cityscapes. This I was in a land far away.

Yeah, Hee haw nation will freak you out?

Yeah. So it did. And yet I called my friend Paul's all after that service, after that church service, and I said, paul, here's the deal.

This guy's approached me, he's asked me to do this. Stacy and I visited the church today. This is, I don't think it's a good idea. And he challenged me and said, I think it's exactly what you need to do.

And I said, are you kidding me? He goes, this is absolutely the next step in your disciplinary restoration process that God has put together.

He said, under two conditions, you have to go there and tell them that you'll serve not as a staff member, but as a contract worker. Number two, nobody can know you're there. In other words, don't let them use you being there as a marketing tool.

And so I approached this guy and he said, in light of that, you need to go somewhere, serve behind the scenes, wash the feet of people that you've never known. Wash the feet of people that you've never seen. Just go. Humbly serve.

Wow.

So I met with the pastor, gave him those conditions, signed a six month contract. I did some consulting work for them. We were there every Sunday in church.

He allowed me to preach there a couple times, helped him organize some things structurally behind the scenes, put some things in place administratively. And when that six months was over, Stacy and I moved to Fort Myers, Florida.

A friend of mine who had pastored a small Lutheran church, he's retired now.

Pat Thurmer, one of my best friends in the world, was pastoring a small Lutheran church, had been there for 20 years, reached out to me and asked me what I was doing, how I was doing. We talked. I said, I have no idea. This is what I'm doing now, but I have no idea what I'm going to do with the rest of my life.

And he said, listen, we're a small church with an even smaller budget, otherwise we would offer you a job. We're not afraid of bad press for bringing in a notorious sinner. That's what we're about.

But he said, we don't have any money, however, and I didn't ask him for a job. He said this to me.

He said, however, if you and Stacy moved to Fort Myers, Florida, which is the southwest coast of Florida, two hours from where I grew up on the southeast coast of Florida, said, if you move here, I can promise you a community, I can promise you a church and a people that will love you and nurse you back to health. Because we believe here that your best Days are ahead of you, not behind you. So we made a couple trips there to scope it out, to visit.

We ended up moving there. Stacy quit her job. I had no idea what I was going to do. We had no idea how we were going to pay bills.

I had been writing up until that point, like three months before I moved to Fort Myers. Our last three months in Texas, I had. I started writing. Writing is one way I figure out what I think.

So you mean like therapeutic, get it out, rather than. You're not publishing.

I'm not even thinking that anybody's ever going to read this.

You're writing. This is a grief observed by C.S.

Lewis. Exactly. So I'm writing, writing, processing, writing. My therapist encouraged me to do that.

And Stacy would read some of this stuff and go, people need to read this. I'm thinking, people, I don't want anyone reading this. Like, this is raw. This is. This is real. My language is raw.

My retelling of what I did, the pain that it caused and everything in the aftermath is raw and real. This could be real. This could be triggering for some people, honestly. And she said, I think you need to rethink that. Talk to Paul's all.

He agreed with her. So a friend of mine agreed to build me a website for free. He said. He too said, people need to read this stuff.

So he built me a website I had been writing the last three months. Like, I said that we were in Texas, moved to Fort Myers, continued writing. My friend launched this website I posted.

How cathartic for you personally was the writing? Because I know it.

Incredibly cathartic. Incredibly cathartic. I don't know if I would be here today had I not.

And we would all encourage people along the narrative therapy, story therapy pathway, and not for publication.

We knew because I had been quiet for a while, off social media, off the grid. I knew once I peaked my head above the surface that I was going to get shot at from the usual suspects. And I did. And that was somewhat overwhelming.

But I was prepared for that a little bit more in my head.

What I wasn't prepared for was the overwhelming positive response and predominantly from people in a lot of pain, people who had screwed up, people who had tanked their lives. And because I was going first in that regard, they felt safe reaching out to me, asking for help, telling me their story.

And I realized that this whole go first thing is pragmatically helpful. It actually, it's a practical way to help people. Just go first. Go out there, be vulnerable.

Tell the truth about yourself, take off the masks, and you'll discover that everybody who's been wearing a mask that has been dying to take it off and is too scared to do so come to you. So that's what was going on. I was overwhelmed by all of this. Of course, I wasn't making any money. Stacy wasn't making any money.

Neither of us were working. We were watching money go out and nothing come in, which is incredibly scary, especially when you're in your mid-40s at the time.

And I remember praying one night and saying, God, I'm trying to help all these people, but I also need to make some money. I don't know what I'm going to do. I need some direction from you. And I didn't hear him speak. If I had, it would have freaked me out.

But the unmistakable impression that I believe wholeheartedly came from God was, you take care of these people and I'll take care of you. Don't worry about that. Within weeks, I started getting invitations to speak. People who had read what I had written.

Churches, conferences, colleges, recovery places, rehabs, that sort of thing. So for 18 months, Stacy went with me on every trip. We traveled around this country, out of this country, going everywhere I've never seen.

I went from a large, massive African American church in Atlanta to a tiny little Presbyterian church plant with 30 people meeting in a middle school lunchroom to rehabs and recovery places, sitting with drug addicts and sex addicts and alcoholics.

Didn't you mention that you've been to Macomb?

Yeah, Macomb, Mississippi. I went there twice.

You know who was born and raised in Macomb, Mississippi?

I knew at one point, I think Britney Spears.

That's Brookhaven.

Oh, okay.

But I love your recall there. My adoptive father.

Really?

Yeah. Small.

So, yeah, that's a whole nother story about how I got invited to preach there. The pastor, the guy who used to pastor that church is a dear friend of mine and is going through his own dark night of the soul as we speak.

He, too, has lost everything, but he was a friend to me when people weren't becoming friends with me. So I'm grateful for that. But we traveled everywhere. Everywhere.

And what I discovered during my travels was that this world is a hell of a lot bigger than I thought it was.

When you spend as much time as I did in a singular world, you Begin thinking this is all that there is, or at the very least, this is the center of the universe.

And when I got voted off of Misfit island and my eyes were open to a whole nother world, I was blown away by what I heard, by what I saw, by who I met. I thought I was a pariah to the universal humanity and realized I was loved and appreciated for saying the things I was saying by lots of people.

And it was so life giving and encouraging. And I will say this too, and Stacy always points this out when I tell the story. I did not solicit one speaking engagement, and I did that on purpose.

And Stacy and I talked about it with Paul's all.

I did that on purpose because I needed to be sure that this was coming from God, that I wasn't manipulating things and orchestrating things so that I would fall back into my old habits. So it was very intentional. We traveled three weekends out of the month, almost every month for 18 months straight. I loved the experience.

My wife and I got to travel together. We learned a lot about each other. We were still a relatively new couple, so we were. We got to learn a lot about each other.

The people that we got to meet. There were people meeting me for the first time, who now only knew me with Stacy.

So that was fresh to us because you had her whole world who knew her with her ex husband, ex husbands. I'm her third marriage and you knew my world. Everyone knew me as a connection with my ex wife.

So for people to accept us as a couple was incredibly encouraging. But I was exhausted after 18 months of this. Absolutely exhausted.

There's a lot that I could go into in terms of the therapy I was receiving at the time, the uncovering of things in my life at the time, digging down deep and doing the hard work. I learned more than anything about the human condition. I learned from people in recovery, but I was worn out traveling. I am a homebody.

If I never had to leave, if I didn't ever have to travel more than 10 minutes from my home, I'd be a happy camper. I'm a regimented dude. I eat the same thing every day at the same time. I work out the same time at the same gym every day. I'm.

I like my bed, my pillows, my car, my home, my conveniences. Traveling is not for me. It's not glamorous. People think, oh, that's the glamour life. I'm like, dude, maybe it is for some people. For me, it's misery.

And we get a phone call from a childhood friend of mine that I had introduced Stacy to a couple years earlier by the name of Cammie from Jupiter, Florida. And she said, I represent a group of people that are interested in the possibility of starting a church. Would you guys be interested in doing that?

And I was not. I was interested in getting off the road.

I was dying to get back to the southeast coast of Florida because kids, grandkids, familiar, but did not want to plant a church. I never wanted to pastor again. I never. I definitely didn't want to plant a church and I definitely knew I couldn't.

I would never fit in a church that already existed. So I felt like I was consigned to a life of traveling and speaking and writing, that I wouldn't have a home base.

So I was attracted by the idea of having a home base, but I did not want to do it. By planting a church, pastoring a church. I did not want to entrust my primary livelihood into the hands of Christians again, ever.

Because I discovered that when the shit hits the fan, for the most part, not entirely, thankfully, but for the most part, Christian people scatter. You are now a leper, a liability.

I tell people all the time it's impossible to know who your best friends are when you're at the top and you have so much to offer and people benefit from being around you.

But when you're at the bottom and all you have to offer people is liability and leprosy, you discover that you don't have nearly as many friends as you thought you had.

How skeptical are you of people in your circle near your sphere now?

Much less.

What about. What about trust with people?

That is a work in progress. That is not something that comes naturally to me.

Now, it's easier on the one hand, for this reason, not being able to trust someone fully who was close to me used to paralyze me. Now it doesn't. I have a much lower anthropology these days. I expect broken people to break things. I expect fallen people to fall down.

I expect sinners to sin. I expect people to not meet my expectations as they expect me not to meet theirs.

So even though it's difficult to trust people, it's getting easier because I'm healing. But even though it's difficult, I'm okay with it. I don't need to. It'd be nice to, but I don't need to.

I'm going to ask you a question right there because I think that the end of that word you used people will find interesting. I do. You said I'm healing.

Yeah.

And I think what the expectation among most people would be is like you don't start talking about recovery or the, the new you until you're healed.

Right.

But you're healing like today.

Like, yeah.

People are tuning in, going, wait, exactly. I thought this guy was fixed.

Yeah, no. Oh, I'm far from fixed. The difference is now I know it before I didn't. Self awareness is the difference.

So I'm resisting this idea of moving to Jupiter and starting this church. I agreed to meet with these people.

Stacy and I drove over from Fort Myers, about a two hour drive across the state, met with about 20 or 30 people in a room at a country club. I walked into them. As I was walking into the meeting, I looked at Stacy and I said, here's my strategy because I really don't even want to be here.

But here's my strategy.

I'm going to go in and tell these strangers, I only knew this old friend of mine who had called me, she was the only one in the room that her and her husband that I knew. Everybody else was a complete stranger and I was a stranger to them.

And I said, I'm going to go into this meeting and I'm going to tell my story as real and as raw as I know how. Unedited, unmasked. And if by the time I'm finished, these people are still interested in us coming, they may just be our people.

So I did told my story and the first guy that spoke stood up and he said, thank you for sharing. When can you come back and speak to a larger group of us? I was blown away.

Backfire.

Yeah, blown away.

You were trying to convince them to have nothing to do with.

I was testing them to see if they could handle me.

And what you didn't realize at the time is that that is a classic close tactic in sales.

There you go. There. I didn't realize that. So we went back over a couple times, still living in Fort Myers. We drove over a couple times. I spoke.

They would rent out these rooms, these ballrooms in a hotel and I would speak. 60 people, 70 people, 80 people. Not a church service, but I would speak, answer questions.

And after our third trip here, God made it clear, this is where I want you. So I said to these people, here's the deal, I'll come.

But the sanctuary, which is what it's called, the sanctuary is going to be a recovery place masquerading as a church. That's what we are. That's who we are. Because that's who I am.

And the reason I said that is because while I was traveling and at the same time working through all of my shit with professional help, I got deeply connected to the recovery community.

And in my former life, if you say the word recovery, I immediately think of the recovering drug addict, the recovering alcoholic, the recovering food addict or sex addict that has to check themselves into a rehab so that they can be detoxed from this bad habit that they've developed.

But as I sat around with these groups of people with addictions across the board, what I discovered is that I have everything in common with these people.

Absolutely.

I discovered sitting in circles with people at rock bottom. I discovered more about grace and mercy and truth and God sitting in those circles than I ever did in any church I had been with.

And these people were raw, cussing up a storm, talking about the guilt and the shame and the regret and the loss that they have, the broken relationships that they have to endure. They've run out of people to blame.

Here they are chain smoking cigarettes, cussing up a storm, telling the truth about themselves in a way I never heard growing up in church, ever from a preacher or a parishioner, ever. So I found myself deeply connected to this community. I felt like I was one of them, that they were me and I was them.

How did they treat you? Because it's one thing to walk in a room and feel like, okay, I can relate to these people. How do they respond to you?

So I would open up usually and say, my problems. I didn't get here the same way you got here, but here's where I am. This is how I'm feeling this morning.

This is the guilt and the shame and the regret that I still carry because I screwed up and I hurt people I love. And I still don't really know what to do with it all. I'm working through it.

Every single one in that circle is able to raise their hand and go, me too.

Wow.

I got here via heroin. I got here via alcohol abuse. You got here your way. What matters is that we're here. So I can. I am still very deeply connected to that community.

And they've taught me more. Some of them Christians, some of them non Christians.

Some of the most profound wisdom I've heard about the human condition, grace, mercy, forgiveness, have come from the lips of non Christians in recovery places. My eyes were opened up to a completely different world. And this was the first world, the world of recovery that I finally felt like I fit in with.

Finally. I always felt like a misfit in the religious world. I've never been like a church guy. I always felt like a fish out of water. Totally.

You don't say.

Yeah. And I. I did my best to conform at different times, trying to make myself more preachy, more churchy. It's just not me at all.

And so with these people, I felt like I could be me. The good, the bad and the ugly. And that felt so life giving and freeing. And so I thought, what if our church felt like this room? What if.

What it felt like for people when they walked through the door at the sanctuary? What if they were able to feel the way I feel when I walk into a recovery place and sit with a bunch of addicts?

What if everybody in your congregation is raising their hand at your confession?

Exactly.

That's strong.

We were shut down for eight months. Didn't know if we were going to have a church after that.

But our church actually grew during COVID because Stacy and I were live streaming conversations we were having about God, grace, life, a lot like we do here. And we were live streaming that from our living room every Sunday morning on really pads and computers and phones and whatever.

And the following exploded. It was like shitty production value. We didn't know what we were doing. We just sat, talked very casual, and people loved it.

We have a large, very large online audience, but in person is small, which I love. I've been in the pulpits where you look out and it is a sea of thousands of faces. And I'm energized by that kind of. By that kind of thing.

If you haven't, I mean, it's worth a destination trip.

I'm telling you, as somebody who's been here twice before, once to speak and then once for the conference, to walk in the door of a church that is in another state and people go, you're back.

Yeah. They're like, thank God you made it back, dude. It is.

It's unbelievable.

And we've got rich, poor, old, young, red, yellow, black, white, and. But they all have one thing in common. They Are all people in recovery who know that they're in recovery from something.

The only difference between this church and on a Sunday morning and then AA meeting is shitty coffee and styrofoam cups.

You mean it's better here?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta get the small cups and then.

Yeah, right.

I think that's so true. And one of the things that I appreciate, the honesty.

I love everything about the recovery movement, it is the fill in the blank, higher power that I think the beauty of it is that what you do in a very loving, gracious way, is you take a pencil and you write in the margin and say, hey, listen, I know someone that you could fill this blank in with who will love you forever.

Yeah. And I feel that it's the way it's so.

I mean, it is the fill in the blank, higher power that loves. Right, prodigals.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

When I came here, visited for the first time, I was with Sean, John this. And blah, blah, blah. It was just sickening. And he's like, I'm here. I'm kidding. Okay.

This couple, after the service, had heard about what we were doing, right? Because it had been made public. Terrible headshots. And you were wearing a sport coat. That's the period where you tried to conform.

I think so.

It's so funny.

I think so.

Funny. Don't do it.

Not a sport coat here in the headshot.

I know.

Gotcha. Okay, so go on, be clear, be clear.

All V necks from here on till Jesus comes back.

Amen.

But somebody came up to me and they knew who I was because they heard of misfits around here. Like the good rumor was spreading. And they go, hi, I'm Byron. They go, yeah, we know who you are. We googled your name.

And my nervous system went, yeah, because I've been hiding for so long. And they go, quite a story, buddy. Yeah, something like that. And they go, we don't care. We love you. Get in the loser line. It's way back there.

And just gave me this bear hug, dude.

And that is the vibe here. And what I have labored hard to communicate to anybody who walks in the door is that there are two kinds of people in this world.

There are people in recovery who know that they are and people in recovery who think that they're not. But nobody is not recovering from something. So you don't have to be a recovering drug addict or.

I was never addicted to those conventional addictions. My addictions were deep performance affirmation.

There's snorting lines of accolades.

Yes, snorting lines of accolade. That's exactly right. So we've been at it now for four years. Coming up on four years. I feel at home here in a way that I never have before.

My three kids and I are incredibly close. They are three of my very best friends. I have a good cordial relationship with my ex wife, Kim. I love my wife, Stacy. She's a gift from God.

I love the small group of friends that I have here. I love my life here. The sanctuary is a part of my life, but it's not my life.

And I realize that now in a way that I didn't when I was pastoring Coral Ridge. So life is a lot slower, it's a lot quieter and I'm a lot freer. But not true.

You guys are planting a sanctuary near the campus of Bob Jones. Is that true?

I don't even know what that is. Although my granddad did go there for a short season.

Okay, so I want to read something real quick to close out to land the plane, wrap it up and let you know how life feels like now.

I don't want to step on this landing, so I'm just going to tell you right now, bro. Thank you so much.

Oh, God. You guys are welcome, man. You guys are welcome.

It's really amazing.

No, thank you. So this comes from a book that I published.

Title.

Yeah. Carnage and Grace. Confessions of an Adulterous Heart. It's raw. Keep it on the upper shelf so your kids don't get a hold of it. Because the language.

Not for the junior high Bible study.

No, the language is not gratuitous, but it's raw. It's the way life actually was and is for me.

Where can people get it?

Just before Amazon, Barnes and Noble and normal places, toward the end, this is how I land. The people closest to me say I'm less and more than I used to be. I'm less what's next? And more present. Less Superman, thank God. And more humane.

Less self assured and more self aware. Less larger than life and more down to earth. I'm softer than I used to be, they say. More understanding, more empathetic.

My own failures have forced me to reckon with God's forgiveness in a way that has made me more forgiving without even really trying. And as a result, I'm less likely to Hold a grudge. I'm far more grateful for the smaller things now.

You could even say that small things are a big deal to me these days. I take a lot less for granted. People matter more. Way more. Projects matter less, way less. I'm more of a friend and less of a networker.

I enjoy listening more. I love the things that matter most. More. Minutes and moments are so much more important to me now.

I care way more about today and much less about tomorrow. Life is smaller and slower than it used to be. A lot smaller, a lot slower. And I love it. It's less grand, less busy, less impressive.

I have less stuff, less money, less connections. I'm less celebrated, less influential and less sought after.

And yet I couldn't care less about all that these days because life is slower and smaller. I see more, hear more, feel more. Things are quieter inside me. I'm less distracted.

I'm way more content, way more free and way more comfortable in my own skin. Have I arrived? No, not by a long shot.

These days I live with a seemingly incurable low grade fever of sadness because of the people I hurt and some of the relationships I lost. It's the grievous wound of used to be that will not heal. I live with lopped off limbs. I still feel like I'm white knuckling it some days.

Prone to wander, taking destructive detours in my heart. Yes, I'm fully aware of my capacity to screw it all up again, repeating my adulterous history. Lord have mercy.

But some place or picture of arrival is not what I'm grasping after. If I'm reaching at all, it is to receive what's been so graciously given. Stacy's love.

A family of screwed up misfit friends, the voices of my children and grandchildren. Sunsets and ocean breezes, midnight music festivals with my daughter under the Miami night sky.

Poet Maya Popa captures this sentiment perfectly in the title of her book. Wound is the origin of wonder. That it is. And I am grateful for the wonder that now marks my wounded rattletrap life.

Frederick Buechner famously wrote, here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. That's the abundant life, my friends, experiencing the abundance, all of it.

The beautiful and the terrible and everything else in between. Every stitch in the cardia. So to go back to an observation you made John a little bit ago, I am not recovered. I am recovering.

I am not whole, although I'm healing. And it's a lifelong process for anybody who's tanks their own life and thinks I got to put it all back together again.

This has to remain in my rear view mirror. I want to get past this part of me. God shows up on the bathroom floors of life. That's where we meet Him.

Paul asked for his thorn in the flesh to be removed over and over again. And God said, I'm not taking it away. And the reason is because it keeps you connected to me. So in that sense, failure is not an enemy, it's a friend.

Because it shows us in and through our worst parts, the best parts of God.

Unbelievable.

Love you, bro.

Yeah, love you guys too.

Thank you.

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